Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages: Third EditionCutts, Edward Lewes
History
Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages: Third Edition
Cutts, Edward Lewes
Civilization, Medieval; Middle Ages -- Social life and customs
And in inventories of church furniture in the Middle Ages we find organs
enumerated:[339] Not only the organ, but all instruments in common use,
were probably also used in the celebration of divine worship. We meet with
repeated instances in which David singing the psalms is accompanied by a
band of musicians, as in the Saxon illumination on p. 272, and again in
the initial letter of this chapter, which is taken from a psalter of
early thirteenth-century date in the British Museum (Harl. 5,102). The men
of those days were in some respects much more real and practical, less
sentimental and transcendental, than we in religious matters. We must have
everything relating to divine worship of different form and fashion from
ordinary domestic appliances, and think it irreverent to use things of
ordinary domestic fashion for religious uses, or to have domestic things
in the shapes of what we call religious art. They had only one art, the
best they knew, for all purposes; and they were content to apply the best
of that to the service of God. Thus to their minds it would not appear at
all unseemly that the minstrels who had accompanied the divine service in
chapel should walk straight out of chapel into the hall, and tune their
instruments anew to play symphonies, or accompany chansons during dinner,
or enliven the dance in the great chamber in the evening--no more unseemly
than that their master and his family should dine and dance as well as
pray. The chapel royal establishment of Edward IV. consisted of trumpets,
shalms, and pipes, as well as voices; and we may be quite sure that the
custom of the royal chapel was imitated by noblemen and gentlemen of
estate. A good fifteenth-century picture of the interior of a church,
showing the organ in a gallery, is engraved in the "Annales
Archæologiques," vol. xii., p. 349. A very good representation of an organ
of the latter part of the sixteenth century (1582) is in the fine MS.
Plut. 3,469, folio 27.[340] An organ of about this date is still preserved
in that most interesting old Manor House, Igtham Mote, in Kent. They were
sometimes placed at the side of the chancel, sometimes in the rood-loft,
which occupied the same relative position in the choir which the music
gallery did in the hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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