Music and Society in Early Modern England (review)

Musical life offers one of the better contexts within which to study society generally, since it often involves links with the family, religion, politics, and diverse social classes. Christopher Marsh followed that path in masterful fashion here in discussing the social contexts of the ballad, the catch, congregational psalm-singing, dance music, and change-ringing in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Marsh was trained in history, publishing a book on a heretical movement and another on popular religion in the sixteenth century.¹ Historians will benefit a great deal from the present book in its analysis of how compromises were forged over religious issues; how social classes borrowed from one another in public entertainment; and how a sophisticated urban culture emerged with close links still with country life. Marsh’s manipulation of legal and parish records toward social analysis is a model in itself. Helpfully enough, a CD-ROM is attached, offering recordings of pieces discussed in the book.

The present book brings a reinterpretation to its subject compared with its predecessor, Walter L. Woodfill’s Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (1953). Woodfill’s work was remarkable in its time for making a systematic analysis of groups and institutions in a nation’s musical life. Yet the book was limited to the upper reaches of the profession and, as Marsh puts it, “tended towards acute and inoperable pessimism” (154). Marsh’s sympathetic views on English musical culture derive from the respect for local culture which developed among British social historians in recent decades. Whereas Woodfill takes for granted what sources say about the low life of travelling minstrels, Marsh digs deeper and reinterprets what he finds to show that a more or less effective system of licensing musicians emerged in the late sixteenth century, and that concern with supposed “vagabonds” receded after the Restoration. A gentry family would hire servants for their musical abilities and might permit players to wear its livery while traveling in adjoining regions. Moreover, almost all towns of any size hired “waits” for ritual or festival music, and these musicians were usually able to make a decent living from informal gigs in homes, taverns, or theaters. Most people back then heard a great deal more live music than we hear today.

Marsh turned the time-honored deprecation of the musician on its head: slurs about the profession’s status derived, he argues, from the very popularity of what its members accomplished. Musicians might find themselves on a relatively intimate basis in a gentry household, seeming to “appear among the lower servants yet they could be regarded by their employers almost as trusted companions” (172). Furthermore, the convention of professionals performing regularly with amateur patrons “could build bridges between different social groups” and in so doing “generate confusion by muddying the waters of social distinction” (219). The ballad, usually sung without acccompaniment, was associated with local popular culture and became but standard fare in gentry homes and urban clubs. In 1595 the author of An Apologie for Poetrie called ballads filthy and obscene but nonetheless admitted these “pleasant and delightfull tunes, by cunning and witti Composers” (263). Much the same was said about dance pieces influenced by the manners of the country village. Marsh concludes that most people’s musical experience was eclectic in social origin and is best understood by what is now called “crossover and fusion” (390).

The book provides by far the most up-to-date analysis of how the English Reformation affected church music. Looking at the problem from the grass roots, Marsh follows the assessment of historians such as David Cressy that local practice varied enormously from village to village. Even though Catholic families were most concentrated in the northwest, examples of different musical practices might be found almost anywhere in the country. Even though organs and choirs declined in use after the Reformation, they experienced important revivals in the seventeenth century. Many organs survived until the Civil War and were brought back...