The Henry VIII Book (British Library, Add. MS 31922) by David Fallows (review)

The first years of Henry VIII’s reign must have been a magnificent time for the royal court of England. During the 1510s the young English king made every effort to set himself on the European stage as a first-rank monarch, entertaining courtiers and diplomats, calling for lavish festivities at many seasons of the year, and expanding his late father’s musical household. If the first-hand letters, biographies, and financial records relating to these entertainments are to be believed, how much has been lost to us today! Accounts of festivities at court abound in references to players and singers, but it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile the data on their performances with the majority of surviving music books. This should hardly come as a surprise, when the highly skilled chamber musicians and instrumentalists employed by Henry VIII must have performed largely without written aids. Their music-making was sometimes described but hardly ever ‘recorded’ for posterity.

These circumstances make the survival of ‘The Henry VIII Book’ (British Library Additional MS 31922) all the more important for the window it offers onto types of courtly music barely preserved elsewhere. An unassuming parchment volume, bound sometime in the years around 1520, it was certainly not chosen for reproduction on account of its decorations—workaday initials painted roughly by an amateur. Nor can it boast a wealth of advanced polyphony like the well-known choirbooks of the period. Its 109-piece repertory is dominated by light three-voice compositions: simple homophonic songs on love and youth, pieces with theatrical text connections, several of the best-known Continental ‘hit songs’, rounds, other ‘threemans’ songs’ or ‘freemen’s songs’, and textless fantasies (dubbed ‘consorts’ in John Stevens’s 1962 edition, which continues even today to set the scene for studies of Additional 31922). The manuscript’s claim to fame is its preservation of numerous compositions labelled ‘the kyng h. viii’, among them some of its more trivial items, and it is likely that it is through this connection that the book survived the centuries at all.

We have Oxford’s DIAMM project (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) to thank for this new full-colour facsimile edition, following on from their splendid earlier publications of English polyphonic treasures such as the Eton Choirbook and the Dow Partbooks. DIAMM’s printed series seems to aim for a middle ground between the workmanlike black-and-white facsimile editions of the old Garland series and the expensive limited editions of the Roxburghe Club, offering quality colour reproductions in simple cloth or paper bindings at a reasonable price. The present volume continues to push affordable musicological facsimiles closer and closer to ‘the real thing’, reproducing the manuscript at just about original size (98%) on good thick stock. The photography is of excellent quality, as can only be expected from DIAMM, although in this case the work was performed by the British Library’s own Imaging Services.

It is a seductive realism: one is almost inclined to rub the pages to feel the textural differences between hair and skin sides of the parchment that the images reveal so clearly. The interplay of ink and page, typically lost in the unfocused blur of old microfilms, is here evident on every folio, whether in the jagged edges of staff lines, or the subtle shifts in colour reflecting changes in pressure and the angle of the nib. Far from merely enabling some clumsy fetishism of manuscript enthusiasts, this level of detail and accuracy opens the door to investigation previously unfeasible with reproductions. It can also be deceiving, as evidenced by the remarkable lack of any distortion and curvature at inner page edges, as though the manuscript had been disbound for the photography process. This is actually the result of digital post-processing ‘using Adobe Photoshop to straighten and correct for some mis-shapenness caused by curvature of the pages as they lifted...