(fl 1351–92). English friar. He was from the Custody of Bristol and was the author-compiler of the Quatuor principalia musice (GB-Ob Digby 90; CoussemakerS, iv, 200–98, shortened version iii, 334–64) and the scribe, maker and owner of the earliest extant copy of this work, completed at Oxford on 4 August 1351 and donated by John to the Oxford Franciscans in 1388 with the assent of Thomas de Kingsbury, the 26th provincial minister of the Franciscan order in England. Another book of which John was the author-compiler, scribe, maker and owner, the astronomical treatise De situ universorum (GB-Mch 6681), was completed in 1392; several passages in this work indicate that he had been at the Oxford Franciscan convent on 5 April 1353. A different John of Tewkesbury, a sophist and fellow at Merton College, Oxford, in 1304, was credited by the antiquary John Bale with several non-musical works and mentioned by Holinshed among the illustrious men who flourished in the years of Edward III.
The Quatuor principalia includes lengthy quotations from Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Guido d'Arezzo, Magister Lambertus and Franco of Cologne. In addition, the treatise expounds the principles of the Ars Nova, mentions two of Philippe de Vitry's motets (Cum statua/Hugo/Magister invidie and Vos qui admiramini/Gratissima/Gaude gloriosa), and includes the only known reference in an English source to the anonymous mid-14th-century motet Tant a souttille pointure/Bien pert qu'en moy n'a d'art point/Cuius pulcritudinem sol et luna mirantur preserved in the manuscripts I-IV, F-CH 564 and AS.
J. Bale: Scriptorium illustrium Maioris Brytanniae catalogus (Basle, 1559/R), 435
R. Holinshed: Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577/R), ii, 710
N.R. Ker: Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford, 1969–92), iii, 338–9
P.M. Lefferts, ed. and trans.: Robertus de Handlo: Regule, and Johannes Hanboys: Summa (Lincoln, NE, 1991), 3, 33–8, 51–3, 63, 67–8, 72–3
F.Ll. Harrison: ‘Plainsong into Polyphony: Repertories and Structures circa 1270–circa 1420’, Music in the Medieval English Liturgy. Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society Centennial Essays, ed. S. Rankin and D. Hiley (Oxford, 1993), 303–53
LUMINITA F. ALUAS