A summary of a lecture given by Dr Helen Deeming of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the opening words of the Life of King Edward the Confessor, the anonymous chronicler was addressed thus by his muse:

You shall be the first to sing King Edward's song:
Describe him thus, this English king, so fair in form,
How at his coming, with all grief repressed,
A golden age shone for his English race,
As after David's wars came Solomon and peace,
Which drowned the grievous moans in Lethe's stream,
And Plenty poured profusely for her king
Abundant riches from a bounteous horn.

If our chronicler was right, these times of peace and plenty should have been an ideal soil in which to nurture the arts. And indeed, in his great benefaction to the abbey of Westminster, Edward showed himself capable of turning both mind and purse away from day to day government towards less worldly pursuits. In supporting the Church, he and other rich patrons of his day were not simply expressing their devotion; they were also sponsoring their country's greatest writers, artists and musicians. Almost everything we know about music and literature form Edward's time has come down to us through the Church. Songs and stories must have formed part of most people's lives, but only those in holy orders had the skill and inclination to write them down. The full picture of music and language in the time of Edward the Confessor, then, has to be pieced together, bit by bit. We can read what the clerics wrote, and try to establish how much more has been lost, or was never written down. We can look at the pictures they painted of musical performances, to learn what we can of the instruments they played. And we can fill in the gaps with educated guesses based on what we know about musical and literary culture both earlier and later.

The eleventh century was a time of great change in music and language. Reforming forces within the Church revived and then gradually transformed the music of the liturgy. The state of Latin was improved and then put to new purposes in William the Conqueror's administration, and for a time, French and English co-existed as the vernacular languages of Norman England. Yet there were also continuities, and England's cultural interaction with its Continental neighbours neither began nor ended with the upheavals of 1066. Throughout the eleventh century, the gathering of high-brow Latin song from across Europe continued to be a favoured pastime of the musical elite, and the enjoyment of epic poetry and instrumental music remained the usual entertainment at lordly banquets. Perhaps in St Godric's life we have the ideal mirror to these musical and linguistic changes. At his death in 1170 he must have been one of the few remaining people on this island who had no knowledge of either French or Latin, and yet his extraordinary career had taken him all across Europe. Those who wrote the story of this life must have been baffled by his four songs, in an obscure dialect of a diminished language, and in an alien musical style unlike anything sung officially in church. And yet, perhaps they recognised that Godric's songs were relics of an Anglo-Saxon past that was rapidly becoming forgotten.