6 - The gittern and Tudor song

Summary

The historian who steps away from institutions and instead tries to account for [the musical pursuits] of individuals or groups of individuals in an urban community – politicians or physicians, lawyers or craftsmen, merchants or lower gentry – will usually find that the deposits are thin and poor, or have run out altogether.

John Milsom, Songs and Society in Early Tudor London

All the social groups mentioned by John Milsom in this passage from 1997 have made their appearance during the course of this book, either as owners or as importers of the gittern. For the politicians there was Sir William More and for physicians the Cambridge professor Thomas Lorkin who kept two gitterns in his rooms at Trinity Hall. A lawyer appeared in the person of Sir William Petre, and a craftsman with the shoemaker Robart Crispe who took to the open road, gittern in hand. John White, draper of London, stood for the merchants and William Calley, who bequeathed a gittern in his will, for the lower gentry. These men give a reasonable conspectus of the laymen that later Elizabethans called the ‘best sort’, a term that somewhat relaxed the old importance of blood in favour of respectable character, hard work and attainment.

What use did such men have for the gittern if they wished to accompany song? Here we may broaden the frame of reference for a moment. A comprehensive survey of the guitar in England from the 1550s to at least the 1850s would show that even those who criticised the instrument for its doubtful associations, or its limited musical capacity, often conceded that it serves very well as an accompaniment to the voice. Yet the traces of gittern-accompanied song in English musical sources of the sixteenth century are just what Milsom's words would lead us to expect; the deposits ‘are thin and poor’, or rather they have ‘run out altogether’, for no gittern tablatures are known to survive from Tudor England with a separate and texted part for a singer. Descriptions in a handful of literary texts, however, suggest that the gittern had a place in a vigorous culture of Tudor song where musical and poetic materials were constantly being made, remade and hybridised in a manner that often acknowledged no real boundary between court and street, or chamber and tavern.