Editing Early English Music

Abstract

Just what does 'English' or 'British' mean for the music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Can there be definitions of these term centred on the small but important island off the Atlantic coast of the European mainland, whose identity has been most recently transformed from a rusty former superpower to a cultural and business capital of the world, so-called 'Cool Britannia'? Even attempts to escape the slippage between the geopolitical entities of England and Britain are prone to disagreements and equivocations. Turning to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the situation was no clearer. The strong admixing of royal French and English bloodlines during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fact that the English line was descended from a conquering French line and the death of last of the Capetan line of French kings, Charles IV, in 1328 resulted in the longest war (or series of wars) in European history between rival English and French claimants for the French throne, the so-called Hundred Years War. For a time, swathes of continental northwest Europe, even Paris, were English possessions. The consequence was cultural exchange. French kings and princes were hostage-guests, sometimes for many years, of their English victors. Princes brought their musicians from England and even hired continental composers.