The greatest contrast between English strategy in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and between Edward III and Henry V as military leaders, is in the military occupation of territory through a garrison system. Whilst Edward III and his commanders had not completely eschewed this method of subduing and controlling the French, there was no real precedent for the systematic conquest of Normandy by Henry V and for the establishment of a network of garrisons in order to hold on to what had been conquered. Even after the treaty of Troyes the ‘English kingdom of France’ relied much on the maintenance of fortified and manned centres, both for internal security and for expansion into areas which remained loyal to the Dauphin. As the latter's fortunes improved, the English increasingly fell back on their original conquests and power base in Normandy, until they were finally expelled from the area in 1450.

Thanks to the survival of financial records on both sides of the Channel, we can know much about the English military establishment in this fifteenthcentury phase of the war, especially in Normandy. Muster rolls within these records, for instance, generated 128,526 nominal records for ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ project, a figure which represented around half of the total names collected. Although the archives of the chambre des comptes have suffered many vicissitudes over the years, enough survives to enable a reconstruction of the garrison establishment as well as of field campaigns, and to facilitate research into many aspects of military activity and interactions. The key word, however, is reconstruction. Whilst relevant materials survive for every year, there are gaps in the evidence. In the light of the inconsistency of data survival, therefore, it is very helpful that a number of documents provide a fuller picture, such as the surviving accounts of Pierre Surreau, receiver-general of Normandy, for the years 1423–25, 1425–26 and 1428–29. Unfortunately the account of the receiver-general of Normandy for 1448–49 survives only in part and is missing its garrison section.

Five documents are known which provide a complete listing of all the garrisons at a particular point in time.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is recognized the world over as one of the greatest composers of all time and is especially known for his musical triumphs in the face of increasing deafness, beginning around 1798.

In 1801 he confided his early hearing loss to Dr. Franz Wegeler in Bonn and schoolmaster/violinist Carl Amenda in Latvia, friends who had lived in Vienna but were now safely far away. By the summer of 1802 others were starting to perceive lapses in his hearing, and his fear and confusion are reflected in the Heiligenstadt Testament in October of that year. With more good days than bad, Beethoven's hearing slowly became weaker, although it had not yet interfered with his performing in public, even with orchestra on the marathon concert of December 22, 1808.

Between 1812 and 1816 he tried using ear trumpets (made for him by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel and possibly his brother Leonhard, also an inventor) with varying, but largely disappointing, degrees of success. Between December 8, 1813, and February 27, 1814, Beethoven conducted (or attempted to conduct) four benefit concerts with an orchestra of ca. 113 professionals, causing considerable commentary about his exaggerated motions, some of which by now were the inevitable result of his weakened hearing. At the performances, which included the premieres of his Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, as well as Wellington's Victory, Beethoven's motions were probably shadowed, much more accurately, by conductor Michael Umlauf. In the fall of 1814, as the Congress of Vienna assembled, Beethoven composed a cantata, Der glorreiche Augenblick, for the occasion. On October 10 the Prague pianist and pedagogue Johann Wenzel Tomaschek visited Beethoven, found sketches for the cantata on the piano, and reported that the composer “was especially hard of hearing this day, so that one had to shout, rather than speak, in order to be understood.” Tomaschek returned on November 24, just as the parts for the cantata were being copied: “Beethoven received me very politely, but appeared to be very deaf on this day, for I had to exert myself to the utmost to make myself understood.” Even though many of his other comments were caustic, Tomaschek did not report that any portion of their conversation took place in writing.

Spiral columns in Christian buildings are often, even routinely, referred to as Solomonic. The evidence in favour of this reading is extensive, as is illustrated by a list of examples going back in time from the sixteenth century, as follows:

• a) Raphael’s cartoon of Peter healing a man in the porch of the Temple (Acts 3, 1–11), of 1515 to 1520.

• b) Jean Fouquet’s illumination of Pompei entering the Temple, in a manuscript of 1475.

• c) The column in St Peter’s known as the colonna santa, identified between 1362 and 1378 as one against which Christ lent while preaching in the Temple [Fig. 7.1].

• d) The Cappella Palatina in Palermo, of the 1140s: two spiral columns support the west side of the domed bay, while Solomon is represented on the west side of the dome and on the soffit of the west arch, that is, the one supported by the spiral columns [Fig. 7.2].

• e) Two columns in San Carlo a Cave in Lazio, dated 1090 to 1100 by the style of their carvings, with sixteenth-century inscriptions on their plinths saying marmorae columnae and Salomonici templi.

• f) Half-columns from the synagogue at Capharnaum of the third century or the fifth, reconstructed as flanking windows on the side of the building facing Jerusalem [Fig. 7.3].

Examined in detail, however, the picture is less clear. There is no doubt about the intended symbolism of the Raphael cartoon, the Fouquet miniature and the late-fourteenth-century identification of the colonna santa, but Walter Cahn concluded that the colonna is the earliest documentary reference associating spiral columns with the Temple. The sixteenth-century date of the inscriptions on the San Carlo a Cave columns places a question mark over their identification as Solomonic around 1100, if it does not remove them from consideration completely. The half-columns at Capharnaum are a distinct possibility, though it could be argued that they were purely decorative. If a question mark is allowed over the Capharnaum shafts, this leaves Palermo as the only convincing example before the colonna santa. It is possible that the spiral columns which occur frequently in twelfth- and thirteenth-century cloisters in Rome were intended as a reference to the portico of Solomon, but it is also worth noting the complete absence of spiral columns from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Temple discussed in David Ekserdjian’s chapter in this volume.

THIS CHAPTER, devoted to how the motet functions in the thirteenth century, draws its examples largely from a motet family based on the chant fragment portare; this melodic segment appears in the Alleluia: Dulce lignum (M22) for the celebrations of the Cross: its Invention on 3 May and its Exaltation on 14 September. A number of Parisian chant sources, including F-Pn lat. 1112, fol. 169v, shown in Example 6.1, use the word sustinere instead of portare, a fact that is not necessarily significant because the words are employed interchangeability in the Office liturgy for the feasts of the Cross. As indicated below the example, the text and melody also appear in a Marian version, Alleluia: Dulcis virgo, for the Octave of the Assumption, with the word portare. In this contrafactum, the image of the Cross bearing the weight of Christ changes to one of Mary carrying him, presumably both before birth and later as the infant Jesus. Thus, the chant segment possesses both Marian and Christological connotations, an essential fact as we turn to the exegetical function of motets.

As discussed in Catherine A. Bradley's chapter, many of the earliest thirteenth-century Latin motets result from the addition of a syllabic text to the upper voice of discant clausulae of the Magnus liber organi or its supplements. These new Latin texts allude to the plainsong from which the tenor chant melisma is taken or even to other liturgical items for the same feast. These motets thus function as exegetical vehicles in which the hermeneutic modes are applied to the Scriptural passages associated with the feast. Of the four hermeneutic modes – historia, allegoria, tropologia, and anagoge – the tropological figures strongly in the early Latin motet repertory. A new Latin upper-voice text often tropes the tenor chant, giving it a moral interpretation or significance apart from its direct meaning.

IN HIS 1993 BOOK, Discarding Images, Christopher Page offered a sustained critique of studies of intertextuality in the ars antiqua motet. Page argued that modern scholars who undertook nuanced interpretations of the relationships between the different voices of polytextual motets were operating from a personal bias toward bookishness. Reinterpreting oft-cited passages of Johannes de Grocheio's De musica regarding the literate audience of the medieval motet, Page reacted against the scholarly tendency to view this audience as a cultural or intellectual elite who interpreted motets ‘in a fashion that somehow approximates to what a musicologist, armed with dictionaries, concordances, the Glossa ordinaria, and more besides can accomplish’. Scholars such as Sylvia Huot and others viewed the subtle, intertextual meanings that emerged when interpreting the motet voices against one another as evidence of the learnedness of their composers and audiences. Page disagreed, arguing that these intertextual interpretations highlighted fortuitous, rather than intentional, connections, and hypothesizing that the motet composers of the thirteenth century were more interested in using musical structure to highlight the phonic qualities of their texts, such as the rhyme scheme and rhyme sounds. The reaction to Page's critique and his novel theory of motet aesthetics was swift and largely negative. Moreover, in the decades that followed, intertextual analyses of motets, many directly inspired by Huot's work, proliferated, arguably forming the mainstream of current ars antiqua motet scholarship. Although they successfully showcase the interpretive possibilities of the genre, these recent studies have perpetuated other scholarly biases that Page rightly criticized in Discarding Images. Page warned, for example, that intertextual motet interpretations overwhelmingly focused on just one source: the old corpus of Mo. He also noted that intertextual analyses privileged motets that featured contrasting upper voices over the more numerous examples in which the texts of the upper voices were poetically similar in their theme, register, and genre.

Page also argued that the focus on intertextuality had led scholars to all but ignore a substantial portion of the motet repertoire: the two-voice motet. The two-voice motet repertory has arguably received less attention than it deserves, particularly from the hermeneutic perspectives that have animated so much recent research on the genre.

Construction of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century round churches of England coincides largely with the period from the Latin conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 to the city’s brief recapture by the Emperor Frederick II in the 1230s and early 1240s. The first such rotunda was built by the independent Augustinian Order of the Holy Sepulchre on lands in Cambridge, granted sometime between 1114 and 1130 by Reinaldus, abbot of Ramsey, to three men of the confraternity. This church, still dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre, is a classic example of Norman architectural style, with a double-shelled interior supported on eight massive stone columns. The last to be constructed is the church of St John the Baptist in Little Maplestead, near Halstead, in north-central Essex. Its Gothic elements and a change of designation from ecclesia to capella point to a date of construction between 1240 and 1245.

Two-thirds of England’s rotundas from the period can be attributed to the military orders, that is, the Order of the Temple and the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. The Templars, together with the Cistercians, were encouraged to enter the country by King Henry I in, or shortly after, 1128, and the Hospitallers very likely came at the same time. While these orders were together responsible for building many preceptory or commandery churches throughout the land, we know currently of only eight rotundas which can be attributed to them. Of these, six were Templar foundations and two were Hospitaller. The numbers correspond in very general terms to the relative wealth and influence of the two orders, the Templars having a distinct advantage from the start over their sister, Hospitaller, order. This prominence on the part of the Templars developed early, despite the Hospitallers having been granted their foundation charter by Rome five years earlier than the former; that is, in 1113 as opposed to 1118. They were founded to meet the very specific needs of an age which invested heavily in the salvation of the soul through pilgrimage, the most outward expression of which was participation in the crusades, themselves conceived as nothing short of armed pilgrimages.

The twenty-second of September, 2013, was a busy date on the calendar of events to celebrate the centenary of Witold Lutosławski's birth. That evening, Krystian Zimerman played the Piano Concerto in Warsaw with Poland's National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. At the same time, a different tribute to the composer, called Polish Icons 2, was taking place in Kraków: electronic musicians were juxtaposing their re-workings of Muzyka żałobna and Preludes and Fugue with the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra's acoustic renditions of Lutosławski's original pieces.

On the surface, these events may seem to have little in common. Zimerman played in a standard concert hall; the musicians of Polish Icons 2 performed in the former electro-galvanizing plant of ArcelorMittal, Poland's largest steel producer. One concert professed a reverential attitude to the composer's score; the other featured musicians who quite literally took Lutosławski's music apart and used it to create something new.

The festivals at which these performances took place further amplified their differences. Zimerman performed during the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, the oldest institution of its kind in Poland. Launched by the Polish Composers’ Union (Związek Kompozytorów Polskich, ZKP), the Warsaw Autumn has treated audiences since 1956 to an eclectic (yet, stylistically speaking, predominantly modernist) array of art music from all over the world. The festival has played a key role in shaping Polish composers’ careers, Lutosławski's included. Polish Icons 2, by contrast, was part of Sacrum Profanum, an event sponsored by the Kraków Festival Bureau that has occurred annually since 2003. Sacrum Profanum's approach to programming departs from the Warsaw Autumn model. Instead of privileging art music, its professed mission is ‘to blur the boundary between contemporary [classical] music, which is often perceived to be difficult and incomprehensible, and the achievements of the ambitious experimental-pop scene’. According to journalist Jacek Skolimowski, Sacrum Profanum's blend of aesthetic and consumer values ‘has, for the first time in Poland, succeeded in bringing ambitious contemporary music to a broader audience’.

With that assessment, Skolimowski implied that the Sacrum Profanum had managed to achieve something that had eluded the Warsaw Autumn throughout its long history. And he has not been the only one to view the festivals as rivals.

The history of the book and the history of literature are rarely coterminous, and this is especially true for medieval texts. It is unusual, for example, for a holograph copy of a medieval manuscript to survive, or for any copy to be signed or dated, and later copies attest to the transmission of a work rather than to a literary scene at the moment of authorship. The history of the book often sits uncomfortably astride traditional literary periods, as, for example, in the case of Middle English literature, which, from a stylistic perspective, seems to reach its zenith with Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1390s, transitioning only fitfully to early modern with the advent of print in the 1470s (figured as a gain for the early modern) and the dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersion of their books in the 1530s and 1540s (figured as a loss for the medieval).

The little-studied but important figure Richard de Bury (c. 1287–1345) provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between book history and literary history, and the forms with which we write them. Bury's life as a book collector, and his vivid reflections on the value of letters, make him a site at which English book and literary history collide. As we will see, Bury imagines that collision as a violent one, strewn with bodies and books, and, indeed, it is his portrayal of literary history as a history of destruction that maps the history of letters so meaningfully on to the history of material texts. Only one literary work of his survives, the Latin treatise called the Philobiblon (Love of Books, c. 1345); earlier in his career, he compiled a formulary, the Liber epistolaris, containing about 1,500 letters, which survives in just one manuscript copied in Bury's own hand (datable approximately to 1324). And yet, had things turned out differently, traditional English literary history might have begun with Richard de Bury (as he intended), rather than in the next generation, with Geoffrey Chaucer. Had that been the case, the history of material texts and the history of English letters might have shared a common origin and a very different future.

It is, it seems, no longer necessary to justify the place of administrative history in an Eltonian bark. The records of medieval institutions, and the processes they reveal, have become the preoccupation of a ‘new’ administrative history, placing institutions and the ideas running through them in a wider context. Part of this revival has been manifested in the exhaustive researches of those historians interested in military service prosopography – pioneered, of course, by Andrew Ayton. This work has revealed how armies functioned internally and within the wider social networks from which this manpower was drawn.

The transformation to paid service generated a complex sea of relationships between different groups – the retinue captains providing the hubs around which clusters of men of varying continuity formed and reformed within and across the contingents of an army – which Ayton has called the ‘dynamics of recruitment’. In a world of paid service the success of these dynamics depended on the availability of money to stimulate and maintain the recruitment process. After a period of experimentation, from the mid-1340s to the 1370s, these funds came in the form of ‘a balanced scheme…pay, regard and restauro equorum’ (the ‘pay package’). To assist the costs of captains, additional lump sum payments – regard – paid before the commencement of campaign (usually at a quarterly rate of 100 marks per thirty men-at-arms) developed alongside wages, becoming common from the mid-1340s. From this time onwards, the availability of regard and an increase in the size of prests (sums offered in advance of wages before a campaign) meant more cash was theoretically available for captains to use in the recruitment process. However, like the payment of wages after a campaign, the availability of regard and prests was of course determined by the availability of cash. The government departments of the Exchequer and the Wardrobe could issue payments in cash, but in wartime the government's financial obligations almost always outstripped the ready cash available. One consequence of this cash-flow problem was that payments to important, senior noblemen – such as the Black Prince and John of Gaunt – undertaking important military and diplomatic business, often took priority over payments to lesser captains, but sufficient ready cash to pay even these most senior captains was frequently unavailable.

The Durham Liber Vitae is a manuscript listing the names of those admitted to the confraternity of the Cathedral Priory of Durham, and its predecessors at Lindisfarne and Chester le Street. The first entries are from the ninth century, and few date from after 1300. Among those few is a group of eighteen names, in a fourteenth-century hand, headed by that of Sir Henry de Beaumont. Comparison with other evidence suggests the names are those of part of his military retinue, probably dating to 1314; if so, it is likely that the names commemorate a pilgrimage made by Beaumont and some of his retainers to the cathedral, and its relics of St Cuthbert, on their way to serve under arms in Scotland. Any spiritual benison they might have gained from the exercise does not, however, appear to have translated into worldly advantage, for at least four of those named were subsequently captured at the catastrophic English defeat at Bannockburn.

Sir Henry de Beaumont had an eventful and often contentious career. A foreign adventurer, who made good through a career of continuous military service, in the face of repeated political controversy, he provides an interesting case-study for the investigation of military retinues. A great deal of work has been done on the recruitment and composition of such retinues and their stability, or lack thereof (notably, of course, by Andrew Ayton). However, while the dynamics of a military retinue were, at least in part, the dynamics of lordship, it is has rarely been possible to trace the personal relationships which underpin them. In Sir Henry de Beaumont's case, however, we are unusually well informed, because one of his retainers was the Northumbrian Sir Thomas Gray. And Gray's like-named son was the author of a chronicle, the Scalacronica, composed in the late 1350s, which includes some fascinating details of the elder Gray's relationship with Beaumont, presumably derived from Gray's own testimony.

Born circa 1280, Beaumont was a Frenchman, the younger son of Louis de Brienne, Vicomte de Beaumont-au-Maine, and a relative of both Edward I's queen, Eleanor of Castile, and Edward II's queen, Isabella of France. Beaumont's sister, Isabella, married the English baron John de Vescy, one of Edward I's close associates; and Beaumont himself became a knight of Edward's household in 1297.

It seems to me that one of the great ironies of military history – the study of the most terrible of human endeavours – is its capacity to attract peaceloving gentlemen like Andrew Ayton and the late Maurice Keen. Like Maurice, Andrew has been in the vanguard of modern studies, a disciplined and clear-sighted campaigner, mindful of the collective interest and of the contributions of others, including those who went before – ‘companionship- in-arms’ is an appropriate analogy. In his early works Andrew called for the systematic exploitation of the voluminous but ‘unexplored’ records of military service and its prosopographical study. That the situation is now so radically changed is due in large measure to his approach and his endeavour. Like all successful captains he has been able to inspire others to further the enterprise, and to adapt to circumstances by following up on both his own and their subsequent successes.

A further characteristic of his work is that he avoids seeing military service as a discrete area of life but looks rather at the interaction between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ dimensions. As he shows, there is a two-way traffic. On the one hand prevailing norms, in terms of social interaction, belief and behaviour, had profound implications for military recruitment, as he deftly demonstrates. Moreover, since society was not static but evolving, recruitment was, from the outset, dynamic even before the impact of military changes and developments. On the other hand, the high level of military involvement achieved by the English kings in their wars cannot have failed to have equally profound effects upon aristocratic society in general. While he has not dealt with this question systematically, he has thrown out challenges to historians of the gentry along the way. In his essay on the aristocracy at the outset of the Hundred Years’ War, Ayton effectively proffered his glove to those historians of the gentry who place their emphasis upon the role of landowners in county administration: ‘Given the range of military commitments facing the traditional warrior class in England at the start of the Hundred Years’ War, commitments involving the defence of the realm as well as the king's expeditions to France, should we not conclude that war was the prime “public” activity of the gentry at this time?’