3 - Eton

Summary

When King Henry VI founded the sister colleges of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, he intended that those who made music and worshipped in the Chapel should be at the very core of college life. From its founding in 1440, Eton had a choir of singing boys and men recruited locally, and an organist too; the archive can produce repair bills to the organ dating back to 1490! With the sacking of the monasteries, the survival of Eton Chapel's choral repertoire, in the form of what is now known as the Eton Choir Book, was a sheer fluke, now affording unique insight into the worship and music of the college's first hundred years. Indeed, the survival of the Chapel's equally unique wall paintings from the fanatical zeal of that later vandal, Cromwell, was due also to chance: a last-minute intervention led to their being covered over rather than destroyed completely.

The barbaric conditions in college following the Jacobean revival somehow failed to eradicate the musical enthusiasms of the young Thomas Augustine Arne, as he persisted in serenading his irate fellow scholars on an old cracked flute. But maybe he took some comfort in the new three-manual organ by Father Smith in the College Chapel, that had graced a fabulously covered wooden screen by Grinling Gibbons since 1699.