Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

10. Musical Space and Quiet Space in Medieval Monastic Canterbury

196 10. Musical Space and Quiet Space in Medieval Monastic Canterbury Joe Williams Abstract: In this chapter, the background noises, or belles noiseuses, of everyday mid-thirteenth century c.e. life at a Benedictine monastery and an Augustinian house of regular canons, both in Canterbury, England, are studied by focusing on the movement of people through the buildings and on artifacts found during excavations. The significance of sound to studies of monastic sites is evident when one considers the emphasis placed on silence in monastic rules. Musical space and quiet space are not considered here as dichotomous but rather as similar qualitative types in that both require a relative lack of external sound to function as desired by their users. The idea of copresence is significant in this regard, as it is often through sound that we are aware of the proximity of another. An interpretive approach, utilizing access analysis and considering copresence zones in conjunction with the archaeological context of artifacts, suggests that the background noises of these two sites were somewhat dissimilar in terms of amount, character, and spatial distribution. On the basis of data generated by access analysis, the reasons for such variation can be said to relate to the layouts of the main claustral buildings, but elements of the artifactual evidence suggest that differences between the rules followed by the two monastic orders may also have played a part. It has been suggested by numerous commentators that there is significantly less silence in the modern world than there was in the past. Luigi Russolo, in a manifesto of Futurist music (Apollonio 1973:74), wrote that “[a]ncient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born.” Bruce Davis (1990:1), writing with a less enthusiastic attitude toward noise, states that “[t]he twentieth century may go down in history as the one in which we Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. Musical and Quiet Space in Medieval Monastic Canterbury 197 lost the silence. Since the industrial revolution, the noise of machines has increasingly filled our homes, cities, farms, skies, and earth.” One aim of this chapter is to challenge this idea. While it would be fair to say that the noises of automobiles, aircraft, and electrical devices were absent from medieval life, the assertion that in their absence what results would be silence is spurious. As Christopher Witmore (2006:274) observes, “To hear noise is to hear things. Indeed, some background noise is resistant to the ‘flow’ of time. [He gives examples of sounds, including rain and cicadas, which] are transient and yet recurrent. These are philosopher Michel Serres’ belles noiseuses. These background noises are . . . fundamental, not simply to our experiences of place, they are fundamental to our very being.” The examples given by Witmore are predominantly sounds of nature, but the inclusion of the above quote in this chapter should not be taken to imply that the present author subscribes to the idea of the ancient world as an age before machines; such an idea is misleading, for one could certainly refer to as machines such objects as carts, pulley systems, and winepresses, which are known to have existed for many centuries. Even if these sources of noise are discounted, there are many other possible places from which sound could emanate. Jonathan Hill (2006:181) explores the concept of silence by discussing John Cage’s 4’33”, in which the music is in fact the “incidental sounds in a performance environment, whether a creak or a cough,” occurring during the silence of the performer. In an atmosphere of attempted silence, “previously insignificant and familiar sounds assume importance” (Hill 2006:181–182). This chapter presents findings of an archaeological study of sound at two medieval monastic sites in Canterbury (Figure 10-1): St. Augustine’s Abbey, a Benedictine foundation, and St. Gregory’s Priory, a house of Augustinian canons. These sites were chosen as case studies on the basis of their excavation reports, which are of a sufficient standard to enable extensive analysis. As something that does not tend to leave direct material traces, sound is not often considered in archaeological work outside the subdiscipline of archaeomusicology (Witmore 2006:268–276; see also Coles 1973:158–167; Megaw 1968; Megaw and Longworth 1981). It...