Francis Tregian the younger as music copyist

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Smith, David J

A legend?

DAVID J. SMITH responds to a controversial recent

article which reconsiders the provenance of an important

collection of 16th/17th-century English manuscripts

IN A RECENT article, Ruby Reid Thompson dismisses the established view of the Tregian manuscripts (FVB, Eg.3665, Dr.4302, and Ch.Ch.510-14) as legend, questioning the assumptions that have come to surround our understanding of them.1 It is always worthwhile to re-examine evidence relating to any musical source to see what basis there is for forming an opinion about its provenance. However, there is a danger of replacing one 'legend' with another. Thompson puts forward the view that these great anthologies were compiled by more than one scribe in a scriptorium in which there was a conscious effort to preserve as uniform a style of writing as possible, and that the type of paper used suggests a court connection. However, the evidence for this is as circumstantial as that used in the identification of the younger Francis Tregian as the scribe. In this article I shall challenge her interpretation of the physical characteristics of the Tregian manuscripts and argue for a reinstatement of the Tregian hypothesis.2

There is no direct evidence naming the scribe of any of these sources. The names which appear on the covers and flyleaves of FVB, Eg.3665, Dr.4302, and Ch.Ch.510-14 are later additions, providing no clue as to the original owner. There is no record of the compilation of these anthologies: nowhere is there a reference to any individual or group copying music on this scale. This means that any explanation of these manuscripts remains hypothetical. It is not so much a question of determining the validity of the Tregian 'legend', but of ascertaining whether a working hypothesis identifying him as the scribe may be held to critical account. Scholars and editors have tended, perhaps wrongly, to imply a greater degree of certainty over the penmanship than they would probably have intimated had they been questioned more closely about the subject. In the same way that scientists tend to speak of the latest hypothesis as if it were established fact, so have musicologists and performers described the Tregian manuscripts in the absence of a fuller explanation of how they came to be. The hypothesis - not legend - that Tregian wrote the manuscripts may be discarded if some material fact comes to light which proves that he cannot have been the scribe, or if an alternative view seems better fitted to what can be gleaned from the manuscripts themselves and other evidence. Does Thompson's alternative view offer a better explanation than the working hypothesis? Should her 'legend' replace the existing one?

Thompson's hypothesis is founded upon an exhaustive and detailed examination of the physical attributes of the manuscripts, including handwriting. She rejects Cole's identification of Tregian as scribe,3 giving a number of examples purporting to show not only that Tregian's handwriting does not match that of the manuscripts, but also that the scripts within the collection vary. Thompson also casts doubt on whether the document reproduced in her Plate I (fig. 1 in this article) is in Tregian's hand (other than his signature).4 Although some of Cole's conclusions regarding FVB turn out to be unsubstantiated by later research,5 those regarding Tregian as scribe of the manuscript should not be readily dismissed.

IT is important to distinguish between the evolution of a script over time, variations within a script caused by differences in ink and pen, and the deliberate adoption of different scripts by the same scribe. There was a high degree of variation within scripts produced by the same person in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and educated men frequently cultivated more than one style of handwriting, in the same way as we today use more than one typeface in a word-processed document.6 Jonathan Wainwright has demonstrated considerable variation in the music script employed by Stephen Bing, and points out that he cultivated two distinct text-hands in the manuscripts copied by him.7 A person's signature usually differs from their handwriting, but signatures can also vary according to context: William Byrd's signatures vary considerably from document to document.8

Although it is by no means clear that the person who wrote the document in Thompson's Plate III was the same as the scribe of the document in Plate I (figs. 1 and 2),9 we should not rule it out. Even the signatures do not look as though they belong to the same person (exx. 1 and 2). In fact the upper case 'T' of the signature in Plate III matches very closely the letter-form found in the main script of Plate I, and resembles the formation of the letter in FVB (exx.3, 4 and 5). Perhaps it is significant that the example taken from Plate I is from the name `Thomas Tregian'. It is possible that Francis Tregian wrote the first document as well as signing it; even if he did not, the scribe was probably someone close to the family, if not a member. If it is possible to associate any script present in Plates I and III with scripts occurring in the Tregian manuscripts, then there is no reason to discard the hypothesis on ground of handwriting alone.