Composer of the Week – William Byrd

Introduction
The Vicar of Blackmore and Stondon Massey, Revd. Sam Brazier-Gibbs, received an unexpected call from BBC Network Radio in early May. The producer of ‘Composer of the Week’ would like to visit Stondon Massey with its presenter, Donald Macleod, and wondered whether there was any local person who they could interview about Byrd’s life in the village. I was nominated since I was researching the composer for a talk locally, and so it was that on 7 June the recording took place ‘on location’. This is the transcript of the segments of the programme in which I participated.
A Man of Many Parts
Recorded on 7 June 2023 at Stondon Massey Church. First broadcast, BBC Radio 3, Monday 3 July 2023
Donald Macleod (DM): Hello and welcome to a week celebrating the 400th anniversary of the death of the English composer William Byrd. Here on ‘Composer of the Week’ I am going to be marking the occasion by exploring his life, his character and of course lots of his music across the next few days. We will be seeing how music brought him within the orbit of royalty, politicians, and other great composers I will be talking to the Byrd expert Kerry McCarthy, and I will also be exploring some of the places Byrd knew very well.
DM: This year we are seeing William Byrd celebrated not just on Radio 3 but all over the country and I am sure around the world. It is four hundred years since his death. I have brought you to the village of Stondon Massey not far from Brentwood, and this Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul dates from the 12th century. The Church has a pretty little tower. It begins as a square white painted square section of weatherboarding which accommodates the bells and then moves through a series of angular shifts until it becomes an octagonal spire of wooden shingles. The Church interior is very plain and simple with whitewashed walls. Well last time we were making a big Byrd anniversary back in 1923 they put up this very elegant monument on the wall under the heading of ‘Father of Musick’. The tablet reads ‘To the glory of God and memory of William Byrd lived at Stondon Place in this parish for the last 30 years of his life. He died 4th July 1623 aged 80. This tablet was erected in 1923 in celebration of the tercentenary of his death’. Well, that is why I am starting here this week in the Essex village where Byrd lived and worked for a significant part of his life. Before he came here, he dazzled congregations at Lincoln cathedral and in performances with the Royal Chapel. But we will also discover this week that Byrd was something of an outsider. It is telling that he chose this relatively isolated rural place thirty miles from the court of its concerns to spend his later decades. Let us establish right at the outset that Byrd was not a regular attender at the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. His relationship with this church was never an easy one. We know that in 1612 he was asked to contribute to the upkeep of the bells. He flatly refused and will find out later that he had good reason.
DM: I am sitting here inside the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Stondon Massey in Essex a building Byrd knew well but his very literal cost did not often frequent. It is a great pleasure to meet here local historian Andrew Smith who is wearing a very smart William Byrd tie: I rather covet that I have to say. We are sharing this space with a very active insect of some kind. Andrew, 400 years ago as church attenders here we might have been met by the churchwarden of this parish a man called Denis Lolly and probably in Byrd’s case not met very cordially.
Andrew Smith (AS): No, that is true. He was a tenant of Stondon Place where William Byrd actually lived so as the churchwarden, and he would have noticed that William Byrd did not leave his home to come to the church here at Stondon Massey. At that time there was a requirement that church attendance be compulsory. It was an obligation of the clergy at the time to list and name those residents of the parish that were not attending Church. William Byrd was a recusant Catholic, someone who refused to attend the worship of the Church of England and could face very heavy fines for non-attendance; and there is a little quote here by the Revd. Reeve who 100 years ago was the Rector of Stondon Massey. He writes in his book ‘by direction of the Canons of 1603-04 the parson and churchwardens were to present to the Bishop Ordinary every year the names of any who should be found to be favourers of any usurped or foreign power or defenders of popish and erroneous doctrine. The Byrd family of course were regular reporting for papistical leanings’.
DM: It does seem kind of brazen of Byrd who is living next door to the churchwarden to think well to hell with you I'm just not going to church because inevitably, and especially because they are in this antagonistic relationship where Byrd is actually trying to have the man evicted, it seems extraordinary obtuse of him not to think that he's going to get into trouble.
AS: And yet he avoided trouble because he kept company with some of the most influential people in England but equally some of the most wanted people in England such as the Jesuit priests.
DM: Well, we will be taking about the plight of Catholics at this time like Byrd later in the week but these regular reports from the churchwardens have left an interesting legacy for historians they give us a clear picture of the size and make up of Byrd’s quite extensive household here in Stondon Massey. So, we have William and his wife Julian, their eldest son Christopher gradually took over the running of the farm. The house came with two hundred acres of land with a plentiful supply of timber. Byrd’s daughters Elizabeth, Rachel and Mary all married local lads. Their husbands were all yeomen and shepherds rather than gentlemen. Despite his quarrelsome relationship with his neighbours and his conspicuous recusancy we get a picture of Byrd not perhaps so much an isolated figure as fully embedded in the local society.
Stondon Massey; Byrd and the Shelley Family
Recorded on 7 June 2023 at Stondon Massey Church. First broadcast, BBC Radio 3, Friday 7 July 2023
Donald Macleod (DM): I began the week in the village of Stondon Massey and I am back here again. William Byrd lived in this hamlet in Essex from around 1594 until his death just short of 30 years later. By the time he made that very carefully considered move to this rural retreat Byrd had pretty much retired from his official duties connected with Queen Elizabeth's Chapel Royal. But that did not mean that he'd withdrawn from an active musical life. Around me visible from the churchyard there isn't really very much I think that Byrd would recognise. There are rolling fields, but I imagine they are very much larger than they would have been in Tudor times and farming activities going on around us. We've been dodging a man with a chainsaw all afternoon. I'm sure that 400 years on there are houses here that Londoners have bought themselves as country retreats within a convenient distance of the capital but far enough away from all the tensions, rivalries, political dramas and in Byrd’s time religious furore of his then public life as a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. But as we're going to discover Byrd was never one to shy away from conflict. Even here, he created it wherever he went. Stondon rather than a haven of peace and rural tranquilly was to prove a place of energy and activity much of it fractious and abrasive.
DM: I am talking here to local history expert Andrew Smith. Andrew, the Tudor house where William Byrd lived in the village of Stondon no longer stands. It is difficult coming through the village today to get any sense of what Byrd might have seen as he walked along the same road. The church is oddly separate from the village.
Andrew Smith (AS): Yes, it is probably getting on for one and half miles from the centre of the population of Stondon Massey around what is a green and a pub these days. Byrd’s home at Stondon Place was about half a mile from here and has been rebuilt actually twice since Byrd lived in that particular house. The Times has an advert, from 1972, that says that ‘Stondon Place at Stondon Massey is a house with an unusual background. Apparently there had been a house on the site since the sixteenth century and one of the earlier properties was occupied by William Byrd the composer’.
DM: It’s great that the Estate Agent thought of putting William Byrd in as a selling point for that. So why did Byrd come to live in Stondon Massey in the first place? He is really benefiting from another man's misfortune.
AS: Yes, William Shelley is a gentleman from Sussex, and he was detained in the Tower of London for his involvement in the Throckmorton Plot in the 1580s. Now we know that William Shelley had, shall we say, previous recusancy – he was confined as a close prisoner in the Fleet because of his intransigence to the religion - and his wife Jane Shelley complained that during her husband's long imprisonment much of the property had been distrained and she petitioned for return of her share. You move forward then to William Byrd coming to Stondon Massey in, shall I say, semi-retirement in 1594 and we find him occupying one of the homes that Shelley inherits from his grandmother in the 1520s. Now he has been confiscated of all his property and it is the Crown who grants a short lease to William Byrd and his family at Stondon Place.
DM: When you say the Crown, we are talking here about Queen Elizabeth I.
AS: Yes, Queen Elizabeth I.
DM: So, the tables are kind of turned because when he came here first of all he tried to get the churchwarden Lolly evicted from Stondon Place and now Shelley's wife starts that doing that the same to him.
AS: Much the same. Jane Shelley claimed that the property was in her ownership. William Shelley actually dies in 1597 but there continues at a long running dispute over the ownership of Stondon Place, and Reverend Reeve who was the Rector of Stondon Massey a 100 years ago and very keen local historian quotes this: ‘Both Mrs Shelley and Byrd were evidently born litigants and never so happy as when they were giving work to the judge and counsel. Suits of Shelley v. Byrd being varied by countersuits of Byrd v. Shelley. She encloses eight grievances against her tenant: the said William Byrd did vile and bitter words and when told he had no right to the property Byrd replied that if he could not hold it by right, he would hold in my might’. And the legal wrangling continued for over a decade.
DM: Essentially even when the court finds against Mrs Shelley and allows Byrd to go on living there the thing just rumbles on disputatiously forever so there are disputes over Byrd’s right to cut the wood on the estate and at one point, he's taken to court for blocking the road to nearby Kelvedon Hatch.
AS: Yes, that is correct.

Stondon Massey; Byrd’s Will and Burial
Recorded on 7 June 2023 at Stondon Massey Church. First broadcast, BBC Radio 3, Friday 7 July 2023
Donald Macleod (DM): Well now I am back where I began this week in the Church of Saint Peter and Paul in the Essex village of Stondon Massey with the local historian Andrew Smith. This Church was somewhere we know Byrd generally tried to avoid. As a Catholic he was frequently fined for not attending services. But here in the vestry on the wall is a fascinating document connected with Byrd. It is a facsimile of a sheet of parchment covered in very elegant positively calligraphic handwriting, stems of a Ds all sloping backwards and the text is in English. Andrew what are we looking at?
Andrew Smith (AS): This is a photograph copy William Byrd’s will signed in November 1622. He says that he was in his 80th year. Recent evidence suggests that he was older than eighty which suggests to me that that this Last Will and Testament had been, shall we say, hanging around for a while before being signed. The Will refers to his wish to be buried in the churchyard at Stondon Massey: ‘my body to be honestly buried in that parish near unto to the place where my wife liest buried’. Julian Byrd was buried around 1608 after 40 years of marriage to William Byrd.
DM: Do you think Byrd got his way in the end, that he got his wish to be buried here?
AS: I would like to think he did. Unfortunately, the burial registers prior to 1708 don't exist at Stondon Massey so we do not know with any certainty that he's buried here. However, historians such as John Harley say there are no records to say that his was refused burial here, so I'd like to think on the balance of probability he is buried here.
DM: He said, and you quoted his words from the Will, that he wanted to be honestly buried by which we presume he meant according to Catholic rite. Do you think that this is likely?
AS: I think was possible. He may have had a quiet funeral maybe in the evening or night within the churchyard, but he probably was not allowed an Anglican rite of burial.
DM: Andrew Smith. Thank you so much for being my guide this week.
DM: Well, I have come out of the church into the churchyard. Byrd died at Stondon Massey on 4th July 1623 at the exceptional age for the time of eighty-three. Among the gravestones here around me I cannot see any bearing Byrd’s name, so we have no way of knowing that the wish of his to be buried here stated in his will was actually honoured. It is possible that as a Catholic in the eyes of the Anglican Church at the time he died excommunicate, so his grave was not part of the official consecrated ground. The churchwardens probably wouldn’t have allowed a Catholic to be buried in the graveyard with an inscription over his head, not even a famous Catholic like Byrd. What hasn’t been lost of course is Byrd’s remarkably rich musical legacy which continues to inspire performers and resonates strongly with us today four hundred years after his death wherever it is performed, in churches, concert halls and homes around the world, including here in Stondon this month and on Radio 3 of course.