Queens' College : The Booke of Common Prayer, with Chapel Part Book

Queens' College

<p style='text-align: justify;'> Interleaved between each section of this Book of Common Prayer are leaves of handwritten music that provide an extensive selection of English anthems and service music. The music that survives constitutes just the tenor part from what might have been a set of seven or so part books, the remainder of which are now lost. Both the handwriting and the composers included suggest that this collection was copied out in the earlier seventeenth century, prior to the suppression of sung services following the Civil War. In addition to music by some principal English Reformation composers (Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Tye) there are works by lesser known figures, some of them local to Cambridge (John Amner (1579–1641), Thomas Wilkinson (fl.?1575–?1612), Osbert Parsley (1511–85)). The volume’s front cover inscription ('Tenor Decani Colligium Reginat Cantatrio 1664') together with its presence in Queens’ College Library strongly suggests that it was used for Queens’ College Chapel services in the years preceding the civil war. If true, the volume clearly demonstrates the College’s High-Church and Royalist loyalties at a time when the use of such music in worship was deplored by Puritans as an obstruction to the word of God. <p>By Dr Tim Eggington, Fellow Librarian, Queens' College</p></p>