Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Blaðsíða 76

62
Michael Chesnutt
among other things the ambition to exploit a multiplicity of verse forms,
and what the last-mentioned scholar calls the “Reihung der Gesånge
nach Ziffemfolge der Modi” (see notes to the differentiae of the psalm
tones in the edition).107
There is no reason to doubt that the words and music of this historia
as transmitted in K were the achievement of a Benedictine monk at
Ringsted. English parallels to the music in K as well as textual parallels
in the liturgy of St Alban have already been mentioned (p. 9 above). The
Magnificat antiphon Ave martyr dux Danorum (K § 1:5) may have been
musically inspired by the antiphon Ave protomartyr Anglorum,m while
the Vespers respond Martyr benignissime Kanute (K § 8:3) textually
replicates the respond Martyr benignissime Albane.109 The psalm an-
tiphon Ave martyr gloriose (K § 9:1), of which L provides a contrafa-
ctum (pp. 49-51), is also identical with an antiphon for St Alban.110 The
Danish duke has been clothed in liturgical garments previously belong-
ing to the English martyr. This can scarcely be a coincidence: in Odense
lay the precious relics of St Alban and St Knud the King, and the
monastery at Ringsted was a daughter house of the originally English
Benedictine foundation at Odense. There, if anywhere, we find the tradi-
107 Baumer GB 356-64; Robert Abraham Ottosson (n. 7 above) 48. Note also that number
symbolism is at work in the selection of psalm tones for the minor hours: Tone I for Prime,
Tone III for Terce, and Tone VI for Sext (see notes to K 587, 593, 606). There are, how-
ever, only eight (regular) psalm tones and the system therefore breaks down at None, for
which Tone VIII is made to serve (note to K 618). - External witnesses to the cultivation
of the versified liturgy in the Danish middle ages are a record about Bishop Tyge of Århus
(third quarter of the thirteenth century) qui historiam sancti Clementis dictavit, cujus vitam
Romæ scribi fecit (SRD VII 209-16, no. cc-cci, here 209), and the will of Benechinus
Henrici (cantor at Lund some hundred years later) who owned a librum continentem hy-
storias de corpore Christi et de sancta Anna cum notis (Kr. Erslev [ed.], Testamenter fra
Danmarks Middelalder indtil 1450, Copenhagen 1901, 118-24, no. 53, here 122). Apart
from the two Sts Knud, VSD prints rhymed offices for Sts Tøger, Kjeld, Vilhelm, and An-
ders of Slagelse (? fragmentary).
108 Bergsagel (as n. 19) 15-16, 22 with chant incipit from the related antiphon Ave rex gen-
tis Anglorum for St Edmund of East Anglia.
109 Bergsagel 14; K. D. Hartzell, “A St. Albans Miscellany in New York,” in: Mittel-
lateinisches Jahrbuch 10, 1975, 20-61, here 56 n. 6 (from the early sixteenth-century
printed breviary of St Albans).
110 Bergsagel loc. cit.; Hartzell (as previous note) 55 n. 41, 59 (from the St Albans printed
breviary and O respectively). Another variant not noticed in the previous literature, name-
ly Ave pater gloriose, is among the Magnificat antiphons given in the Hyde breviary for
the Common of Confessors who were also bishops; this provides a natural explanation of
why the antiphon has also been addressed there to St Thomas Becket (MBHA I fo. 27v,
29r, V fo. 425r).