CHARTERHOUSE CHRONICLE

By Mary Remnant
WHETHER OR NOT St James the
Greater is buried at Santiago, his shrine has been a centre of pilgrimage for hundreds of years, and much music is associated with it.
The earliest surviving examples are in the Codex Calixtinus, a 12th-century manuscript of French origin which is kept in Santiago Cathedral. Its oldest piece of music is the anonymous pilgrim song, Dum Paterfamilias, which is written in neumes showing the general direction of the tune but without lines to show the exact pitch. The result is that all modem transcriptions are different and none can definitively be called authentic.
More advanced notation, however, can be found in other works there, such as the hymn Ad honorem Regis summi by Aimery Picaud (d.1141) and the Mass of St James by Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres (d c1028).
Also in the Codex is a pilgrim guide (possibly by Aimery Picaud) which describes four main routes starting from Arles, Le Puy, Vezelay and Tours, all meeing together at Puente la Reina in Navarre and then proceeding, by way of Burgos and Le6n, to Santiago in the north-west corner of Spain.
Apart from the music of the liturgy, the Codex tells us how choirs of pilgrims from different countries kept vigil by the statue of St James throughout the night, lit by hundreds of candles, and how they kept awake by playing harps, psalteries, fiddles, pipes, trumpets or horns and other instruments, while singing in their different tongues.
This was the period when pilgrims saw the building of great Romanesque churches, where the chief instruments of the day were carved on capitals, corbels and doorways.
In the tympanum of the west doorway at the Abbey of Conques, the Last Judgment scene includes a devil holding the instrument of a wicked minstrel who has gone to hell.
The greatest of the doorways is at Santiago itself. The Portico de la Goria, which was completed in 1188, includes not only fiddles and trumpets much more advanced than any in contemporary English art, but also the best example of the organistrum, the earliest type of hurdy-gurdy.
Here, one Elder of the Apocalypse turns a handle which causes a wheel to rub against the three strings, while his companion pulls up stoppers which cause the notes to be sounded by tangents inside. The instrument flourished in the 12th and early 13th centuries and is believed to have played in churches, particularly those which could not afford to have an organ.
The Gothic period showed not only a pronounced change in architecture, but also a greater variety of available instruments. Among the best sources for the 13th century are the scuptures and stained glass windows of Leon Cathedral and the illustrations to the manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. These songs may have been composed by King Alfonso X "the Wise" of Castile, for whom the manuscripts were compiled. Most are about miracles attributed to Our Lady and some relate to the Santiago pilgrimage.
Of particular interest are the many pictures of musicians, whose more interesting instruments include a fivecourse lute, bagpipes with four drones (very unusual for the period), "Christian" and "Moorish" instruments of the guitar family and a Moorish two-headed drum.
From the abbey of Monserrat comes the 14thcentury Libre Vermell, a manuscript containing mainly songs in honour of Our Lady, but also Ad mortem festinamus, knownas "The Dance of Death", which would be particularly appropriate for pilgrims continuing their journey from there to Santiago, in view of some of the treacherous terrain.
Although William Wey (the Fellow of Eton College who went to Santiago in 1456) wrote down a short piece of music sung by small boys to pilgrims in Galicia, there is no known pilgrim song from England itself. We do, however, have that magnificent poem Men may leve all games 1 That sailen to Saint lames (which is published in The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, 1970) and describes the perils of doing the pilgrimage by sea.
Y INVOLVEMENT
with Santiago goes back to 1967, when a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship took me there to see the Cathedral and its many carvings of musicians. Over the subsequent years I formed the desire to work out a lecturerecital about music on the pilgimage.
This finally became possible in 1980 when the Churchill Trust very kindly gave me a second grant to drive to Santiago, preparing the programe for a series of lecture-recitals organised by the Early Music Network.
Before setting off, I joined the Societe des Amis de SaintJacques de Compostelle and later met English pilgrims who had walked or bicycled along the different routes. In 1983, at the request of the General Secretary of the French society, six of us met at my home and founded the Confraternity of St James, little knowing how it would change our lives.
When we had existed for five years we started an appeal to raise money for the restoration of an old pilgrim hostel at Rabanal del Camino in the mountains of Leon, and over £50,000 has made it into one of the best stopping places on the route. One of the events towards the present total was very kindly organised by our own member Gillian Clarke at No 11 Downing Street, a splendid occasion when a new version of the lecture-recital was enhanced, not only by the singing of the Confraternity Choir, but also by the presence of the Spanish Ambassador and his wife, who together played the organistrum to accompany the choir for Dum Patetfamilas at the end.
The Ambassador is always our Honorary President and His Excellency Don Alberto Asa Arias is our third, being a true pilgrim himself, having walked to Santiago with his family several times. I should like to take this opportunity to thank him and his wife wholeheartedly for all that they have done for us and to hope that they will be with us for a long time to come.
• Information about the Confraternity of St James can be obtained from: The Secretary, 1st Floor, Talbot Yard, Borough High Street, London SE! lYP