Merbecke, John

first edition, 4to (c.18.3 x 14cm),  68 leaves, (A², B-R⁴, S²),  type-set music throughout, printed in black on red stave-blocks by double impression, up to six staves per page, mensural notation with Merbecke's explanatory preface, title printed in red and black within and elaborate woodcut border, 3 large historiated initials (up to 52mm high) for 'Mattins', 'Evensong' and 'At the buriall',  Merbecke is named at the end of the music, printer's device at end (McKerrow & Ferguson 122),  a few contemporary annotations, nineteenth-century calf,  the flyleaves comprise 4 leaves of contemporary printer's waste: "Letany and suffrages" [extracted from a longer work]. London: Richard Grafton, 10 October 1549 (unrecorded in STC), the first 2 leaves of the Merbecke carefully repaired on verso, the beginning and end of the volume recornered, S1 cropped affecting running heads and flyleaves, otherwise with good margins clear of side-notes, some staining, front cover detaching

RISM M 2281; ESTC S109681; STC 16441; Steele, The Earliest English Music Printing, no.17 (fig.12); J. Milsom, 'Music', in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, III (1999), 549 (& 597-600)

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Rare: we have seen no copy of Merbecke at auction for twenty-five years. There is no copy recorded in any institution outside Britain, Ireland and the United States.  It is one of the earliest substantial examples of English music printing, apart from plain-chant in missals.

John Merbecke (c.1505-c.1585), or "Marbeck", composed these metrically precise melodies for the new English text of Cranmer's "Book of Common Prayer" (1549).  He was also the composer of several sacred works, of which only a Latin mass and two motets and an English anthem survive.  Since Merbecke was the leading musician at Windsor, it seems likely (though unproven) that Cranmer or his committee asked him to write these clear syllabic settings, in order to replace the plainchant found in the old Sarum service books.

The metrical rhythms in The Booke of Common Praier noted are precisely defined (unlike plainchant) and are explained by Merbecke in his preface.  He shows four note-values: a "strene" (or breve), a "semy breve", a "pycke" (or minim) and a "close" (an extended breve at the end of a verse), and explains the "prycke" (or dot) which, as in modern notation, lengthens the preceding note by half.  Merbecke's was the first published musical setting of the new English services, but it soon became redundant when music was largely excluded from the revised "Book of Common Prayer" in 1552, and when English services were abolished altogether on Mary I's accession in 1553.  

The flyleaves comprise fragments of an apparently unrecorded primer (cf STC 16043.5, by Grafton in 1546), possibly published in an edition of the Psalms in English (cf. STC 2374-2377).  We only have quires O and P (with the colophon on P6), amounting to 32 pages 16mo in all, but uncut, unfolded and apparently unused.  Grafton and Whitchurche (printers of the first Books of Common Prayer) were granted a seven-year privilege in 1543 by Henry VIII for the printing of missals, primers and other liturgical texts.