Mirie it is while sumer ilast: decoding the earliest surviving secular song in English (third edition)

Mirie it is while sumer ilast, dated to the first half of the 13^th century, is the earliest surviving secular song in the English language, preserved only by the good luck of being written on parchment, torn from a discarded book and used as the flyleaf for an unrelated manuscript. We have the music and a single verse. This may be a fragment, but its wonderful melody and poignant lyric embody in microcosm the medieval struggle to get through the winter, nature’s most barren and cruel season. This article examines the original words and notation, showing both that the now-standard version of the song performed by early music revival players is not a true representation of the text and music, and that the manuscript with the only surviving version of the song poses multiple problems of interpretation.

This is a second revision of the article, originally published in February 2016, revised in August 2018. This third edition is published in June 2025, with further analysis of the melody and poetry, the addition of a medieval source as the basis for interpretation of the music, and a new performance video arranged for voice and medieval harp.

We begin with a video performance of the song; followed by a translation of the Middle English verse into modern English and an exploration of its meaning; then a description of the social context of the song; and finally a step by step reconstruction of the music.

In the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, is a manuscript Book of Psalms dated to the second half of the 12^th century, written in Latin on parchment, associated with Thorney Abbey (now the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Botolph) in The Fens of Cambridgeshire. The book, now classified as Bodleian Libraries MS. Rawl. G. 22, is part of the collection of 18^th century antiquarian Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755). The Book of Psalms has not survived completely intact.

In the first half of the 13^th century, a few decades after the completion of the Book of Psalms, a torn page from an otherwise now lost volume was added as a flyleaf at the beginning of the book. On this was written the music and words to two French songs in the trouvère tradition (chant ai entendu – I heard a song, and Mult s’asprisme li termines – The appointed end draws near) and the music and a single incomplete verse of what is now the earliest surviving secular song in English, Mirie it is while sumer ilast. As we see below, the parchment is marred by tears, holes and other damage, but thankfully not so much that we can’t make out the words and most of the music.

Words: translation and meaning

[M]Irie it is while sumer ilast
with fugheles song
oc nu necheth windes blast
and weder strong.
Ey ey what this nicht is long.
And ich with wel michel wrong.
Soregh and murne and

The manuscript shows several visual differences to modern handwriting: an s looks more like an f or an r, the equivalent of w looks like a y backwards, and what looks like a small d with a line through is the equivalent of th.

Almost all modern sources spell the opening word “Miri”, pronounced with two syllables, based on the interpretation by E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison (Medieval English Songs, 1979 – more of their now-standard interpretation below), but we see in the original manuscript that the spelling is “Mirie” and the music clearly has three notes at the same pitch for the word, indicating the pronunciation, “Mi-ri-e”.

The spelling of the exclamations, “Ey ey”, could arguably be rendered “Ei ei” or “Ej ej” if we didn’t have letters i and j to compare on other parts of the flyleaf. In Middle English (and Middle French, and early modern English), i and j were variants of the same letter, as we see below in words from the last line of chant ai entendu, the first flyleaf song: “la joie dunt”, written “la ioie dunt”. The i of “[M]irie it is” is written in the same manner as “ioie”, without the long tail of the second letter of “Ey”, so on that basis they must be different letters. There isn’t another letter y to compare in any of the three surviving songs on the flyleaf, all in the same handwriting, so since the letter is not an i or j , “Ey” is the best solution.

The last line we have for Mirie it is is “Soregh and murne and”. The next word – or words – of the single surviving verse is missing. It is highly likely that the missing next folio had several more verses, as the first song on the flyleaf begins partway through with the words chant ai entendu (I heard a song), continuing with another 3 verses, and the second song, Mult s’asprisme li termines (The appointed end draws near), has 5 verses, so the remainder of the Mirie verse and some number of following verses were presumably written on the lost next folio of the manuscript. We cannot be sure of the missing next word, nor that it is the last word of the verse. E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison (1979) give fast in what has become the standard version for modern players of medieval music, a shortened version of the Middle English faste, which rhymes with “ilast” and “blast” and fits the meaning and sense of the words. It assumes a rhyme scheme of ababbba, and such schemes with only 2 rhymes in a stanza were typical in medieval poetry: the rhyme scheme of chant ai entendu is aaaabb, and Mult s’asprisme li termines is aaaaaabb.

My translation into modern English, incorporating fast, without aiming at scansion:

Merry it is while summer lasts
with birdsong
but now, close by, the winds blast
and the weather is powerful.
Oh, oh, I exclaim, this night is long
And I am done much wrong.
Sorrow and mourn and go without food.

In March 2025 I had some correspondence with composer Graham Lack, who suggested wast rather than fast as the missing last word. This maintains the rhyme scheme better and gives a richer sense. Dobson and Harrison state that fast “was supplied by the editors of Early Bodleian Music and is clearly right” (p. 121), but they contradict their assertion immediately in observing that “the proper form … is faste, with pronounced –e” (p. 122), in which case faste does not really rhyme with “ilast” and “blast” because it ends with an extra syllable. Graham Lack’s suggestion of the Middle English wast rhymes correctly and had a variety of meanings, depending on context: enfeeblement or weakened emaciation; or futility; or uncultivated, barren land, i.e. wasteland. When I recorded the video for this third edition of the article, I therefore used Graham’s better suggestion.

The first two lines have a particular poignancy contrasted with the rest of the stanza when we consider the regular use of the same simile in medieval literature: human happiness is like the gladness of a bird at the rising of the Sun. The medieval word for birds in general, especially wild birds, was foul and its variants, fuȝel (fuwel), fouel, fuel, fewyl, fule, fuele, fughele, and so on, still used today as our modern word, fowl, though now in the more specific sense of domesticated or game birds, or brid and its variants, bred, bryd, bird, berd, burd, bord. The link between birds, the rising Sun, and happiness is illustrated in the following examples.

“Cristene men ogen ben so fagen so fueles arn quan he it sen dagen.”
Christians ought to be as happy as birds are when they see the day dawn.
            Middle English translation of Genesis and Exodus (Corpus Christi College 444), c. 1250.

“Gladder icham … Þan þe fouel whan hit ginneþ dawe.”
Gladder I am … than the bird when the day begins to dawn.
            The Romance of Sir Bevis of Hamtoun, c. 1300–30.

“As fayn as fowel is of the brighte sonne.”
As glad as the bird is of the bright Sun.
            Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale from Canterbury Tales, c. 1385.

“They were as glad of his comyng
As fowel is fayn whan that the sonne vp riseth.”
They were as glad of his coming
as a bird is happy when the Sun rises.
            Geoffrey Chaucer, The Shipman’s Tale from Canterbury Tales, c. 1390.

“Þenne was I as fayn as foul on feir morwen”
Then was I as happy as a bird on a bright morning
            Anonymous, Piers Plowman, c. 1390.

We could add to these literary examples two more occurrences in English medieval music.

The opening line of Sumer is icumen in, c. 1250 (about which there is an article here) is:

“Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu”

Summer has come in
Loudly sing cuckoo

The first thing mentioned in the song about summer is birdsong, and the underlying pes, an accompanying short vocal line that repeats throughout, is “Sing cuccu nu Sing cuccu” – Sing cuckoo now sing cuckoo. In Sumer is icumen in, it is the sound of a bird that signals the summer Sun, as a result of which the seed grows, the meadow blossoms, there is new growth in the wood, new birth with the ewe bleating after the lamb and the cow lowing after the calf, the bullock leaps and the buck farts (presumably due to plentiful food). In Sumer and in Mirie, it is the song of a bird that signals happiness and plenty; and in Mirie, the lack of birdsong signals the barrenness of winter. (Birds do make calls in winter, but the volume of birdsong is hugely reduced as birds conserve energy in the cold months of food scarcity, and birdsong for breeding has ceased entirely until late winter.) 

In bryd one brere, c. 1290–1320, an English song written in the style of troubadour love poetry (about which there are articles here and here), the anonymous author uses the metaphor of a bird on a briar for his unreachable object of love, she being the only means by which he can be content. Again, a bird is associated with human happiness.

We see, then, that the first two lines of Mirie draw upon a familiar medieval metaphor, linking human happiness with birds singing in the summer, in stark contrast with the next five lines describing winter: cold blasting wind; powerful weather; long nights of darkness; a feeling of moral injustice or unfairness; sorrow, lamenting, and starvation or emaciated wasting. 

Historical context

The two earliest surviving secular songs in English are both about the weather, the other being Sumer is icumen in, c. 1250, about the sights and sounds of summer. English people have a reputation for being obsessed with the weather, but consider this: in the 13^th century the onset of winter was a concern for health and well-being, and could ultimately be a matter of survival.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew the Englishman), an English scholar working in Paris, in his Latin encyclopaedia, De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), c. 1250, described winter as “cold and moist. But in winter, coldness has more mastery than moisture, for then is great binding and freezing of air and of water … winter is all contrary to summer. Therefore, all things that lived and sprang by the benefit of summer, fade and die by the hard cruelness of winter.”

As we have seen, Mirie it is sums this up, opening with memories of summer birdsong, implying warmth and plentiful food, immediately contrasted with present winter: short hours of daylight (“Ey ey what this nicht is long”), freezing temperatures and harsh weather (“windes blast and weder strong”), lack of fresh food bringing a greater propensity for illness (“Soregh and murne and [wast]”) and therefore, among the least hardy, potential death.

The experience of winter in 13^th century England is best understood in its social context.

Feudalism linked the possession of power, land, money and military might, concentrated in the hands of the hereditary land-owning warrior aristocracy, the ruling 1–2% of the population. Dependent on the aristocracy were the vassals, permanent tenants of the lord of the manor, obliged to serve and protect their lord and be prepared to fight for him in battle. Next down the social hierarchy were rent-paying farmers, tenants known as freemen since they owed little or no service to the lord. In England they constituted the most fortunate and well-off 10% of the general population. The rest were unfree tenant farmers known as bondmen, serfs or villeins. Not only were they not allowed to own land, they were themselves owned along with the land they worked, so that if the manorial lord sold land he thereby sold the unfree tenant bondmen with it. Bondmen were allotted a small plot to grow food, but all the food they produced for themselves belonged legally to their lord; they were not allowed to leave the manor for more than a day; the lord had power of approval or refusal of their marriages, and he could even compel marriages if it suited him to have land worked by a forcibly-married couple rather than left fallow. Their conditions of life can therefore only be described as slavery. Social class was hereditary, so there was no chance of escaping from the bottom of the social pile except by being made free by the beneficence of one’s lord or by successfully running away and hiding for a year and a day, thereby losing all one’s possessions from the manor but gaining one’s legal freedom.    

What is now commonly called ‘the peasantry’ were by no means always passive accepters of their lot. After the legal classification of free and unfree in c. 1200, roughly contemporaneous with Mirie, individuals who were newly unfree challenged their categorisation in the royal courts. Whole communities brought lawsuits against their lords when rents and demands on their services increased. These services could include extra labour and the giving of food that bondmen had grown for themselves. The royal courts nearly always found against the complainants and manorial lords punished them for daring to protest, but protests did continue.

It follows that food security depended on social class, as class dictated ownership of land, levels of disposable income and the affordability of food, particularly during winter scarcity.

For all levels of society, fresh food was entirely seasonal. Fruit and vegetables were fresh in late spring to autumn. A few root vegetables and some fruit could be kept in cold storage over winter, such as carrots, turnips, apples and pears. Unground grain could, in theory, be kept all year round, though the danger of rot and mice was ever-present and, once ground, its storage time was severely limited.

There were several means of preserving food through the winter: pickling fruit and vegetables; turning milk into cheese; salting meat, for those who could afford the expense of salt; and drying or salting fish, for those who could afford the high price of fish due to the cost of transporting it inland.

Meat was largely the food of the rich, seldom tasted by the rest of the populace except by hunting game and wild animals, which was, on the whole, permitted only for the lord of the manor. Fresh meat was more plentiful towards the end of autumn for one practical economic reason: feeding animals through the winter was expensive, so large numbers were slaughtered at Martinmas, 11^th November. The carcasses not immediately roasted and eaten were salted to be kept for consumption through the winter. There was a similar seasonal situation with fish: long days of sunlight and calmer seas in summer brought the most plentiful catches, whereas the short days and rough seas of winter meant that most fish then available at market were dried and salted.

So what was preserved in winter, and one’s means to preserve and store it, depended entirely upon one’s social class: the affordability of meat, fish and salt; the availability of storage; and the financial possibility of surplus to preserve.

The staples of the common diet were bread, pottage (white porridge of oats, green pottage of peas and white porray of leeks) and vegetables. While the majority’s largely vegetarian diet was healthy when food was fresh, it was necessarily unbalanced in the winter. A seasonal diet made those further down the social hierarchy more heavily dependent on a good harvest, lacking as they did the ability to afford meat, fish, or salt to preserve it, or generous storage space for surplus. Thus, when there was a food shortage due to a poor harvest, it affected the poor disproportionately. Scarcity raised prices and, at such times, the rich could afford expensive imports beyond the means of the poor.

Seasonal under-nutrition inevitably weakened health, creating greater susceptibility to disease, thereby shortening or ending the lives of the vulnerable. Lack of fresh fruit and vegetables for large parts of the year, particularly in the dark, harsh winter months, resulted in a high incidence of scurvy, the result of vitamin C deficiency, causing swollen, bleeding gums and the reopening of formerly healed wounds. Between 1315 and 1317, a century or so after Mirie it is, a succession of three wet summers created a famine in which upwards of half a million people died, causing a further crisis of uncultivated land due to a shortage of surviving healthy labourers.

The living quarters of rich and poor alike were subject to the chills of winter. For keeping warm at night, when the temperature drops further still, a nightcap was worn and a stone or brick was heated in the fireplace, then wrapped in fabric and put in bed to warm the sheets. Spacious buildings retained the cold, not every room had a fireplace, and the openings in walls, rarely glazed due to the expense of glass, let in icy drafts. In the winter, wall openings were usually sealed only with paper, which kept out the worst of the wind, but did nothing to reduce the cold.

For those in more lowly dwellings, winter could be deadly. In the winter of 1389, Montpellier (formerly in Occitania under the crown of Aragon, sold to France in 1349) had such heavy snow that the insubstantially-built homes of farmers collapsed under the weight, resulting in fatalities. The city chronicle for that year states that “in January, February and March, the snowfalls in Lozère were so great that they destroyed many farmsteads and that many people died, because their houses fell down on them. Other people died of cold, others of hunger, because snowfalls had lasted so much longer than usual that people had run out of provisions. And there are people of the country whose memories date back 80 years, who say that they had never seen such great snowfalls.”

Who composed the song?

It is no wonder, then, that the writer of Mirie it is didn’t like winter and looked back to happier times in summer. The fact that this contrast was expressed in song and in writing gives us clues about the author’s status. We can be sure that the composer wasn’t a bondman, serf or villein, since they were always illiterate, so we have a status of freeman – or freewoman – or higher. The law presumed male superiority, with women legally an extension of their fathers or husbands, but we cannot assume the Mirie composer was necessarily a man: while women were of an inferior social and legal status to men, nunneries educated as many girls as boys and townswomen were often literate.

We can almost certainly say that the song’s expression of concern about the hardships of winter means the composer was not of the highest social strata, was sufficiently socially elevated to be literate, but not so elevated that the experience of the coldest season did not include familiarity with significant privation.

Typically, manuscript collections of medieval songs were drawn from many sources, written out by scribes without any sign of input by the various composers. Often, the composer was neither named nor presumably known or sometimes, when known, deceased. There is one notable exception: Codex Vogüé, known as the Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, consists entirely of the works of French composer Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), probably under his supervision.

In the case of the MS Rawl. G. 22 flyleaf music, we cannot know what songs were in the rest of the lost collection. If we presume an English scribe, s/he would likely not have been the composer of the two anonymous French songs in the trouvère tradition, and since we know neither the composer nor the scribe of Mirie, we cannot know if composer and scribe were the same person. (The question of the scribe’s musical skill and the authorship of Mirie is addressed in more detail below.)

Deciphering the music I: rhythm and pitch   

Music notation developed over time, with different systems used in different locations and periods. Until the Notre Dame school of polyphony, which flourished from c. 1160–70 to 1250, there was no system in western music for notating rhythm. Of their composers, only the names of Léonin and Pérotin survive, plus an anonymous member of the school, possibly Johannes de Garlandia, who wrote De mensurabili musica (The measurable music) in c. 1240. This work was the first to describe the six rhythmic modes, the earliest system for writing mensuration – measured rhythm – on the page. In ecclesiastical melismatic music (with syllables sung over many notes), the rhythmic mode was indicated visually by the way the notes were grouped using ligatures, shown below in the music written by Léonin, and then in modern notation in which bar lines indicate perfections, units of 3 beats or 3 breves equivalent to a perfect long, making 1 perfection.

 

The notation system of Franco of Cologne, described in his Ars Cantus Mensurabilis (The Art of Mensurable Music), written 1250–80, built on the way rhythmic modes were notated to create a more versatile method of writing mensuration (rhythm) in music. This system was popular during the second half of the 13^th and into the 14^th century, and is now known as Franconian square notation. Franconian notation gives the musician all the important information about pitch and note duration.

It is visually obvious that in c. 1225 the Mirie scribe used neither modal rhythm, first described in c. 1240, nor Franco’s mensural square notation, first described in 1250–80, so a key question for the interpretation of the song is whether the scribe used a type of mensural notation we could call proto-Franconian, or whether the notation indicates only pitch, not note duration.  

The notation of the MS Rawl. G. 22 flyleaf is recognisably similar to that in other surviving English songs of the period, such as the Latin Magno gaudens (With rejoicing), written 1180–c.1230 (about which an article will appear soon on this site) and the Middle English Man mei longe him liues wene (Man may long life expect to gain), c. 1250 (about which an article will also appear soon). This similarity in notation doesn’t give a secure indication for interpretation of mensural note values as, while the neumes of Man mei longe him liues wene certainly can be read mensurally, it is impossible to make rhythmic sense of the different neumes present in Magno gaudens, to the extent that they appear to be rhythmically meaningless.  

To find out whether the Mirie scribe’s notation can be read literally from the page in a proto-Franconian way, the first interpretive step is to treat the manuscript as if it is mensural, i.e. it gives accurate written rhythm, to see what results.

To test this, below is a mensural reading of the second French song on the flyleaf, the only complete song, Mult s’asprisme li termines. In reading the music, my working assumption was that it can be read in units of 3 beats, called perfections, which are necessary for rhythmic modes and Franconian notation. In my modern notation, each beat or breve/brevis is a quaver; a perfect long/longa, which equals 3 beats or 1 perfection, is a dotted crotchet; and an imperfect long/longa, 2 beats, is a crotchet. Notes are grouped according to their groupings in the manuscript. The third note in modern notation is a tied crotchet and quaver, which is 2 separate notes in the manuscript, but in every stanza this is 1 syllable, hence the tie. The only editorial changes I have made to the literal mensural reading are 2 notes at the same point in the first and second phrase, on “li” in the first phrase and the first note of the melismatic “vei-“ of “veisines” in the second phrase, both written as longs, but they are clearly breves when read in context. In modern notation, the double bar line marks the beginning of the refrain. The notes and words in square brackets are editorial judgements where the manuscript is damaged, taken from the non-mensural editorial reading of Helen Deeming (2013). The rests in square brackets are my editorial additions to complete the timing of musical phrases.

 

This shows beyond doubt that the second song is credibly mensural.

The first verse and melody of the first song are incomplete. We are calling the song chant ai entundu, after the first surviving words. The neumes are treated as proto-Franconian, with perfections. Assumptions have to be made about the mensural meaning of some neumes since this is not square notation and so historically we do not yet have the instructions of Franco of Cologne. There are no editorial changes to note values. The result is as follows.

 

We hear that there are the makings of a melody, but some of the rhythm is clearly incorrect. Simply by placing rests in obvious places for phrasing, as with Mult s’asprisme li termines, a credible tune emerges.  

 

Do we also have a credible melody if we assume longs and breves, but not perfections (as in the music thesis of Augustine, explained below)? The result is below, and we see and hear that the result is not convincing as music. 

 

When we apply the same musical assumptions to the third song, Mirie it is, that it is mensural with perfections, the result is as follows. The first two square brackets with rests signify notes missing due to the damaged parchment, and the third square bracket with a rest is the missing final(?) word and note, which would have been on the next folio. The pitches of some notes are ambiguous. Since currently the focus is rhythm, pitch will be addressed below.  

 

Taking the music literally, and making the same assumptions about notation as with Mult s’asprisme li termines and chant ai entundu, yields such a confused result that one is forced to conclude that the notation for Mirie was either mensural, but not intended to be read assuming perfections, or entirely non-mensural, as with Magno gaudens in similar notation, written 1180–c.1230, briefly described above.

The 13^th century, when chant ai entundu, Mult s’asprisme li termines and Mirie it is were written, was a time of significant change in notating music. In the first half of the century, most music was still written non-mensurally; but the chant of the Notre Dame school was written in rhythmic modes; and the ideas behind Franco of Cologne’s notation system, written in his ground-breaking thesis in the second half of the century, had evidently been developing for some decades before. 

With so much in flux, it is not surprising that songs in the same fragment of an otherwise lost manuscript are mensurally different.

We will put aside perfections and interpret the neumes of Mirie only as longs and breves (in accordance with Augustine’s hugely influential De Musica, described below), with a more detailed look at the many issues of rhythm and pitch presented by Mirie’s notation. The comments below, (i) to (x), indicate the problems, and relate to the manuscript annotations (i) to (x) on the right. Following on from the commentary is the resulting version of Mirie in modern notation.

(i) The value of this note is ambiguous. Is the tail a part of the note or a mark on the page? Here it has been interpreted as a tail on the note.

(ii) Missing notes due to the torn page are shown in the modern transcription below as rests.

(iii) Is there a tail on the note or has it been rubbed out? It has been interpreted as present.

(iv) Does this neume on “nicht” indicate an interval of a second, c’’ to b’, or a third, c’’ to a’? This particular neume looks ambiguous, but I judge it to be a third on the basis that it is the same neume as at (viii) on “mi-“ of “michel”, (ix) on “murne”, and (x) on “and”. In each case the neume, like a large comma, clearly begins on one line and ‘hooks’ the line below – this is particularly clear at (viii) and (x) – making an interval of a third. Compare this to the neume like a capital D on “-last” of “ilast”, on the second line of the manuscript. This is certainly an interval of a second, and is a different shape to the ‘comma neume’ at these other points. This appears to indicate a different neume shape for descending second intervals and third intervals for this scribe. Since we have three songs, we can test this theory with examples from each. Below we see these descending neumes in chant ai entendu, Mult s’asprisme li termines, and Mirie it is, cumulatively demonstrating that ‘capital D neumes’, which can also look like a small p, are seconds, and ‘comma neumes’ are thirds.

(v) We appear at first sight to see a 3 note neume with the notes c’’ e’’ f’’ on “And” (see right), but this shape of neume doesn’t appear elsewhere in the music. This is the beginning of the repeat of a musical phrase. A close look at the same point in the phrase the first time, on the word “Ey”, shown on the right, reveals that the distinctive hook at the bottom of the neume, like a modern capital J, is present on both “Ey” and “And”, though at this point on “And” it is somewhat obscured by extraneous marks and damage to the manuscript. Therefore, as at “Ey”, there are 2 notes on “And”: e’’ f’’.   

(vi) In modern notation, groups of quavers and shorter notes are joined by a line or ligature to help the reader interpret the rhythm of the music. In a similar but not identical way, medieval neumes may be joined to indicate a melisma (plural melismata), a single syllable lasting two or more notes.

A comparison of the Gregorian chant neumes of the Miller Nichols book (University of Missouri-Kansas City), 10^th–16^th century (above left), which uses square notation, with Mirie it is, which does not (above right), shows they have a systematic principle in common: notes grouped together that rise in pitch are indicated by a vertical line on the right, and notes grouped together that fall in pitch are indicated by a vertical line on the left. We see this in the first example in the composite picture on the right: the first “Ey” is 2 rising notes with a line on the right, and the second “ey” is 3 falling notes with a line on the left. That comes at the beginning of a musical phrase that repeats with the words “And ich”. Next on the right is that word “ich”, above which is the neume in question at this point. This does not look like the same neume as on the second “ey”, so on face value it may possibly be interpreted as 2 rising notes, c’’ and d’’ in modern notation, except that there is no line on the right of the neume to indicate rising notes and the neume shape, like a Z, is not that of rising notes, like a J. Given the context that “Ey ey” and “And ich” begin the same musical phrase, we can conclude that the neume on “ey” and “ich” are the same, but only partially written on “ich”. This leads to the conclusion that musically this whole phrase, “And ich with wel michel wrong”, is a note for note repeat of the previous phrase, “Ey ey what this nicht is long”.    

(vii) The note is missing, but can only be e’, where there is a hole in the page.

(viii), (ix) and (x) are addressed above in discussing (iv).

All of which leads to the following interpretation of the neumes, interpreted as longs, breves and semi-breves, without perfection. As previously, in the modern notation that follows, longs are written as crotchets and breves as quavers, and quavers are written single or grouped according to whether they are single or grouped in the original notation. Bar lines represent the end of a line in the original manuscript. The points just addressed, (i) to (x), are marked.

 

The result clearly has errors, but it is far closer to credible music than with the assumption of perfections.

Deciphering the music II: the final note

What is the final note? As an experiment, below the tune is transposed down a fourth so that it begins on a’, the reciting note of the dorian mode. If the tune is dorian, it should resolve on d’. At the original pitch, this means the tune would begin on e’’ and resolve on a’.    

 

I am not convinced by the experiment for two reasons. First, at the transposed pitch, finishing on d’ does not sound convincing as a resolving finalis: it sounds like it should resolve a semitone below the penultimate note, an octave below the starting note, as we see below at manuscript pitch. Second, if the melody was meant to be dorian it would surely have been written at the above pitch, starting on a’ rather than e’’.

 

The tune overall does not fit any of the ecclesiastical modes (also called tones), and we should not necessarily expect it to: some secular medieval music was clearly modal, but much more often secular music conformed to modes loosely or not at all. Not only do we have the evidence of comparing ecclesiastical with secular medieval music for this observation, we have the testimony of Johannes de Grocheio who, in his Ars musicae, c. 1270–1300, stated that secular music was not restricted by the modes, and Jerome of Moravia, who described three vielle (viella, fiddle) tunings in his Tractatus de Musica, c. 1280, stating that the second tuning was “necessary for secular and all other kinds of songs, especially irregular ones”, meaning that medieval secular music did not follow the ecclesiastical modal or tonal system.

Deciphering the music III: a basis for resolving rhythm

As we have seen and heard, Mirie can be read mensurally but, if so, two observations are necessary.   

First, if the scribe did mean to write mensurally, there are clear errors.

Second, if the notation was proto-Franconian, as I proposed as a tool for interpretation, one key feature of Franconian notation is missing: differential duration of longs, perfect and imperfect. In the Franconian system, time is measured in perfections, 3 beat units. A long may be perfect, 3 beats, the equivalent time of 3 breves, or it could be imperfect, 2 beats, the equivalent time of 2 breves. A long looked the same on the page in either case, so its perfection or imperfection was read from the context. For example, a long, a long and a breve would be 3 beats, 2 beats and 1 beat: the first long is perfect, 3 beats, and the second is imperfect, 2 beats, to make time for the 1 beat breve before the next perfection, so the imperfect long and the breve together make a 3 beat perfection. In the same way, 2 breves followed by a long would be read as 1 beat, 2 beats, 3 beats, as the value of the second breve is expanded to make a perfection with the first breve before the perfect long. Once the Franconian system is understood, this can be quickly inferred from the notation, but not so with Mirie: it isn’t written in the square notation of the Franconian system; questions about some note durations prevents an unequivocal reading; and the presumption of perfections gives an erratic and unmusical result, as we have seen. The mensural interpretation without assuming perfections is much better, but obviously not completely correct. 

Given the time period of c. 1225, others have looked to the rhythmic modes for note duration. Rhythmic modes can give shape to a secular melody written non-mensurally, but the method lacks veracity when applied beyond the Notre Dame school. In early music debates there has been a great deal of controversy over whether the rhythmic modes apply only to the polyphonic melismatic ecclesiastical music for which they were explicitly intended, made clear by the visual grouping of neumes, or also to monophonic secular music of the period, in which rhythmic modes are not written on the page. In other words, it is a question of whether the rhythmic modes were only part of the musical life of the church or a reflection of music-making generally. This debate has aroused great passion among modern early music theorists.

I would argue that the more useful question is not whether church rhythms were always or never used in secular music, but whether they were sometimes used. The answer is clear. The writers of secular music were trained in the ways of the church. In this period, there was no education other than through the church. Unless we are to argue that all secular music was universally without a rhythmic pulse – an argument that is musically odd and for which there is no evidence – then some melodies outside the church’s jurisdiction must have used some of the same rhythmic patterns used by the church, but without necessarily thinking of them as ecclesiastical modes: the church had no monopoly on rhythm. Clear examples make this more than theoretical. Four will suffice for the general principle, the first three English, the fourth French. Three secular instrumental pieces on folios 8v–9r of British Library Harley 978, c. 1261–65, are written in rhythms that are visibly and clearly underpinned by what the church called the first rhythmic mode, and the eighth of the French estampies in Manuscrit du roi, c. 1300, La Uitime estampie Real, clearly has an underlying pulse of the second rhythmic mode. One of the Harley 978 pieces and La Uitime estampie Real can be heard in the videos below.

Having stated that secular music sometimes used an underlying rhythmic pulse the same as a Notre Dame rhythmic mode, it is critical to distinguish between two types of music: music in which rhythm is notated on the page, and that rhythm coincides with one of the Notre Dame modes, such as the instrumental pieces just cited; and music in which rhythm is not notated, which may or may not be capable of having a rhythmic mode imposed upon it, but for which the written evidence of its rhythm is completely lacking.

For Mirie, detecting an underlying pulse would be crucial to help distinguish what some of the more indistinct-looking and apparently erroneous note values may be, but the Mirie notation does not indicate any of the six Notre Dame modes; the theory that a rhythmic mode is appropriate in non-mensural or semi-mensural music is without historical foundation; and forcing the song into one of the Notre Dame modes, as the now standard version by Dobson and Harrison does (but inconsistently – see below) is contrary to what is written on the page. This points out a general problem with all medieval music written non-mensurally: much of it resists being put into a rhythmic mode; and, even when a mode can be used, there is no evidence that this is correct.

How do we get past this rhythmic impasse?

Aurelius Augustine (354–430) was Bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa, from 395. He was canonised as a saint in 1303 for his life and works, which remained hugely influential from his death through the subsequent nine centuries and beyond: De civitate Dei (The City of God), De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), and his autobiographical work, Confessiones (Confessions).

Augustine intended to write books on all the liberal arts (from the Latin liberalis, free, and ars, art, skill or occupation) – grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, philosophy, arithmetic, music. A treatise on music was started but never finished. We have the first part under the title, De Musica (On Music), begun before his baptism in Milan in 387. By the time of his death in 430, he had completed the first six books. In the first five books he builds his argument for the treatment of rhythm and metre in music. In the sixth book, he gives a theological underpinning without further practical instructions.

Augustine’s treatise on musical rhythm was considered authoritative, amply demonstrated by medieval writers who used and referenced it, such as:

• Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (c. 485–c. 585), commonly called Cassiodorus, a Christian Roman scholar, in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum (Institutions of Divine and Secular Literature), 543–55;
• John Scotus Eriugena (Johannes Scotus Erigena, c. 800–c. 877), Irish philosopher and poet, in his Periphyseon;
• Berno (c. 978–1048), Abbot of Reichenau Abbey, Germany, in his Musica Bernonis seu Prologus in Tonorum (The Music of Berno, or Prologue to the Tones);
• Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), Bishop of Lincoln, England, in his letters to Adam Rufus, a former student;
• and English Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (c. 1214–c. 1294), in his Opus Tertium (Third Work), wrote that “It is necessary that one should thoroughly understand the laws of metres and rhythms … and it is impossible to comprehend these unless one knows the five books of Augustine’s De Musica … Only Augustine reveals the truth of this matter. It is impossible to know what is rhythm or metre or verse truly and properly except through these books.”

As we will see from the following description, it is not only likely that the Notre Dame school drew upon Augustine’s foundational description of musical rhythm to formulate the rhythmic modes, it is such a logical connection and progression that it is hardly possible to imagine otherwise.   

It is clear from Augustine’s thesis that he knew of no written system for musical mensuration, as the basis of musical rhythm is discerned from grammatical rhythm, not notation. He argued that rhythm and metre should dominate in music, and this consists of stressed and unstressed syllables, strong and weak beats, long syllables worth 2 beats and short syllables worth 1 beat (which is the basis of rhythmic modes, though in Augustine there are no 3 beat units of perfection). Short units of stressed and unstressed syllables are feet, feet combined a specific number of times is metre, and metres combined in specific ratios is verse.  

Augustine described how this can be modified in two ways. First, when grammatical rhythm and musical rhythm are at odds, musical rhythm persists. Augustine doesn’t give a clear example of this in practice. My assumption is that he was referring to strophic songs, in which all stanzas are sung to the same strophe or melodic unit, and in which each line has its own metre, fixed in the first strophe. In such songs, in the second strophe on, occasionally the spoken stress of a word is over-ridden by the musical stress established in the music of the first strophe. The second way grammatical rhythm can be modified is by inserting a rest between words to maintain the length of the foot (as I have done in transcribing Mult s’asprisme li termines and chant ai entendu above), or at the end of a verse so that the next verse begins on the correct stress. Rests can be the equivalent time of a long syllable, a short syllable, or a combination of both.

Augustine’s treatise will be explored in detail in an article to appear on this site in late 2025 or 2026: Discerning rhythm in non-mensural medieval music. Part 1/3: interpreting the historical sources.

Deciphering the music IV: applying Augustine to Mirie

Let’s continue the working assumption that the music of Mirie, c. 1225, was intended to be read mensurally but that, since mensural notation was in its infancy and not yet formalised by Franco of Cologne, the scribe notated rhythm inconsistently, sometimes mixing up longs and shorts/breves which can, let’s suppose, be retrospectively discerned with the right interpretative tool.

We have seen that there is no written indication that the music employs a rhythmic mode, first written of by an anonymous member of the Notre Dame school in c. 1240, so we will use Augustine’s basis for interpreting the rhythm: the natural cadence of speech.

On this working model, the literal reading of the music shown so far may be modified rhythmically as follows, with bar lines now placed to give shape to the underlying spoken rhythm of the words, rests added for natural pauses in speech, and double bars added at the ends of phrases:

 

Above we see there is a melisma – one syllable sung with more than one note – on “-last” of “ilast”, “blast”, “Ey”, “ey”, “nicht”, “And”, “ich”, “mi-“ of “michel”, and “and” twice in the last phrase. In each case, it is both possible and logical to treat the melisma as a musical division of the usual time it would take to say the syllable, so the grammatical rhythm is uninterrupted; and to divide the notes of the melismatic syllable as it would be divided in typical mensural 13^th century fashion.

To check the plausibility of the theory of mensural but imperfectly-written music, we compare the result so far with the previous literal reading of the manuscript, to see how far the literal reading is changed by Augustine’s grammatical rhythm, and to see if my supposition of imperfect mensural notation, rather than entirely non-mensural music, is credible. Below is the original music in modern notation, with the same barring as above to indicate phrasing, and the notes that have changed value in red boxes.  

We see that, in changing the notes to the natural rhythm of speech, far more notes have remained at the same value (47) than have changed (10), so we could argue that grammatical rhythm was there from the beginning, but slightly obscured by the scribe’s imperfect grasp of notation.

Before filling in the missing notes from the clues in the rest of the music, we will carry out one more test to go back to basics grammatically, in line with Augustine’s De Musica: does the musical rhythm conform to the poetic rhythm of the verse? The verse is below, with the rhyme scheme in letters and the musical pulse count in numbers indicated on the left, and each rhythmic pulse indicated in bold type.  

a 5         Mirie it is while summer ilast        
b 2         with fugheles song                                        
a 4         oc nu necheth windes blast              
b 2         and weder strong                             
b 4         Ey ey what this nicht is long                        
b 4         And ich with wel michel wrong                  
a 3         Soregh and murne and [wast].        

It now becomes clear that the music does not give us quite the rhythmic shape we would expect of a poetic stanza. In natural spoken rhythm, taking the number of notes in the manuscript literally, we have the following number of musical pulses per line: 5 2 4 2 4 4 3. The first line is out of place. 

As spoken poetry, the natural rhythm would sound like this, with long syllables shown as crotchets and short syllables as quavers:

 

Since the musical rhythm should reflect the poetic stresses in syllabic music (with entirely or mostly one note per syllable), we now have a conundrum: the words and music do have the rhythmic form we would expect of poetic verse if we elide the final vowels of the opening word, so instead of 3 notes for 3 syllables as indicated in the manuscript, Mi-ri-e, it has 2 syllables, Mi-rie, thus equalising the rhythmic stresses in lines 1 and 3 (4 stresses), just as they are equal in lines 2 and 4 (2 stresses) and in lines 5 and 6 (4 stresses), with the final line 7 being sui generis (3 stresses). This gives a poetically balanced number of stresses per line, arranged as 42 42 44, ending with 3, providing the rhythmic symmetry that Augustine taught as a fundamental principle, and ending with a partial foot, as he also argued.  

This requires us to conclude that the scribe wrote one too many opening notes, and that we should editorially remove a note as scribal error, changing Mi-ri-e to Mi-rie. Though there are three notes on Mi-ri-e in the manuscript, this word and its variants would usually have the vowels i and e elided into one sound, just as we see in the line “murie sing cuccu” in the song, Sumer is icumen in, c. 1250, in which the syllables align with the notes as “mu-rie sing cu-ccu”.  

It is now clear that a rational starting point for non-mensural or, as we might say in this case, semi-mensural or imperfectly-mensurated music, is the rhythm of the poetry. Augustine wrote that to know the rhythm and metre of music, “we first perceive [the] measured length [of a verse] naturally by the ear, and then establish it by the rational consideration of numbers”. In other words, we begin with the natural rhythm of speech, then consider the musical-numerical aspects of metre, equality in the length and stress of feet, and the partition of verse into “two members approaching equality”, as we have just observed in the stresses per line: 42 42 44 3.

We can now modify the spoken rhythm to include the melismata, the extra notes per syllable in the manuscript, the result of treating the music as mensural, without perfections, with scribal errors which can be corrected using Augustine’s thesis.

 

Deciphering the music V: missing notes

It is now obvious that the missing notes, shown below in the red box, are at the same pitch as those in the black box.

In the first and second lines …

a 4         Mirie it is while summer ilast            
b 2         with fugheles song                                       

… the phrases are not rhythmically identical to the third and fourth …

a 4         oc nu necheth windes blast         
b 2         and weder strong                            

… but they do take up the same rhythmic space, with the same number of stresses, and the same melody with the rhythm divided differently according to the syllable count. The missing notes in the third line can therefore be taken from their related position in the first line. There are 2 words of 2 syllables each in the first line – “while sumer” – in the place where there are notes missing for the syllables “-cheth” of “necheth” and “win-” of “windes” in the third line, 1 syllable each. To maintain the syllabic pulse of the poetry, the notes on “-cheth” and “win-” must have twice the time value the second time, shown above as quavers in the first phrase and crotchets in the second.

Deciphering the music VI: comparison with Dobson and Harrison 

The now standard version of Mirie it is was created by Frank Llewellyn Harrison, who edited the music, and E. J. Dobson, who edited the words, first published on a date I have been unable to track down. Certainly it was around in 1965, as it appeared on an LP of that date, Medieval English Lyrics, sung by Grayston Burgess, and in 1973 it was used in the British horror film, The Wicker Man. It was published in E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison (1979) Medieval English Songs (London: Faber and Faber), and my observations below are in relation to the commentary in that book.

How does my solution for Mirie compare with the now standard tune? The two are shown below, my solution on the top line, Dobson and Harrison on the second line, followed by soundfiles and analysis. 

Mirie it is, solution by Ian Pittaway.

Miri it is, solution by Frank Llewellyn Harrison.

Words. E. J. Dobson’s commentary on the verse (p. 121–122) replaced some of the original words written by the scribe on the assumption that clearly-written linguistic variants must be ‘corrected’ and standardised, even though there was no standard spelling in the 13^th century.  The words in red above are Dobson’s replacements, changed from the only surviving manuscript of the song: “Mirie” he changed to “Miri”; “necheth” to “neheth”; “nicht” to “niht”; and “murne” to “murn”. E. J. Dobson gave the exclamation the spelling of “Ei” rather than “Ey”, which is immaterial to pronunciation. As described above, E. J. Dobson gives “fast” as the editorially added last word, a truncated version of the Middle English faste with a pronounced e, whereas I have taken Graham Lack’s suggestion, “wast”, a word in keeping with the verse which needs no modification.

Rhythm. Frank Harrison’s musical commentary (p. 297–298) states that the notation “is of the overtly unmeasured type which is most often interpreted, in the context of secular songs, in patterns based on the rhythmic modes” (p. 298), but for this he offers no justification. As we have seen above, there is no evidence for a rhythmic mode either in the Mirie music or indeed in medieval music theory for music not notated modally or mensurally. He explains that “a regularly stressed rhythm seems suitable both to the strongly metrical structure of the text and to its prevailingly syllabic relation to the music”, which means he took the natural rhythm of the poem to be in a rhythmic mode, which it clearly isn’t – see above under Deciphering the music III: a basis for resolving rhythm and Deciphering the music IV: applying Augustine to Mirie. But instead of being in one rhythmic mode, his interpretation of the music is in two: “The notation is therefore interpreted here in the iambic pattern of the first rhythmic mode, though the shape of the two-note ligatures has suggested for them transcription in the trochaic rhythm of the second mode”, that is to say, he assumes a basic rhythm of, in modern notation, crotchet quaver, the first mode, but at many points – “ilast”, “blast”, “Ei”, “niht”, “And”, “mi-” of “michel”, “-regh” of “soregh”, “murn”, “and” – the rhythm is in the second mode, quaver crotchet. He argues, then, that the neumes are to be read non-mensurally, but interpreted in the first rhythmic mode, for which there is no evidence, except at the points where the music is to be read mensurally, and at those points it is in the second mode, all for reasons he doesn’t explain. 

At the beginning of the final phrase, Frank Harrison and I differ on the number of notes. As we see above, Harrison has 3 notes on “Soregh and”, I have 4. There is a wide range of accuracy in the alignment of words and music in medieval manuscripts: some scribes meticulously placed every syllable under its corresponding note, whereas others were more slapdash, leaving the performer with the task of mentally associating each note with its wayward word. In the case of Mirie, the scribe left us with puzzles in understanding the music rhythmically, but the alignment of syllables and notes is careful throughout. Directly above, we see the words in question: I have ringed the notes and underlined the corresponding syllables “So-regh” and the melisma on “a-nd”, each syllable directly under the note, clearly showing 2 notes on “So-regh” and 2 notes on “and”.

The outcome of Frank Harrison’s rhythmically modal approach is that the neume shapes are ignored, and rhythm is based on units of three, perfections, thus he has the music in 6/8; whereas I haven’t given a modern time signature and have used the rhythm of the words as per Augustine, without imposing a rhythmic mode or modes. As we have seen, if read mensurally, the neumes do reflect grammatical rhythm, but imperfectly.

Note pitches. There are 2 notes in the Harrison version of the melody ringed in red, both g’, a third down from the b’ before it. I interpret both these notes as a’, a second down from the b’ before it, due to the scribe’s differentiating neumes, explained in detail above.

In Frank Harrison’s standardised popular version of the song, the missing last note is given editorially as g’, presumably because every other phrase ends on g’, but this seems to me to be a mistake, going against the medieval musical aesthetic. Medieval melody was built on the principle of consonance – dissonance – consonance, i.e. beginning with resolution, going through irresolution, then ending with resolution. Intermediate cadences typically end on non-resolving notes, resolution coming only at the end of a musical subsection or at the end of a melody. Therefore, on medieval musical principles, it does not make sense for all 5 phrases of this song to resolve with the final note, as is the case if that editorially added final note is g’. Since the penultimate note is f’, and since this melody begins with 3 notes on e’’, it would be more fitting for non-resolving phrases to end with g’ and the resolving last note to be e’.

Devising an accompaniment

We cannot know what accompaniment, if any, was intended for this song, and that is true of all secular medieval music, but performance necessitates making a decision about singing a cappella or having an accompanying instrument. My chosen self-accompanying instrument for this song is the medieval harp, the early 13^th century being a little too early for the gittern or citole, and the sound of the symphonia doesn’t, to my ears, have the right tone for the song.

Harps in the 13^th century were strung diatonically, i.e. without a row of sharp/flat strings as on the triple harp and without the levers or pedals on modern harps to achieve sharps and flats. If the overall pitch of a song needed to be changed to suit the singer’s voice, a harp would be retuned to the appropriate scordatura (non-standard tuning) to maintain the strings’ relative pitches to each other. (For more on this practice, click here.) I have done just this, starting on note a’ to suit my voice rather than the manuscript’s e’’, and I therefore flatten the b strings to restore the correct relationship between notes.

I wanted to create a sound on the harp that complements the atmosphere of the words, while also staying true to the principles of historically-informed performance. The right hand doubles the melody. The accompanying left hand plays notes ascending and descending step-wise on each pulse of the rhythm, with some voice crossings (i.e. the pitch of the accompaniment is lower and higher than the melody at different points) as with much medieval polyphonic accompaniment. The accompanying hand begins on the consonant octave and resolves on the consonant fifth. Between verses, I play the type of historically-informed medieval variation I call “minstrelish organum”. (For an explanation of “minstrelish organum”, click here and see the subheading, Organum: contrary motion and discantus).  

For a more detailed account of these accompaniment methods, describing how medieval music may be arranged to historical principles, see Performing medieval music. Part 2: Turning monophony to polyphony.

Unanswerable questions

Mirie it is was written on parchment in a book later discarded, at least one of its pages torn up and used as scrap for a flyleaf. The song is precious because it is early and rare, but being incomplete and with scribal errors, there are a lot of unanswerable questions. 

How do we account for the scribal accuracy of chant ai entundu and Mult s’asprisme li termines compared with the errors in Mirie it is? Were the French songs and the English song copied from different sources that had different levels of accuracy? But if so, why was the notation of Mirie not corrected? One reason may be that the scribe was good at copying but lacked the musical knowledge to correct inaccurate notation. Another reason may be that chant ai entundu and Mult s’asprisme li termines were copied from a written source but Mirie was circulating in the oral song tradition, written from memory by a scribe who could copy music accurately but lacked the skill to notate perfectly from first principles. The same notational discrepancy could have occurred with the same musically semi-skilled scribe if the French songs were copied but the English Mirie was the scribe’s own composition.

We cannot know if Mirie was copied from another written source, or learned by ear and written from memory, or if it was the scribe’s own composition. We cannot know if the words to the other stanzas are lost because the next folio is lost, as is likely, since the other two surviving songs have multiple stanzas, or if the other verses were already in the memory of the scribe and it was the tune in particular s/he wanted to notate. Nor can we know if it was meant to be monophonic, as written, or if were there other voice parts, now lost.

I have shown that the now–standard 20^th century version of the melody is questionable in its accuracy of the 13^th century scribe’s intention; and that, in trying to get closer to what was sung, complete certainty is impossible. Whatever the solution, we have a great tune, and a fragment of the earliest surviving secular song in English, giving voice to 13^th century experience, evocatively implying so much about common hardship in the coldest season of the year.

Postscript: the changes made in this third edition

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727
(often wrongly attributed to Jonathan Swift, as he wrote an essay with the same name – see here).

In this third edition of the article on Mirie it is, I hope, in Alexander Pope’s words, to be wiser today than yesterday. This short last section explains the changes made in my interpretation of the music and, more importantly, the reasons for making them. 

Even a glance at the Mirie manuscript makes the problem of interpretation obvious, as the surviving page is in a poor state, with tears and holes; but it is the uncertainty of the notation that is the fundamental problem. Add to that the fact that so many players of medieval music do not read medieval neumes, but rely on others’ interpretations, and we have a situation that there is now a standardised version of the song which, as I have shown, does not completely represent either the music or the words in the only surviving account. It is not possible to give a definitive reading of the song due to uncertainties in the notation and the missing ending, so while I have shown that the now-standard version is erroneous, I cannot claim that my interpretation is completely accurate. Indeed, this third edition of the article has a slightly different construction of the music and a new video due to new (i.e. old, historical) information that has been applied. We don’t have a way of knowing exactly what musical accuracy looks like for this song, so it is impossible to prove the scribe’s intentions beyond doubt. 

The fundamental question in performing any medieval music where the rhythm is missing or in question is: what is the key that unlocks the principle upon which rhythm can be discerned? In this edition, we saw that Frank Harrison considered the first rhythmic mode to be the key and, confusingly, also the second mode. In the previous edition of this article, my primary focus was interpreting the music, apart from the words. I wanted to edit the music as lightly as possible to be respectful to it, not to impose modern ideas, so the opening 4 notes on the first 2 words – “Mi-ri-e it” – remained. In this edition, I took the key ultimately to be the natural rhythm of speech and the syllabic pulse of the poem, hence the different rhythms of the resulting music between Frank Harrison and myself and, on the opening word, between myself now compared to 7 years ago. In this, I follow the understanding of Bruno de Labriolle, Gregorian choir leader in Lyon, who states that “Until the 13^th century, the most authoritative source for musical rhythm was the De Musica of Saint Augustine, that linked poetic metre to musical metre … in most of the music that predates the 13^th–14^th century, the rhythm of music is the rhythm of the words.” (This is part of a wide-ranging interview with Bruno, which can be read here.)

This third edition of the article also enabled me to:

• delve deeper into the poetry of the singular verse, with commentary on the medieval link between birdsong and human happiness;
• go into further detail about the medieval experience of winter, according to social class;
• test out the mensurability of the notation by transcribing chant ai entendu and Mult s’asprisme li termines from the same flyleaf;
• add annotations and more detailed commentary on the Mirie manuscript, including the identification of the difference between neumes descending a second and a third;
• include Augustine’s De Musica as a critical interpretative source, with its emphasis on grammatical rhythm and poetic form in music, confirming that my previous interpretation was basically correct, but that the vowel ending of the first word needed to be elided;
• incorporate Graham Lack’s excellent suggestion of wast rather than fast(e) as the final word.

For much more on the principles of discerning rhythm in medieval music written non-mensurally, three articles will appear on this site in late 2025 or 2026:

Discerning rhythm in non-mensural medieval music. Part 1/3: interpreting the historical sources.
Discerning rhythm in non-mensural medieval music. Part 2/3: Sainte Nicholaes by Godric of Finchale.
Discerning rhythm in non-mensural medieval music. Part 3/3: Worldes blis ne last no throwe.

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.

 

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Pittaway, Ian (2025) Discerning rhythm in non-mensural medieval music. Part 1/3: interpreting the historical sources. Available on this site in late 2025 or 2026.

Regents of the University of Michigan (2025) wast, entry in Middle English Compendium. Available here. 

Simkin, John (2020) Scotland and the Normans. Available here. 

Singman, Jeffrey L. (1999) Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Taliaferro, Robert Catesby, translator (1939) St. Augustine On Music. Annapolis: The St. John’s Bookstore. Available here. 

White, Stephen D. (1975) English Feudalism and its Origins. American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 19, pp. 138–55. Available here. 

Wiskus, Jessica (2020) On Music, Order, and Memory: Investigating Augustine’s Descriptive Method in the Confessions. Available here.