ABSTRACT
Without suggesting any romantic visions of ‘Merrie England’, in Tudor Music Wulstan (1985) depicts a sixteenth-century land where music-making was a normal part of everyday life. Hired musicians played and sang for the wealthy, travelling minstrels did so for the poor, and City Waits made music for everyone within earshot on every hour or even every quarter-hour of the day and night (pp. 41-3). Monasteries and convents placed music high in their rites, and towards the end of the century music was heard even in the change-ringing of church bells. Streets resounded with cries that were echoed in both the art music and the ‘small and popular musickes’ of the day (p. 40). Rich and poor made music for themselves in the home, catches and rounds were sung in catch clubs and later glee clubs, and folk songs abounded in all sorts of situations. During the seventeenth century, as A.L. Lloyd describes it,
in country inns song-sheets were pasted up on fireplace surrounds and high benchends for the benefit of carters, ploughmen and others … Milkmaids would paper the walls of byres and dairies with broadsides, and learn off the ballads as they milked and churned … The sailor ocean-bound would paste underside the lid of his sea-chest new songs to try out on his shipmates … In very poor districts it was not unusual for two families to club together to buy a penny ballad-sheet.
