(b Hanapol [?Walpole], Norfolk, c1069; d Finchale, nr Durham, 21 May 1170). English saint and hermit. He reputedly composed some of the earliest metrical rhymed English songs to have survived with their music. A full account of his life is given by Archer. As a young man he travelled widely. About 1115 he moved to a solitary hermitage at Finchale on the Wear, near Durham, and for some 60 years lived a life of incredible asceticism, during which time he was favoured with a number of visions. In these he heard the Virgin Mary, St Mary Magdalen, St Peter, St Nicholas of Bari and his own deceased sister Burchwine singing various songs that they taught him, and which he sang to his future biographers. In two early manuscripts of the Libellus of Reginald of Durham and a digest of it – though not in the earliest – three of the songs appear with musical notation (there are many other copies, including translations into Latin, without music). The melodies are written as monophonies in square and rhomboid notes: Sainte Marie virgine moder alone (without its second verse) appears in the 12th-century GB-Lbl Harl.322; it is copied complete, with the other two surviving songs, in an early 13th-century hand in GB-Lbl Roy.5.F.VII. Since Godric was ‘omnino ignarus musicae’ (‘entirely ignorant of music’), these copies must represent a more learned musician's interpretation of what he sang, possibly at several removes from and some time later than his original performances. The music for Kyrieleyson: Crist and Sainte Marie does not quite correspond with the literary accounts of the vision, where the verse precedes the Kyrie; Sainte Marie, as noted, seems to have gained a second stanza over the years. Welcume Symond (described in Stevenson, 306) is lost and was never copied out in full. Sainte Nicholaes, Godes drudh was presumably sung during the vision of St Nicholas described by Reginald of Durham (see Stevenson, 202; the melody resembles that of Sainte Marie). In melody and metre the songs appear to imitate the style of certain Latin hymns, such as those of St Anselm (d 1109). The litany-like invocations of the Angels in Crist and Sainte Marie resemble parts of the Sarum Kyrie ‘Deus sempiterne’, though it is hard to agree with Reese that the melody of the verse is an elaboration of the plainsong phrases that frame it. (All three songs with music are ed. in Trend and in Dobson and Harrison.)
DNB (T.A. Archer)
ReeseMMA
J. Stevenson, ed.: Reginald of Durham: Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, Surtees Society, xx (Durham, 1847)
S. Baring-Gould: The Lives of the Saints (London, 1872–89, rev. 2/1897–8), 322ff
J. Zupitza: ‘Cantus Beati Godrici’, Englische Studien, xi (1888), 401–32 [standard critical edn]
G.E.B. Saintsbury: History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, i (London, 1906, 2/1923/R) [incl. facs. of Crist and Sainte Marie]
J.W. Rankin: ‘The Hymns of St Godric’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxviii (1923), 699–711
J.B. Trend: ‘The First English Songs’, ML, ix (1928), 111–28 [free-rhythm transcr. with glossary]
E.J. Dobson and F.Ll. Harrison, eds.: Medieval English Songs (London, 1979)
BRIAN TROWELL