Alan McFarlane remarked that ‘any particular community in England in the past was probably no more isolated than a Chicago suburb or twentieth century Banbury’ and it is the intention of this chapter to demonstrate that far from being insular in a pejorative sense, the Isle of Thanet was a dynamic community with connections involving the county, the country and also overseas. First, by examining how the secular and religious administration of the area and its principal occupations of agriculture and fishing located the island within a wider context, and then by investigating three ways in which individuals influenced the shape of the community: landholding and kinship links, marriage horizons, and movement into and throughout Thanet. There is also some evidence that this early modern community was not culturally isolated. It will be seen that at a time when roads were often tracks, its long coastline and river traffic to London meant Thanet engaged fully in national life; and had international connections.

Thanet in Its Geographical and Administrative Context

Thanet is situated at the eastern end of the belt of chalk that runs through the county of Kent as the North Downs, forming cliffs along the North Sea and Thames coasts. The harbours of Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Margate and Birchington are situated in this part of the island; the gradual silting up of the Wantsum formed alluvial marshes along the west and southern parts of the island which provided grazing marshes. Until the twentieth century there was no direct road access to Thanet and travellers had to come via Canterbury; up to the late fifteenth century when the Wantsum Channel was bridged, they would have had to take a ferry at Sarre.

It is not easy to quantify the island’s population in the sixteenth century as there appear to be no surviving lists of names or households and, given the habit of using the same names in each generation and for cousins and siblings, it is not always a simple matter to differentiate individuals. Chalklin reckoned Thanet, at an area of forty-one square miles with thirty-five to forty people per square mile, would, following Hasted, have had a population between 1,435 and 1,640, a figure similar to the coastal survey of 1569.

European musical explorers had China in their sights three centuries before the era of recording; prominent among them were Jesuit priests. And the influence of their discoveries could be far-reaching: by introducing the sheng mouth organ to Europe in 1777, Father Joseph Amiot paved the way for the invention of the harmonica and the accordion. Chinese musicologists, who beat their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament, were in many ways ahead.

The Jesuit project was to win souls for Christ, but in China they realised they would only achieve that by going native. One of the first of these explorer-missionaries was an Italian named Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who wore the traditional silk robes of the Confucian literati and was one of the first Western scholars to speak and write Mandarin; his intellectual feats included translating Euclid into Chinese, and mapping the world in Chinese characters. It was this cultural immersion that earned him the honour of being, in 1601, the first European allowed to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing. The clavichord with which he charmed the reclusive emperor Wan Li was his hook to engage the monarch’s interest in both Western music and the religion of which that music was the expression.

Ricci was an omnivorous diarist, and although he didn’t make a formal study of Chinese music he did observe it, even if his reaction was lordly disdain. While living in Nanjing he witnessed a rehearsal for a Confucian ceremony in which priests played ‘elegant’ music, as opposed to its raucous ‘banquet’ counterpart. ‘The priests who composed the orchestra were vested in sumptuous garments,’ he noted,

It’s no surprise that le kampong javanais – the Javanese village – should have been the most popular colonial attraction at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. People were charmed by the grace of the dance and the magic of the music, which might have been designed to represent Caliban’s sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The resident dancers at the Exposition became tabloid celebrities; Saint-Saëns declared that gamelan ‘dream music’ had hypnotic powers. Debussy, having attended performances at the kampong, would later extol the music as being ‘as natural as breathing: their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves, and the thousand sounds of nature.’

Yet the English were the first Europeans to appreciate it. One of Sir Francis Drake’s entries in the logbook of the Golden Hind in 1580 describes a musical exchange on the south coast of Java between the local ruler and his English visitors. First Drake gave a performance with his musicians in honour of Raia Donan, king of Java, then he listened to the king’s ‘country-musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull’. European interest was rekindled in the nineteenth century with the collecting expeditions of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and others, but the melodic and harmonic nature of gamelan only came properly into focus when the English physiologist Alexander Ellis subjected Javanese music to tonal analysis in his pioneering study of ‘the scales of various nations’.

Colonial links forged in the seventeenth century ensured that Dutch and Javanese scholars should lead the musicological enquiry. In 1857, students of the Royal Academy of Delft became the first Europeans to give a gamelan performance; the author of the programme note expressed an awareness of its microtonal modes, but gave a patronising explanation for them. Quarter tones, he wrote, were due to ‘a deficiency of the instruments’ because the Javanese had ‘no knowledge of the mechanics necessary to make them all the same … The variety of sounds and the simplicity of style cause all pieces to sound almost alike.’ But Dutch scholarship was soon on the trail in a properly

We know that in the Middle Ages minstrels frequently declaimed poetic compositions accompanied by some string instrument. These sonic events were inevitably ephemeral and left no trace whatsoever, other than the impression they made on their earwitnesses, whose audial and memorial abilities were likely more developed than those of present-day audiences. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the poet mentions how he attended such a social occasion and heard the romance being recited, exactly as he promises to reproduce it from memory:

This reference is not enough to substantiate a claim that the Middle English verse romances were intended for oral delivery before a listening audience. The presence of other textual and linguistic clues, however, has led scholars to believe that the metrical romances were indeed expected to be transmitted aurally. I do not propose to search Gawain for signs of oral-memorial transmission. I approach this poem from a literary and sensory perspective with the intention of recovering the soundscape envisioned by the Gawain-poet. I will focus on aspects of the romance’s sonic representation to show the affective and cultural qualities the Gawain-poet attached to the sense of hearing, thus increasing our understanding and appreciation of the poet’s achievement.

John Burrow’s influential monograph on Gawain opens with the sentence: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem for the ear rather than the eye.’ Indeed, the Gawain-poet not only described narrative events for us to visualize them, but also registered their sonic imprint, as we shall see, endowing the story with heightened realism. The poet appears to have placed the faculty of hearing high in the hierarchy of the senses. The idea that Gawain will be killed is conveyed through the metaphor of loss of hearing: ‘Þe dunte þat schulde hym [i.e., Gawain] deue’ (1286). Deafness is comparable to death, suggesting that in the poet’s imagination hearing was an intrinsic and essential part of being alive. It could also be a source of pleasure, which the poet invites auditors of his poem to enjoy: ‘Thenne watz hit lef vpon list to lyþen þe houndez’ (1719).

Other Significant UMCA Missionaries

In East Africa in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, missionaries demanded a range of skilled and unskilled workers, including builders, cooks, waterfetchers, porters and servants, in order to establish an ideal setting for their core aims: the conversion of souls and eventual establishment of an African ministry. As a result, Christian missionaries, who often arrived in Africa ahead of European colonisation, were some of the first Europeans to try and control African workers. The scarcely studied work of building churches, cleaning dishes and cooking meals is the basis of this labour history of Christian mission. By following the livelihood struggles of the African workers at the mission, many of whom had recently emerged from a background of slavery, this study explores the ways Africans made a living within the mission, as well as how they drew upon and adapted knowledge and networks from the mission to make a living elsewhere.

This study shows how joining the mission community meant gaining a patron, which could be a valuable asset for socially marginal people, such as slaves or former slaves. However, being in the mission community could feel oppressive, and did not necessarily secure an improved social or economic position. In fact, some found themselves re-marginalised as social hierarchies in the mission were challenging to negotiate. Moreover, becoming a mission employee, particularly a teacher, could mean a reduction in options as missionaries monopolised the recruitment of this occupation, especially in Tanganyika and Zanzibar, where government schools were rare until the 1930s. Missionaries offered very little in material terms and so the question is how African Christians and ex-slaves chose to negotiate their position, rather than if the mission was capable of transforming their wealth and status. Ultimately, it was up to the African convert or ex-slave to attempt to do this within the bounds of their available choices. In some cases, with the pursuit of status and that of wages at odds, conversion and the adoption of a missioncentred career was a high-risk life strategy.

The book investigates the variety of labour arrangements in the Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Tanzania and Zanzibar and reveals the interwoven strategies of missionary and African workers.

As Daniel Defoe made his way through Kent in the 1720s he commented on the contrast between inland Kent around Maidstone, what he referred to as ‘This neighbourhood of persons of figure and quality … full of gentry, of mirth and of good company’, and the altogether less elevated inhabitants of the coastal communities, in his opinion ‘embarrassed with business and inhabited chiefly by men of business, such as shipbuilders, fishermen, seafaring-men and husband-men, or such as depend on them and very few families of note’. Although this comment, dismissive of the trading, farming and seafaring activities that occupied and sustained the inhabitants of the maritime communities, speaks volumes about Defoe’s social attitudes, it does also suggest that the towns and villages on the Kent coast had a distinct identity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What is intrinsic to Defoe’s definition of those who lived on the coast is that they were all to a greater or lesser extent reliant on their maritime location for their continuing prosperity. The sea provided the raw materials for the fishing trade and it made the transport of fish and farmed produce to the markets of London a realistic prospect. Trade with and the passage of people to and from Europe was also an important element of life in these maritime communities. The north Kent coast was also strategically important, encouraging the growth of shipbuilding in the Medway towns, Deptford and Woolwich. This industry, established in the reign of Henry VIII, saw rapid change and growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The distinct identity of Kent’s maritime communities is also related to the physical environment in which people lived. The parishes on the banks of the Thames and the north Kent coast shared a common environment. The land on which they sat was, at the extremes, marshland bounded by the northern foothills of the chalk downs that run across the county from west to east establishing a clear physical boundary between the north and south of the county. Each of these geological features offered different opportunities. The coastline gave access to the sea for fishing and trade, particularly trade with London.

In 1856 Dante Gabriel Rossetti told William Morris that Malory’s Morte Darthur was one of the two greatest books ever written, the other being the Bible. Although today readers of Malory might question Rossetti’s judgement, his choice of Le Morte Darthur may not be surprising given the great reverence for and influence of Malory’s work in the nineteenth century. More surprising might be Rossetti’s choosing the Bible as the second book. The website of the Freedom from Religion Foundation presents a write-up on Rossetti that includes a quotation in which his brother referred to him as one who ‘professed no religious faith and practised no regular religious observances’. His father, a political refugee from Italy granted asylum in England, was a Roman Catholic who opposed both the papacy and attending Mass. His mother, an Anglican, had her children baptized into the Church of England. His two sisters were devout, with the poet Christina writing a number of Christian poems, including one that would be set to music as the familiar Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. Dante Gabriel, however, at the age of fourteen followed in his father’s footsteps and stopped attending church. Although he came to question formal religion, earlier in life he would have both read and heard read the King James, or Authorized, version of the Bible, which by the nineteenth century was regarded by many as not only a sacred text but also, perhaps primarily, a great literary one and, Gordon Campbell writes, ‘a high water mark of the English language’.

This essay will discuss affinities between Morte Darthur’s narrative style and that of the King James Version (henceforward KJV). Since Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites disliked realistic art and narrative, the similar archaic style of these two books could account for Rossetti’s associating them. The KJV, known to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestants throughout the English-speaking world, would have prepared them for Morte Darthur, for they would have found in Malory’s book a type of narrative style with which they were familiar. Roman Catholic readers of the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible would, to some extent, have observed these similarities, but certain historical circumstances meant that nineteenth-century Roman Catholics would have been less likely than Protestants to read the Bible.

In 1911 a group of folklorists set out from St Petersburg to comb the Russian shtetls for Jewish songs and chants. Inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and led by the playwright Shloyme Ansky – author of The Dybbuk – they wanted to record this oral tradition before it evaporated for good. The resulting collection of cylinders was so impressive that the incoming Bolsheviks decreed the work should continue, and they put their own man in charge. Moisei Beregovsky was a loyal Stalinist but an excellent folklorist, and until his deportation to Siberia in 1949 he recorded and meticulously transcribed several thousand more songs and texts. When he was released in 1955 the cylinders had disappeared, and it was generally assumed that his unique archive had been destroyed.

Forty-four years later Israel Adler, professor of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced a discovery. The director of the National Library in Kiev had come to see him about photocopying manuscripts. ‘And seeing our cylinder collection, he mentioned that he too had some cylinders, which the American Library of Congress had looked at without much interest. Could this be the Beregovsky collection? I jumped on the first available plane to Kiev, and discovered that it was.’

Even leaving aside the awkward matter of past pogroms, the course of the ensuing affair was bumpy, with Kiev raising endless obstacles to the digitisation of the recordings Jerusalem wanted. While Adler’s aim was to make the archive available to scholars all over the world, Kiev’s aim was to make a profit. But as a Berlin-born Ost-Jude, Adler took this sort of thing for granted. ‘Whenever things seem discouraging, I listen again to these marvellous recordings,’ he told me. ‘Then I am re-inspired.’ To illustrate the point, he played some examples: a Bartókian country song with driving rhythms; a dance sounding as if it was straight out of Fiddler on the Roof; and an austerely beautiful liturgical chant. When the latter was broadcast on Haifa Radio, Adler said, a middle-aged Israeli rang in to say that he recognised the voice of the cantor: his own grandfather.