In Bethlehem town: recomposition and rearrangement in William Cobbold

Ian Payne investigates the provenance of a neglected Elizabethan Christmas anthem

The extant works of the Norwich Cathedral organist William Cobbold (1560–1639) form a most interesting corpus of late-Elizabethan domestic music, consisting almost entirely of five-part consort songs for solo voice and viols. Cobbold’s music for voice(s) and viols has been considerably illuminated by recent research: this suggests, inter alia, that his Christmas verse anthem, In Bethlehem town, may also have been conceived for voices and viols and provide a rare glimpse into the substantial reworking by an Elizabethan composer of a pre-existing model. This, the composer’s only extant anthem, makes a rare and pleasant addition to the small yet musically distinguished body of Elizabethan and Jacobean works dedicated to the festive season. It is preserved in two complementary, but somewhat discordant, manuscript ‘liturgical’ sources comprising (respectively) vocal part-books and an organ part. In these sources the anthem is scored for solo voices, chorus and organ, with the usual ‘decani’ and ‘cantoris’ spatial divisions associated with ‘cathedral’ music; but there are some uncomfortable features which call into question the integrity of the verse-anthem material as it has come down to us. These will be considered below; but the greatest doubt is cast on the status of this version of the anthem by the discovery that the first verse section is essentially a reworking of Cobbold’s earlier five-part consort song, Amids my bale, setting a poem published in 1573 by George Gascoigne. Such an association of the anthem with viols raises the possibility that it may have been conceived as a domestic consort piece, with important implications for the conflicting performing forces required for each version. More interesting still, the consort version is reconstructable.

Before looking at the music in detail, it will be useful to establish a rough chronology in which to place this work, and to introduce the sources. Like Byrd, Cobbold seems to have composed his consort songs (to judge both by their style, and by the single dated example) probably during the 1580s, before the Italianate cadence formula naturalised by the madrigal-prints of Thomas Morley and his disciples had become a cliché in English music. Even so, the anthem cannot be dated at all precisely; and the anthem survives in sources compiled considerably later than its probable date of composition: Durham MS A2, probably the earliest of the Durham Cathedral pre-Restoration organ-parts, begun c.1635 and consisting ‘mainly of a large number of small gatherings of organ parts which originally had a separate existence’; and the so-called Barnard part-books, whose compilation has been dated to the period c.1625–c.1638 and to which the anthem was probably a late addition. Beyond that point the sparse chronological evidence will not take us.