ABSTRACT
The oldest fragment after the Winchester collection, a two-part setting of the verse ‘Ut tuo propitiatus’ from the respond ‘Sancte Dei pretiose’ for the feast of St, is in note-against-note style like the Winchester music and the fragments from Chartres and Fleury. English music emerged painfully enough from the ars antiqua. One of two early or mid-fourteenth century motets on St Edmund uses the idiom of Petrus de Cruce; others show a tendency towards an Italian manner. The three basic polyphonic textures employed in the Old Hall manuscript—chanson, ‘English descant’ and motet—continued to dominate English music, and indeed European music generally, during the first half of the fifteenth century. The carol is characterized by a metrically distinct refrain which is sung at the beginning and end and between each stanza. The individual stanza may also have its own refrain, which may or may not in some cases be a substitute for the longer refrain between stanzas.
