Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire.

Elizabeth Baldwin. Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire.

Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002. xii + 287 pp. index. append. map. bibl. $30 (cl), $15 (pbk). ISBN: 1-58044-040-1 (cl), 1-58044-041-X (pbk).

This unique book by Elizabeth Baldwin raises questions concerning the musical life of Cheshire before 1642. Evidence--taken from material collected for the Records of Early English Drama, a project in which Baldwin participated in the early 1990s--suggests that music was part of life at all social levels and could be performed by practically anyone. Approximately seven hundred documents spanning some 400 years were found which relate to music-making, and it is these that provide Baldwin with her important evidence. They provide information on who was performing music, where, when, and why. The majority of the documents are either judicial (e.g., cases against the illegal "piping on the Sabbath") or financial, especially records from guild accounts of Cheshire that relate to the Cheshire waits. Admirable is the care with which Baldwin acknowledges the limitations and subjectivity inherent in the nature of her evidence.

The book is divided into five chapters. "Music in Context" (chap. 1)--perhaps the most engaging of all the chapters--attempts to establish a social and economic context for musical performance in Cheshire. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cheshire county was a relatively poor area in the northwest of England. The Reformation and the Renaissance brought about important religious and social changes that greatly affected music-making in this area and politicized music in general. In particular, the Reformation brought with it not only a change in liturgy (Latin services were replaced with the Book of Common Prayer) but the creation of sabbatarianism with, as Baldwin explains, its distrust of music and advocacy of abstinence of all secular activities on Sunday, including music-making. Baldwin shows that attitudes towards music varied according to these changing circumstances and religious affiliation. Before proceeding Baldwin closely examines the terms "musician" and "minstrel" and finds that over time the term "minstrel" deteriorated and came to be a pejorative word. To avoid negative connotations, Baldwin chooses the neutral term "music-maker" to describe the focus of her study, a term that encompasses not only the professional but the general "performer, trained or untrained ... the true amateur who performed for pleasure" (1-2). Other topics in this chapter include the important role of alehouses as purveyors of entertainment in Cheshire and the effect of Cheshire's 1572 special Statue of Vagabonds on performers in the county.

"Music in the City" (chap. 2), written by David Mills, and "Music in the County" (chap. 3) present complementary views of music-making in town and county. How music was taught, how music-makers made their living, how "musicians" were seen as lawbreakers, and how music could be used as a weapon (with lyrics that were either slanderous or expressions of communal disapproval) are topics discussed. "Music and the Gentry" (chap. 4) focuses on the role of the gentry as patrons and performers, especially on fashionable instruments like virginals, lutes, gitterns, and bandoras. That gentry frequently borrowed and lent instruments places instruments at the center of complex interrelationships, and here Baldwin does a fine job recreating from surviving wills some of the patterns of borrowing.

In "The Musical Instruments" (chap. 5) Baldwin offers a generous amount of information about a variety of instruments purchased and owned in Cheshire. Four useful tables (one for each family of instruments) specifying the name of the instrument, the price, and the year it was purchased are provided. However, for all Baldwin's meticulous work, one must approach some of Baldwin's claims about the nature of the instruments with skepticism. For one, Baldwin claims that virginals received their name from "the usual players" (173). However, music scholars now generally agree that the origin of the term remains unknown, despite various hypotheses like the one she quotes. In addition, Baldwin contradicts herself by citing evidence that men in addition to women owned and played virginals, John Cooper and William Glaseor to name but two (78). This gives the impression that Baldwin is repeating popular speculation as if it were fact even if her evidence does not support it.

Baldwin also includes an extensive bibliography and four useful maps illustrating the ancient parishes, townships, and chapelries of Cheshire, all so helpful when trying to grasp the extent of Cheshire at a time when geographical boundaries of townships did not always correspond with the parishes, and administrative boundaries often overlapped with other counties. Two appendices (inventories of Cheshire musicians and named musicians) conclude the book.

If Baldwin does not always satisfy the scholar's appetite for a study with firm conclusions, she does, nevertheless, present us with a useful, carefully researched book. In the end Paying the Piper may have tried to do too much with too little evidence, but it is unquestionably a genuine contribution to the study of life in an English county and should be of interest to all scholars of the early modern period.

JANET POLLACK 

University of Puget Sound