First Light

I was getting ready to leave at what I consider an early hour of the morning, although even at five o'clock there are a few intrepid souls already at work. Making my way into the Place du Saint-Sernin I found myself drawn by the haunting beauty of a girl singing where the walls of the Place produce an acoustic almost like a concert-hall. The words, “O quam mirabilis est” — “Oh what a miracle this is!”

She sang like a lark, apparently just enjoying the quiet morning air, and I loitered just inside the square to listen, waiting until her song wwas finished before crossing to greet her. I suppose I should not have been surprised to learn that she was the oldest daughter of Herr Grüneberg; that her family had lived in Bad Sobernheim for five generations becoming one of the wealthiest farming families. In the hope of learning more I invited Traudi and her father to share breakfast with me in the tavern and over the meal, I learned more about the hazards of den Weg des heiligen Jakobus.
The first hazard as you climb into the Pyrenean mountains, so Sigismund tells me, is the packs of wolves in the high forests which prey on lone pilgrims, and it was because of these that the hôpital at Roncesvalles was established. And it wasn't so long ago, that the souls of pilgrims were at risk from the pernicious teachings of the Cathar heretics who sought refuge in the mountains.
On the east of Lorca is the bitter river the local people call the Salado. There are wicked men who wait beside the river for unsuspecting pilgrims and encourage them to water their horses there. When the horses fall dead, these rogues skin them before their carcases have even cooled!
Once you pass over the mountains into Spain, do not eat their beef, pork, shad, eel or tench for they will almost certainly make you sick. (Spanish tummy? I wondered that such a thing has been known for such a long time) The Porma and the Sil are good rivers of sweet water, flowing through verdant and pleasant lands. A few miles from Santiago our party halted and we bathed in the waters of the Miño, a river surely blessed by God, stripping off even our underclothes.
Sigismund was so keen to tell me of the adventures they had been through, and the things they had learned along the road that our meal was done before ever I had a chance to ask Traudi about the song she was singing earlier. Before the poor girl had a chance to utter a word Sigismund told me with a note of pride in his voice that she had learned the song as a pupil, one of the few females admitted to the school run by the Benedictines at Disibodenberg.

References

                    

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Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear?

A cold clear night, stars twinkle above. I can make out the shape of Orion the hunter near the horizon, and the Great Bear, riding high. And as I watch, a figure materialises, like a man outlined in fire, or a shower of gold dust, up there outshining the stars. He's so beautiful, I've never seen anyone like him!
His voice... well I know it's a cliché but his voice is loud and clear, the best way I can describe it is like the sound of a trumpet Glory to God in the highest! And on Earth, peace, good will to men. And before I know it the sky is full of these radiant beings, the stars barely visible. And the music! Oh, the music of their singing!
As they faded from view I was such a mix of emotions; I felt so little, so insignificant, and shameful, as if I had been in the presence of someone who knew the worst things I had ever done, yet at the same time I was so full of joy, I wanted to laugh and cry, and love and be loved. It was some minutes before I realised that my eyes were streaming with tears and my knees were numb on the cold hard ground.

Whatever you believe, whatever faith you keep, let me wish you a very Happy Christmas. And know this, something is coming; something wonderful!
                    

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Love is ... the oldest, yet the latest thing

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll's "Alice", all this jumping back and forth in time makes one quite giddy! I used to think it was bad enough when I woke up in the morning and couldn't remember where I was. Now I have to think "when am I?"
And as if that wasn't enough, I almost didn't get to go with the excursion I had requested. Madame director wanted me to go to France at the beginning of the seventeenth century, while I wanted to follow the link back from John of Salisbury.
In the end I managed to convince her of the value of the trail I was following, and since the technicalities make it impossible to travel to the same place and time more than once, my request was reluctantly granted. And so it is that I find myself in the company of some of the most extraordinary minds ever to gather in a single place:
Here, in 1139, at the Abbey of St.Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, Father Abbot Pierre Abelard takes time from his monastic duties to engage students from some of the furthest reaches of the known world in philosophical and religious debates.
I am surprised (but perhaps, unfairly so) that among the young men who attend so eagerly and listen so attentively to his discourses, are several dark faces with features suggestive of Arab, or Indian heritage. I would have thought that differences in religious belief might have deterred these fellows from aspiring to learn from someone who is now known as much for his sermons as for his rhetoric and knowledge of classics.
Of course, Pierre Abelard was not always a friar. As a young man, quite apart from his promise as a scholar, he had opportunity to indulge his appetites at the various hostelries that catered to the students of Notre Dame university in Paris, but it seems physical pleasures were generally less enticing than intellectual ones. Until, that is, he got to know Heloise, a most unusual young woman taking full advantage of her uncle's guardianship to study alongside the menfolk.
The unhappy outcome of their relationship was that Heloise was compelled to enter holy orders, while Abelard was castrated by her uncle! But not before Heloise had conceived a child.
Despite their forced separation, it seems their love for one another never died.
In tribute to one of the great love stories of all time (for more information, I recommend the tale of Abelard and Heloise), I would like to reproduce in modern notation, the chant of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, received recently at this abbey with other correspondence.

The full text of Pierre Abelard's own account of their story, Historia Calamitatum is available as an online e-text.

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Spreekt u het Nederlands?

My original intention in coming to Leiden was to learn more about the English non-conformists. I could hardly have hoped to find a better friend than Bridget Robinson. I had hoped that perhaps a few inquiries among the market traders might point me in the right direction, but at the third stall a short woman was negotiating the purchase of a brace of pheasant in an odd mixture of English and Dutch, in an unmistakeably English accent.
Once it looked as though the trade was completed I asked whether she knew of any church congregations where I might be able to worship.
"God be thanked!" she exclaimed, and proceeded to ask me about my beliefs, whether I would consider myself a true catholic, or a Calvinist.
I admitted that my own beliefs were closer to those of Calvinist teachings, but that in honesty before God, I should be called a Brownist, believing that neither the catholic church, nor Calvinism gave liberty to the Holy Spirit to move freely in the hearts and lives of men.
For a frightening moment I wasn't sure whether her expression was veering towards outrage or astonishment but when she seized me in a warm embrace and insisted I accompany her back to her home my doubts were banished.
Home, for Bridget and the reverend John Robinson is Grone Point house, only a few minutes walk from Leiden University. And while Grone Point is clearly larger than needed for a single family it also serves as a meeting-place for the English separatist assembly in Leiden.
Although I don't have any pictures of Amsterdam or Leiden when the Robinsons lived there, a couple of paintings by Jan Vermeer from later in the century should give a fair impression of the way the towns looked.

A Delft Street, by Jan Vermeer	Delft, by Jan Vermeer

Comfortably settled in the kitchen of the house, Bridget fills me in on the background to their move to Holland.
She had married John the year before the Gunpowder Plot in London, which had been intended to remove the King from power, and which might, had the conspirators succeeded, have resulted in the Church of England being brought once more under the supremacy of the Pope. John Robinson had been granted the preferment of Saint Andrew's Church in Norwich, a town with a strong connection to the Dutch wool trade and several expatriate Dutch families. When King James issued his proclamation insisting on conformity with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith following the Hampton Court Conference, John felt that he could no longer continue in his position as a priest in the Church of England and they returned to live with Bridget's parents at Sturton-Le-Steeple. It was as a result of the move that the couple had joined the non-conformist assembly meeting at the home of William Brewster, at Scrooby in Northamptonshire.
While the assembly had hoped to be permitted to continue to worship privately in their own unique way, the laws of England in 1606 were such that they were liable to fines, imprisonment, and in some cases torture, and it was these conditions that prompted many of the assembly to move to Amsterdam three years after Bridget married.
The move to Amsterdam was no minor undertaking. Those members who had determined to make the move pooled their resources, hiring horses and a couple of carts which were loaded with such possessions as they intended to take to their new homes. It seemed as though the whole undertaking was in jeopardy when, on arrival in the town of Boston, the captain whose ship had been chartered for the voyage to Holland, was waiting by the quay with the town constables and a priest, ready to arrest the footsore travellers for sedition. (The picture on the left shows Boston as it looked from the air in the 20th century)
Rather than discouraging them, once the fines were paid and jailed members released, the majority of the travellers joined to watch in prayer while a couple of the menfolk were sent to the quay to find another vessel for the voyage.
Bridget tells me that the Brownist congregations that they had found in Amsterdam were not in harmony amongst themselves, let alone with the Church of England which they had shunned, and before the end of the year, the Scrooby assembly had determined that perhaps the least harmful course would be for them to move elsewhere in Holland.
Nearly four years after coming to Holland, in January 1611, John Robinson, William Jepson, Henry Wood, and his brother-in-law, Randall Thickins jointly purchased on behalf of the assembly, a large house called Grone Point, near the Leyden University. Although it would be May 1612 before they could begin to make use of the property.
While she was showing me the rooms in the house that are commonly used by the assembly I couldn't help but admire the virginals used to accompany the singing. The case of the instrument was unusually plain, without even the customary decorative papers, but to me, the sound when Bridget played a few short phrases of a typical foursquare hymn, was beautiful. With music in mind, I asked Bridget about the attitude of the assembly toward music and dancing as forms of recreation.
Although Bridget herself regards music as a perfectly acceptable form of recreation, she tells me that all too often dance is the back door through which the devil tempts innocent souls, and she presents me with a pamphlet (a treatise against daunses) which I am advised to read and consider prayerfully, for the benefit of my soul, although, she concedes that during a visit to Utrecht, not above two years ago, her husband and herself "were greatly entertained at some length" by a blind man who played upon a flute, sitting in the churchyard of the Cathedral, by name, Jacob van Eyck.

X:14                          % number
T:De lof-zangh Marie         % title
C:Anon (arr. J.van Eyck      % composer
O:Der Fluiten Lust-hof (1646) % origin. M:C|                         % meter
L:1/2                        % length of shortest note
Q:                           % tempo
K:C                          % key
V:1                          % voice 1
P:THEMA
d2 | d ^c | d e | f2 | f2 | g f | e d | ^c2 | e2 | f a | g f | e2 | d2 |
A2 | d ^c | d _B | A2 | d2 | f e | f g | e2 | a2 | e2 | g2 | f g | e2 | d2-|d2 |]
P:VARIATIE I
[L:1/8] d2 AB ^c2 A2 | d2 ed ^c2 A2 | d2 gf e2 c2 | f8 | f2 de fdef | g2 ag f2 gf |
e2 fe d2 ed | ^c8 | e2 AB cd e2 | fefg a2 ef | g2 ag f2 gf | e2 d2 eAB^c |
d8 | A2 B2 ^c2 A2 | d2 ed ^c2 A2 | d3 c _B2 AG | A8 | d3 ^c d2 e2 | f2 gf e2 de |
f2 ef gafg | e8 | a2 FGABcd | e2 ABcdef | g2 GABcde | f2 efgafg | e2 d2 eAB^c | d8-|d8 |]
P:VARIATIE II
dDEF GAB^c | dFGF ^cEFE | dFGF eGce | f8 | fFA_B cdef | gceg fadf | eA^ce dDAd |
^cAec A4 | eagf ed^cA | fefg aAFa | gGEg fDdf | eAdF GeA^c | d4 D4 | Aagf ed^cA |
dDFd ^cEAc | dDdc _BG c/d/B/c/ | A8 | dadf ecAe | fDdf eAce | fD de/f/ gGgf | e4 z a fg |
aAFG Aagf | [L:1/16] edcB AGFE FGAB cdef | g2fe dcBA G2g2d2e2 | f2AB cdef g2ag f2gf |
e2A2 d2^cd edcB A2Bc | d2c2 _B2AG FEFG A2D2 | d16-|d16 |]

To be continued...
To convert the code above to sheet music, or listen to the tunes, copy the code for a single song, then paste it here and [submit].