page_title: Music in Medieval England
section_title: Ars Nova
hierarchical_section_title: Music in Medieval England / Ars Nova
caption_attribution_description: Minature of John, Duke of Bedford, praying before St George; from BL Add MS 18850, f. 256v (the "Bedford Hours"). Held and digitised by the British Library.
context_page_description: Music in Medieval England, from the end of Roman rule in the fifth century until the Reformation in the sixteenth century, was a diverse and rich culture, including sacred and secular music and ranging from the popular to the elite.
  The sources of English secular music are much more limited than for ecclesiastical music. Medieval musicians had a wide variety of instruments available to them. The Anglo-Saxon scop and gleeman were replaced in the thirteenth century by the minstrel.
  In the early Middle Ages, ecclesiastical music was dominated by monophonic plainchant, the separate development of British Christianity until the eighth century, led to the development of a distinct form of liturgical Celtic chant. This was superseded, from the eleventh century by Gregorian chant. England retained unique forms of music and of instrumentation, but English music was highly influenced by continental developments, while British composers made an important contribution to many of the major movements in early music in Europe, including the polyphony of the Ars Nova and laid some of the foundations of later national and international classical music.
context_section_description: In the fourteenth century, the English Franciscan friar Simon Tunsted (d. 1369), usually credited with the authorship of Quatuor Principalia Musicae: a treatise on musical composition, is believed to have been one of the theorists who influenced the 'Ars Nova', a movement which developed in France and then Italy, replacing the restrictive styles of Gregorian plainchant with complex polyphony. The tradition was well established in England by the fifteenth century and was widely used in religious, and what became, purely educational establishments, including Eton College, and the colleges that became the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The motet 'Sub Arturo plebs' attributed to Johannes Alanus and dated to the mid or late fourteenth century, includes a list of Latinised names of musicians from the English court that shows the flourishing of court music, the importance of royal patronage in this era and the growing influence of the ars nova. Included in the list is J. de Alto Bosco, who has been identified with the composer and theorist John Hanboys, author of Summa super musicam continuam et discretam, a work that discusses the origins of musical notation and mensuration from the thirteenth century and proposed several new methods for recording music.
caption: John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, a major patron of music
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