The estampie was an internationally popular musical form of the late middle ages. Eight beautiful French estampies from circa 1300 are written in the Manuscrit du Roi, seven of which are complete. The first estampie is a fragment, due to the top half of the page being torn to remove illuminated letters, seen on the right.
After examining what we know about the estampie and the particular characteristics of French estampies, this article searches for historical principles upon which the fragment of La prime Estampie Royal can be made whole again.
The article begins with a video performance of the finished piece played on gittern, then explains the process of historically-informed construction, and ends with the completed music in modern notation.
In the middle ages, minstrels were regularly accused by church commentators of vanity, idleness, inflaming carnal desire, lechery, and leading others into vice. In the 12th century, Bishop of Chartres John of Salisbury expressed the view that all minstrels should be exterminated. Because of this reputation, the church wanted to ensure that its most sacred music was different in kind to minstrel music, and restated several times that only the voice and organ were allowed in the liturgy, not instruments of minstrelsy. Still some writers complained bitterly of secular styles of music corrupting singers’ voices in sacred chant.
How can we account for the contradiction between clergy’s invectives against minstrels and the innumerable quantity of medieval and renaissance paintings in which gitterns, shawms, harps, fiddles, lutes – the instruments of minstrels – are shown in worship of the Virgin Mary and in praise of the infant Jesus? How can we reconcile the critiques of clerics against minstrels with their regular appearance in religious manuscripts, their likenesses carved in churches, and their employment by the church? This article seeks answers through the evidence of medieval Christian moralists; church councils; music treatises; religious paintings; records of church ceremonies; and the relationship of the church with organised minstrelsy.
Images from The Luttrell Psalter, 1325-1340 (BL Add MS 42130). Top row, left to right: church singers (f. 171v); bishop (f. 31r); pilgrim (f. 32r); nun (f. 51v). This row, left to right, players of: harp (f. 174v); pipe and tabor (f. 164v); organistrum, also called the symphony (f. 176r); portative organ (f. 176r).
One of the earliest surviving pieces of English instrumental music has survived with the 13th–14th century manuscript, Douce 139, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is exciting in its musical drive and complexity, but interpretation has its problems. The scribe appears to have changed his mind partway through on several issues of notation, leaving us to make judgements about intention. The music is untitled, and is often named Estampie or English Dance in modern sources.
This article works through the puzzles in order to gain some performable answers. What is an estampie? Is the Douce 139 piece an estampie? How can the musical problems left by the scribe’s imperfect notation be reconciled? Drawing on music theorist, Johannes de Grocheio, writing in c. 1300, this article looks for solutions, with a video of one possible interpretation on citole.
The estampie was an internationally popular musical form of the late middle ages. Eight beautiful French estampies from circa 1300 are written in the Manuscrit du Roi, seven of which are complete. The first estampie is a fragment, due to the top half of the page being torn to remove illuminated letters, seen on the right.
