THESE WERE the words of Jacques Rouché, the director of the Opéra, in August 1916, interviewed by a reporter for the periodical La rampe on the subject of the Opéra's first wartime season in 1915–16. Rouché's thoughts encapsulate wider public sentiment in wartime, as explored in Chapter One, that whilst theatregoing was a vital form of distraction during wartime, and a means of escape and entertainment, it also played a crucial role in bringing the Parisian public together and uniting them in the home-front war effort. As Susan McCready notes, public institutions and in particular theatres played a vital role in unifying the French people during the war, and, as literal gathering spaces, they served as important sites of public assembly during wartime.

Rouché was no doubt aware that by 1916 the Opéra had much catching up to do: having staged its final performance of the 1913–14 season on 28 July 1914, the Opéra remained closed until its inaugural wartime matinée performance on 9 December 1915. As Chapter One has explored, wartime conditions posed numerous practical and financial problems for the Opéra: mobilisation had depleted the institution's forces, leaving a lack of male principals, and a depleted orchestra; wartime shortages made fuel costs high; and, when combined with the large taxes demanded of the institution, keeping the building in operation was financially unviable. The question of what would or could be performed during wartime in order to ensure sufficiently high returns complicated things further. The principal composer whose works had ensured high ticket sales in the pre-war years was Richard Wagner. With the outbreak of war, the works of this ‘enemy’ composer became problematic, leaving the Opéra with a sizeable gap in its repertoire. Rouché outlined his fears regarding programming in a letter to Albert Dalimier, the under-secretary for fine arts, in December 1914: ‘You know, Minister, how important the Wagnerian repertoire was for the successful management of the Opéra.

Writing in the Observer on 5 June 1960 about his newly completed opera, A Midsummer Night's Dream, one week before its Aldeburgh premiere, Britten anticipates what he imagines will be the inevitable criticism of his and tenor Peter Pears’ loose handling of the Shakespearean text in their libretto: ‘I do not feel in the least guilty at having cut the play in half. The original Shakespeare will survive. Nor did I find it daunting to be tackling a masterpiece which already has a strong verbal music of its own.’ It is probably with his sensitivity to the ‘verbal music’ of a character such as Puck that Britten has him speak rather than sing his admittedly singsong lines, albeit in a haunting parlando. Here are the lines (III.ii.448–52), uttered to Lysander within earshot of the four sleeping mortals who have at last found their common ground:

Taking inspiration from these magic drops, Britten wields a magic of his own, a sound-drop, applied to our ears in the form of a ground bass and a series of ‘magic chords’ that comprise the passacaglia. Like Shakespeare, Britten clearly delights in punning, and one finds musical puns throughout his programme music. For instance, a pun of this nature appears in his setting of the folk song, ‘I Will Give My Love an Apple’ (Folk Song Arrangements, vol. 6: England, 1961), which has the rhyming couplet, ‘I will give my love a palace wherein she may be, | And she may unlock it without any key’ – this last phrase, ‘without any key’, prompting Britten to adopt strange chords and cross-rhythms, so that the song bears little resemblance to Vaughan Williams’ (much earlier) setting of it in Folksongs for Schools. Then, in The Turn of the Screw (op. 54, 1954, libretto by Myfanwy Piper after Henry James) there is Britten's knowing use of the celesta – a kind of small upright piano that sounds like a glockenspiel, whose name derives from the French word céleste, meaning heavenly – ironically to invoke the diabolical presence of Quint, or the name Quint itself, which suggests both the pentatonic scale and the perfect fifth, the characteristic joyfulness of which gives lie to the inveterate despondency (and doom) of its utterer.

We begin with the Holy Sepulchre, from Constantine in the early fourth century through to the crusaders in the twelfth. Griffith-Jones surveys the early literary and archaeological evidence, and is among those who view Eusebius’ account with some caution. When completed, under Constantine or his son, the complex as a whole will have been of overwhelming grandeur: the eastern stairs, portico and entrance; westwards into the basilica; through to the courtyard; and finally, at the western end, the rotunda.

Between c. 1145 and 1275, twenty-one visitation indulgences were issued in support of the Temple Church in London. Historians have referenced these indulgences in passing, but no one has yet examined the corpus of pardons as a whole to determine what it reveals about the Templar Order in England. The highly formulaic vocabulary of the charters, along with the growing ubiquity of pardons in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, has likely contributed to this oversight. I will demonstrate in this chapter that the indulgences provide new and important information on the Templar Order in London, particularly in regard to their building campaigns at the New Temple. The Templars, through their invocation of their association with the Holy Sepulchre, aimed to provide for medieval Christians an alternative Jerusalem in London.

After papal recognition of the Templars at the Council of Troyes in 1129, the earliest examples of solicitation of financial support for the Order were associated with papal indulgences. In Milites dei (1144), Pope Celestine II commanded the clergy to urge all Christians to support the Templars financially in return for remission of one-seventh of their enjoined penance. The crusader state of Edessa fell to the Muslims on Christmas Eve that same year, and Pope Eugene III reissued the indulgence in July 1145, followed by his formal crusade encyclical, Quantum predecessores, on 1 December 1145. The first visitation indulgence in support of a specific Templar site in England appeared shortly thereafter. Between c. 1145 and 1161, Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, promised twenty days’ remission from enjoined penance to all who visited the Old Temple church in London on the anniversary of its dedication and gave alms in remission of their sins. Theobald cited financial provision as his reason for issuing the indulgence, which suggests that he was responding to the papal bulls of 1144 and 1145. Furthermore, the recent establishment of the headquarters at the Old Temple in London (c. 1140–44) would have stimulated interest in supporting the new site.

Theobald was serving as papal legate when he issued the pardon and, although his formal legation began in 1150 and lasted until his death in 1161, he was often employed as papal legate earlier than 1150.

A reviewer of Britten's 1943 work Rejoice in the Lamb, based on Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno (1759–63) remarked that ‘Mr Britten has a way of choosing the most recondite texts to set to music’. Even as a young man, his textual choices for his songs and choral works were, as Neil Powell writes, ‘randomly eclectic’ and ‘the sheer oddness of the poems … would often serve him surprisingly well when he came to set them to music’. Britten also had a lifelong taste for ‘anthology’ works (Peter Porter has written that ‘the Nocturne … and the Serenade are excellent pocket anthologies’), which partly explains his catholic choices, as well as the sheer number of poets involved. Boris Ford notes that Britten set texts by around ninety poets, but in fact across the complete range of his vocal and choral works Britten set the words of over 150 writers in his lifetime, including the fifty-six different authors he set as a child. Britten's total far outstrips those of his contemporaries or recent forebears. Vaughan Williams made use of just over forty; Lennox Berkeley about the same; while Walton and Tippett set the texts of only around fourteen writers apiece. This comparison needs to be qualified by a reminder that Britten wrote considerably more vocal works than any of these other composers, largely because of his muse of many decades, Peter Pears. But it is not entirely because of Pears. Britten's productivity throughout his life resulted from a lifelong search for inspiration in a text, as well as in a voice.

Britten's eclecticism might suggest he had no preference for any particular writers, unlike that demonstrated by the other composers listed here, such as Vaughan Williams’ pronounced attachment to Walt Whitman. Britten's taste for collected anthologies of poetry introduced him to groups of poets rather than specifically to one poetic voice; and, as indicated above, his adventurousness in his choices of text is widely accepted. Nonetheless, as a mature composer he did demonstrate an increasing fondness for a certain type of poetry – or rather, for the poetic tastes of his childhood, which, judging by the nature of the material to which he was exposed in 1920s Lowestoft, were texts that cannot really be considered ‘recondite’.

IN AN OFFICIAL LETTER in 1346, King John of Bohemia, Count of Luxembourg, absolved the Dominican order of an old allegation that they had murdered his father, Henry VII, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, by poisoning the Mass wine during communion. The crime would have taken place at Buonconvento near Siena in 1313, in the midst of a campaign during which the emperor intended to unite the warring city-states of northern Italy under the imperial crown. John's letter, written in the year of his own death in the battle of Crécy, mentions the romancij, chronicae & moteti (romances, chronicles and motets) that had been composed in response to his father's alleged murder. One such motet, Scariotis falsitas/Jure quod in opere/Superne matris gaudia, survives as the fifth musical piece in the Roman de Fauvel (Fauv). Its texts proclaim the wickedness of the Dominicans and the horror of their crime. Many of the motets in Fauv criticize the clergy and the mendicant orders; even the pope himself (at that time Clement V, the first of the Avignon popes) is accused of currying favor with the monstrous Fauvel who aspires to dominate the world. Pope Clement had initially supported Henry's enterprise in Italy but, at the instigation of King Philip the Fair of France, had abandoned his cause. Philip's past reign and his evil counselors are likewise heavily criticized in Fauv. Thus, the motet places us in the midst of the political turmoil in France and Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Since the manuscript probably originated in circles of French court officials, and since John of Bohemia, who was a long-standing friend of the French royal house (and, incidentally, Guillaume de Machaut's first patron), often sojourned in Paris, he may have known or heard the motet about his father's death. John's rejection of the accusation came no less than thirty years after the alleged murder, so he too may have initially given credence to the allegation uttered in the motet.

Scariotis falsitas/Jure quod in opere reveals one of the newer functions of the motet during the fourteenth century, beyond the traditional concerns with amorous and devotional subjects. In the previous century, political topics were more proper to the conductus, although there are some thirteenth-century motets criticizing the hypocrisy of the clergy.

The hobelar is very much the poor relation in the study of the English armies of the fourteenth century, eclipsed by both the man-at-arms and the archer. Our understanding of his origins and role has been wholly based on only two major studies of this troop type: J. E. Morris’ ‘Mounted Infantry Warfare’ in 1914 and J. Lydon's ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’ in 1954. The lack of interest might be considered surprising, given that Morris saw him as the precursor to the mounted longbowman, while Lydon called him ‘the most effective fighting man of the age’, referring to the hobelar as ‘an entirely different type of mounted soldier’. Yet other historians have been happy to accept the conclusions of Morris and Lydon, considering the hobelar only in passing. Perhaps the reason that so little work has been done on him is that he is always considered in comparison to the man-at-arms – the elite warrior, in his shining harness, doyen of chivalry and a core element of the medieval political and social elite – and the longbowman – the almost super-heroic, Hundred Years’ War-winning, nationalistic symbol of medieval English, and Welsh, martial prowess. By contrast, there is little if any mention of the hobelar in the battle narratives of the middle ages; they have no great role to play in the successes of the English over the French. They do not form a political and social class within medieval society and there is no way, therefore, to discuss their impact outside of the military sphere. It is also almost certain that their Irish origins have counted against them too. Medieval Ireland has been considered militarily backwards by most historians of warfare, who seem to have inherited something of the dismissive tone of their English sources.

Another reason for the lack of serious work may be because the hobelar's presence in English armies was relatively short-lived. They first appear on Edward I's Scottish campaign of 1296, after which their numbers increase rapidly. Some 490 served in the contingent from Ireland for the 1304 campaign, and one thousand were requested (but did not arrive) for that of 1332.

In this book we have viewed, first and foremost, the Christian monuments themselves, with secondary reference to those who imagined them from afar, who travelled dangerously to them, who worshipped or served in them. It is time, in closing, to repopulate Jerusalem with its pilgrims. We recall the Ethiopian community perhaps already established in the sixth century; St Davit Garejeli for whom the city was too holy to enter; and the Western pilgrims from Jerome’s Paula to Felix Fabri who spent a day gathering pebbles and thorn-twigs between Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives. Thanks to Robert Hillenbrand’s chapter, we can envision too the sensory experience, in Muslim devotion, of the Dome of the Rock.

Jerome’s account of Paula (who travelled with him in 386 CE) is an obituary, and focuses more than most pilgrim accounts and guide-books on emotions. There was a continuity across space and time that might be alien to our more atomised and disenchanted age. Great visitors of the past could inform the experience of their successors, and inspire those who never got to Jerusalem themselves. Rituals and experiences were taken home from Jerusalem, nurtured as local traditions and then brought back to Jerusalem in hope and expectation by later generations. Memory of Jerusalem was a memory of the past, the present and the promised future, all defined and animated at home by local liturgies and processions, churches’ design and decoration, relics and guide-books.

Jerome’s account of Paula had an abiding influence. Amalarius (775–850) compared his own Good Friday veneration to the reaction of Paula when, with Jerome, she saw the cross. She was ‘“prostrate before the cross as if she saw the Lord hanging there”; I, lying before the cross, have Christ’s suffering for me written on my heart [2 Cor. 3.3].’

In his seminal work on the subject of Britten's collaborations with W. H. Auden, Donald Mitchell asserted, ‘[his] music can embody an attitude, a point of view, which need not necessarily be part of the meaning of the original text’. Of course, the ability of music to convey extra-musical meaning, even when text is present, is not without controversy and has sparked fierce debates. Mitchell's language, however, carefully avoids much of the charged terminology that equates music with language: instead of signifying, music here ‘embod[ies]’, a rather safe formation that seems to reside more in the realm of character attributes than of semiotics. It is what Britten's music embodies, according to Mitchell, that becomes more problematic. Rather than merely communicating the poetic text, his music expresses an extrinsic ‘attitude’ or ‘point of view’ about the poem's subject matter. Taken further, this notion suggests that, similar to the subtle nuances in language used by a speaker or writer to express an implied meaning in a discourse, the composer is able to lead the listener through his setting of a text by musical means. Put another way, Britten affects a listener's understanding of the text through his musical discourse.

Melody, as the vehicle of the text, is at the forefront of the discursive code for Britten's text setting. Indeed, the melodic shapes he chooses for expressing and interacting with the text are fundamental to our apprehension of his interpretation. As Peter Pears observed in a discussion of the ‘Prologue’ to Britten's Our Hunting Fathers, ‘[Britten] can match the thorniest epigrams with an apt and memorable phrase’, continuing, ‘the musical motto (major to minor triad) well fits the poet's theme: “O pride so hostile to our charity”.’ The phrase in question, at bars 19–20, slithers downward chromatically and narrowly through major and minor seconds – a gesture that ‘matches’ the text through its mimicry of the inevitable fall (descent) from pride and its allusion to the serpent of original sin. A concurrent shift in register guides the listener toward the gesture, effectively ensuring that the phrase will be, in Pears's words, ‘memorable’. The composer's careful attention to melodic shape and detail, in this instance, points the discerning listener toward this clarifying moment in W. H. Auden's prologue.