THE MANUSCRIPTS OF TALLIS'S FORTY-PART MOTET

Abstract

rediscovery of long-lost treasures. In an earlier issue' it was my fortune to describe a recently found valuable manuscript of 15thcentury music acquired by the British Museum, about whose existence and history no mention in print is known from the time it was written down to the present day. More recently an equally fortunate chance has brought to light the so-called manuscript of Tallis's famous forty-part motet Spem in alium, which, although well known to 18th-century historians of music, had disappeared from sight for almost two hundred years. About it the most recent editors of the work wrote, It is now impossible to recover the original which belonged to James Hawkins of Ely,2 but, far from that being so, it has now found its way to the British Museum, where it will henceforth bear the number Egerton MS 3512. Our earliest knowledge of the manuscript comes from a series of letters from Dr. Thomas Tudway, Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge, to Humfrey Wanley, the indefatigable and industrious librarian to the first and second Earls of Oxford. Tudway was an early example of the ardent musical researcher who sought out eagerly the relics of the English heritage in Cathedral libraries. At the desire of Edward, Lord Harley, who succeeded his father as second Earl of Oxford in 1724, he made copies of many services and anthems of Tudor composers and their successors from manuscripts in those repositories. The six thick quarto volumes, now numbered Harley MSS 7337-7342 in the British Museum, remain a permanent record of his labors, and are a further reminder that, as Professor J. A. Westrup has pointed out,3 the accusation of total neglect of the