The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth by Andrew Taylor is a carefully researched study of one minstrel, one manuscript, and a social world in which they were both living and already taking on an antiqued patina. Richard Sheale was a sixteenth-century minstrel and ballad composer traveling along circuits in northern England who, Taylor argues, also collected ballads for sale to the London broadside market and brought back printed broadsides for sale in his region (xx). Taylor’s approach in this study is both textual and contextual, in that he regularly moves between the figure of a particular minstrel and the mysterious The Stanley Poem, between ballads and a Reformation culture negotiating the role and uses of popular poetry. He identifies the key interest of Sheale in his activities “moving between the booming new economy of southern England and the older feudal allegiances of the north” (80).
In his introduction, “The Minstrel Rides Out,” Taylor argues for Richard Sheale’s significance, not so much as a great poet or evocative ballad singer, but instead as a professional who participated in some parts of the “myth of the wandering minstrel” and also cultivated patronage and business opportunities (11). He suggests that the development of these networks recollects “the old notion of communal creation” but in a way that relates to the creation of meaning and tradition, instead of the words themselves: “the lines created by any given singer are modulated and given meaning by the group” (134). In particular, Taylor notes a song in the Bodleian Library manuscript Ashmole 48 appealing to prominent members of the Stanley family and neighbors for money to help Sheale redeem his debts after he was robbed, connecting Sheale and his song to the manuscript and the community. The first two chapters, “The Minstrel of Tamworth and His Audiences” and “The Stanleys, The Stanley Poem, and the Campaign of 1558,” focus on establishing the biography and socio-economic world of Richard Sheale and of the magnate family with whom Sheale associated himself professionally. Taylor details family and local history, finally arguing for Sheale’s authorship of The Stanley Poem and “Within the North Country,” both dedicated to the histroric exploits of northern lords (70-81).
Taylor’s analysis in Chapter 3, “Ashmole 48 and Its History,” both depends on the chapters preceding it and stands apart, immediately followed by an appendix listing the manuscript contents by first lines and authorial attribution, also indicating the quire layout, manuscript hands, and referencing the numbers assigned by Thomas Wright in his printed edition of 1860. Taylor hypothesizes that the manuscript served Sheale both as a place to compose for performance and to copy northern ballads for sale to the London broadside market (98-107). Taylor is very clear that “The Hunting of the Cheviot” was composed by someone else and then copied by Sheale for performance or sale (102-103). Chapters 4 and 5, “The Hunting of the Cheviot and the Battle of Otterburn” and “‘More than with a Trumpet’: Tudor Responses to the Cheviot Ballads,” turn to the significance of historical ballads for authors in Tudor England, particularly Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, and to one of the most famous border ballads in particular. Taylor describes how Sheale could have worked as a “cultural middleman,” “providing verisimilitudinous detail on the death of the countess of Derby, so that ballad readers and listeners across England could become vicarious participants in her deathbed farewell, and wild Border ballads, so that southern gentlemen could listen to them in taverns” (155).
Taylor concludes with a final engaging sequence running back in time through lamentations over the decline of minstrelsy: from Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel in the nineteenth century to the twelfth-century troubadour Giraut de Borneheil, featuring the trope of loss of excellent minstrels and the ideal supportive court culture for them (158-62). But in Sheale’s own time, this trope was both nurtured and negated by his combination of performance and publication.
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[Review length: 666 words • Review posted on October 8, 2014]