The Will of John Boraston: Musicians within Collegiate and Parochial Communities

Summary

The starting point for this essay is a wholly unremarkable document, the will of John Boraston. The testator was lay clerk and informator choristarum at Eton College between 1473 and his death twenty years later, in the winter of 1493. As one of the college’s five lay clerks, his duties revolved around the daily cycle of worship that took place within the college chapel. As informator choristarum, or instructor of the choristers, he was also responsible for the training and oversight of the college’s boy choristers. He was therefore a central figure in the choral foundation of one of fifteenth-century England’s foremost secular colleges. He was something of a transitional figure, appointed only a few years after the college’s dissolution and partial restitution by Edward IV in the mid-1460s. When he arrived the choir, which had been dispersed in 1465, was still in the early stages of recovery; by the end of his tenure, the college’s choral foundation stood on the threshold of its most brilliant phase of virtuosity. This achievement set the scene for the copying of the Eton choirbook, a magnificent codex containing polyphony of the first order of splendour and complexity, and one of the landmark music manuscripts of pre-Reformation England.

Few if any of Boraston’s testamentary provisions will excite seasoned readers of late medieval wills. Among his twenty-two bequests, however, one is certain to attract a musicologist’s attention, namely the gift of ‘all my books of polyphony (canticis fractis)’ to the college chapel. Although most music books were copied and owned by their immediate users, rather than on behalf of institutions, such books seldom appear in the wills of singers. That Boraston owned pricksong books, and bequeathed them to Eton College less than a decade before the copying of MS 178, is made all the more suggestive by their devotional purpose, to serve the cult of the Virgin Mary: she was the dedicatee of most of the compositions in the Eton choirbook, and it would seem likely that it was from Boraston’s collection that the earlier layer of the choirbook’s repertory was drawn. The college’s account rolls are unhelpfully silent as to the copying, purchase or illuminating of MS 178: circumstantial evidence such as this, pointing towards the genesis of this crucial manuscript, is therefore of more than passing interest.

Boraston’s remaining bequests largely conform to classic late medieval testamentary stereotypes.