Canterbury Cathedral (1541)

Abstract The fourth document of Tallis’s career is a list of musicians made around 1541 at Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral had long been a center of music, art, and pilgrimage, immortalized by Chaucer among many others. It had been run by monks through the 1530s, so it needed radical reorganization and a new lay staff after Henry VIII dissolved all the monastic communities in England. This new staff included twelve professional singers. Tallis was first on the list of singers. Other documents from the 1540s show the richness of the musical culture at Canterbury in Tallis’s day. The Peterhouse partbooks, which are revisited in more detail in Chapter 10, may have been a collection of music assembled for Tallis and his eleven colleagues at the new foundation of Canterbury in 1541.