(1) A refrain. This is the standard modern English word for any repeated sections in hymns and songs of the 15th and 16th centuries. In particular, the presence of a burden structurally independent of the verse is the prime distinguishing characteristic of the Carol (see Bukofzer, 153ff). The medieval term, according to Richard Hill’s Commonplace-book (Balliol College, Oxford, MS 354), seems to have been ‘fote’ (foot).
(2) A drone or pedal note, particularly on a bagpipe. This usage is found in both English and French music from the 13th century onwards.
(3) A shawm. Presumably this meaning is related to the preceding one: the 15th-century chronicle of St Albans describes the reception of a new abbot to the Te Deum with bells and ‘shawms which we call burdones’ (sonantis chalamis quos burdones appellamus; see HarrisonMMB, 206).
(4) In 1338 Robert Manning of Brunne used the word to describe the bottom line of a three-voice texture in his Rimed Story of England: ‘Of tho clerkes that best couthe synge, Wyth treble, mene, & burdoun’. Many later English references define burden as a deep bass.
(5) A special type of burden may have been called Faburden, as suggested by Besseler.
HarrisonMMB
H. Besseler: Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (Leipzig, 1950, rev., enlarged 2/1974 by P. Gülke)
M.F. Bukofzer: Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New York, 1950)
B. Trowell: ‘Faburden and Fauxbourdon’, MD, xiii (1959), 43–78
H.H. Carter: A Dictionary of Middle English Musical Terms (Bloomington, IN, 1961/R)
G. Strahle: An Early Music Dictionary: Musical Terms from British Sources, 1500–1740 (Cambridge, 1995)
DAVID FALLOWS