Renaissance polyphony

Walk along the streets of medieval London, especially in the vicinity of St Benet Fink parish, and you may well have been followed by a 'tantony' pig. Unmarketable runts were customarily made over to the Hospital of St Anthony, whose steward hung little bells around their necks and set them free to scavenge from the city's waste tips and pursue likely looking passers-by, squealing plaintively for morsels of bread. The custom endured until 1525 or later, and was noted by London's Elizabethan antiquary, John Stow. The hospital had been founded in the mid-13th century as a dependency of the Augustinian Order of Hospitallers of St Anthony; it was later reconstituted in the 1440s as a grammar school, with a flourishing tradition of polyphonic singing, after its links with its French mother house were severed during the Hundred Years' War.

The mother house, at St-Antoine-en-Viennois (or St-Antoine-l'Abbaye or La Motte St-Didier) in the fertile foothills of the Alps between Vienne, Valence and Grenoble, was dedicated to Anthony Abbot (c.251-356), who renounced his inheritance to become a hermit. Although Anthony came to be associated with pigs (various contradictory explanations have been given for this), his relics achieved wider fame for their curative powers. Healing therefore lay at the heart of the order's mission, St-Antoine-l'Abbaye attracting crowds of pilgrims seeking relief from St Anthony's fire, a painful skin disorder: either the unsightly erysipelas (which also has a swine variant) or ergotism, a virulent gangrenous infection caught from bread made from rye infected with the fungus Claviceps purpurea. Anthony's association with bread probably had its roots in Jerome's account of the desert encounter between Anthony and his fellow-hermit, Paul of Thebes, when a raven dropped a loaf of bread. As well as monks, bakers, swineherds and the dermatologically afflicted, Anthony Abbot was also the patron of the Valois dukes of Burgundy, who saw their chivalric image reflected in the saint's battle against demons: 'Seeing that you have fought manfully', said the Holy Spirit to Anthony, 'behold I am with you, and I shall make your name renowned in all the world.'

At the baptism of the four-month-old heir to the duchy of Burgundy on 18 January 1431 the ducal chapel sang Gilles Binchois's purpose-written motet, Nove cantum melodie, a sunny encomium for the infant Anthoine, son of Philip the Good. The ceremony was held the day after the feast of St Anthony Abbot, and the Antonine resonances were amplified through explicit invocation of St Anthony of Padua in the texts of the commemorative motet (which also famously includes the names of Binchois and his fellow singers in the ducal chapel). The year 1430-31 was one of big geopolitics and high dynasticism. The Paris coronation of England's Henry VI as king of France in December set the seal on his father's grand military designs for a Plantagenet dual monarchy, plans which had been underpinned by the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. Simultaneously Philip's territorial ambitions for his duchy took a decisive step forward with the acquisition of Brabant, extending the ducal domain well beyond the feudal reach of the kingdom of France-a new political reality symbolized in the establishment of Burgundy's own order of chivalry, the Order of the Golden Fleece. The musician Binchois had experienced at first hand the Anglo-Burgundian alliance during the previous decade: before he joined Philip's ducal household he had probably been in the service of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, one of the English magnates then occupying France.

This story, and the ritual and mythological representation of Burgundian dynastic braggadocio, provides a narrative frame for the latest release by The Binchois Consort, Dufay: Mass for St Anthony Abbot (Hyperion CDA67474, rec 2004). Four items are presented here: Binchois's motets Nove cantum melodie and Domitor Hectoris, and three relatively short mass movements by him, one of which, a nine-fold Kyrie, can be related melodically to Nove cantum melodie. The fourth item comprises a ten-movement plenary setting of the Mass...