Guillelmus Da Francia, Guillaume Des Mares, and Faugues

My intent is to identify Guillaume Faugues with the St. Peter's composer and scribe Guillelmus and also with Guillaume des Mares, a singer both at St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel. I will discuss both of these figures separately before identifying the reasons for conflating their individual biographies with what we know of Faugues.

Guillaume des Mares, a tenor at St. Peter's from the latter half of July 1471 through June 1472, was a musician and cleric whose achievements have yet to be recognized. Elsewhere he is identified as a priest, master of choirboys, scribe, and author of a theological treatise. From St. Peter's he passed directly into the papal choir in July 1472, remaining until circa 1477-78. Benefices he sought as a member of the Sistine Chapel indicate origins in Normandy, with particular reference to a canonry at Evreux Cathedral and an unspecified benefice in the diocese of Lisieux,^[19] and the parish church of Ste. Colombe near Caudebec in the diocese of Rouen. The last document names him as a priest from the diocese of Evreux.^[20]

During the mid-1460s Guillaume traveled between Evreux and Chartres. Des Mares was in Evreux long enough to welcome the newly elected bishop Guillaume de Floques to the cathedral on 16 March 1464. Already a canon, he presented the bishop with a small tract (opusculum ) that he had written on the Holy Eucharist, with a dedication to Bishop de Floques.^[21] Despite his gift, or perhaps because of it, des Mares soon left Evreux to become an instructor of children at

[19] Both are mentioned m Reg. vat. 569, fols. 20-21 (12 NOV. 1474). I am grateful to Jeremy Noble for this information. At St. Peter's he replaced, and was later replaced by, Johannes Guillant (also Guillault, Giglior, Quilant, Glant, and Olant).

[20] Reg. vat. 573, fols. 50v-51v (10 Feb. 1475).

[21] "Guillelmus de Mara canonicus Ebroicensis, dicavit Guillelmo [de Floques] opusculum de sacrosancta Eucharista" (Gallia Christiana , 11:605). See also Pierre Le Brasseur, Histoire civile et ecclésiastique de Comte d'Evreux , 289; and G. Bonnenfant, Histoire générale du Diocese d'Evreux , 1:94. All of these describe the lengthy battle Guillaume de Floques waged to take possession of his bishopric, only to die on 25 Nov. 1464.

the cathedral in nearby Chartres, confirmed there on 25 June 1464 for an undetermined period.^[22] War broke out again in Normandy through much of 1471-72, just as des Mares was hired at St. Peter's. The Burgundian army at one point invaded and pillaged the territories of Caux, fighting as far as the city walls of Caudebec, where, as local histories take pride in telling, it was repulsed.^[23] By July 1471 des Mares was singing tenor at St. Peter's, where he remained until he joined the papal chapel choir a year later. The Vatican account books cease in May 1476, when des Mares was still present, and resume in 1479, after he had left.

He apparently had relatives in Caudebec, all of them local officials and agents of the royal bureaucracy. Pierre des Mares, Adam des Mares, and also a Guillaume des Mares appear frequently and steadily in archival records from Normandy between 1448 and 1506, identified by such titles as "tabellion juré pour le Roy en siège de Caudebec" (1460), "procureur du Roy" (1466), "lieutenant du Verdier" (1480-81), "avocat et conseiller du Roy et vicontes de Caudebec et Monstiervillier," and also as minor nobility with the rank of écuier . However, the Guillaume who sang at St. Peter's and in the papal chapel is not the same as Guillaume des Mares, the écuier and avocat du roy active in Caudebec between 1463 and 1506.^[24] This is indicated by a notice that the latter collected taxes in Caudebec for the year 1474-75, at a time when the singer was present in Rome.^[25]

The earliest probable reference to Guillaume des Mares, the priest

[22] André Pirro cited this position in "Gilles Mureau, chanoine de Chartres," 164.

[23] R. de Maulde, Une vieille ville normande Caudebec en Caux , 43.

[24] Several references occur in Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, Gallia regia ou état des officiers royaux des bailliages et des sénéchaussées de 1328 à 1515, 2:22-23, 30-31.

[25] It is surely this other Guillaume that represented Caudebec at a convocation of the Norman estates in Caen on 1 Oct. 1470. Called by Louis XI, this assembly dealt with a question of the annual subsidy paid by the provincial estates to the royal treasury. In response to a commission that had met in Dec. 1469 about this issue, Norman representatives fought a perceived infringement of their rights, declaring that "the instructions of this commission were contrary to the laws, customs ... franchises and liberties of the province and charter of the Normans" (Henri Prentout, Les états provinciaux de Normandie , 1:199; this episode is interpreted on 198-201). They thus discussed a dispute nearly a year old. One of the "six notables personages" representing the bailliage of Caux, and the only one from the "viscounty of Caudebec," was Guillaume des Mares, reimbursed 30 l.t. for fifteen days of expenses away from home (ibid., 3:119).

and musician, places him in Rome during the pontificate of Nicholas V. In late summer 1449 Nicholas appointed Guillelmus des Mares, a cleric from the Norman diocese of Bayeux and a familiar of Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville, to the position of scribe in the Sacred Poenitentiary.^[26] This was no ordinary appointment, coming just days after Nicholas agreed to an exceptional increase in the number of scribes beyond the legal limit of twenty-four. As a temporary expansion made when the antipope Felix V—the erstwhile patron of Du Fay—finally abdicated, Nicholas accepted eight of the scribes who had served Felix in Basel. He did so with the proviso that no other scribes would be appointed until death or resignations reduced the total once again to twenty-four.^[27] Guillaume des Mares must therefore have come to Rome from Normandy via Basel, seeking first the patronage of the influential Norman Cardinal d'Estouteville and then taking curial employment. Des Mares would not have been the only northern singer in the musically astute cardinal's household. Jean Mocque, a singer in the chapel of the duke of Brittany, Francis I, became a familiar of d'Estouteville in September 1451.^[28]

Guillaume des Mares and Faugues share two attributes: Both served as maître des enfants , and both were identified as "prêtre" or "presbiter"—albeit not uncommon titles given the clerical status of most singers. The few details of their biographies fit chronologically. Faugues "the priest" evidently left Bourges in fall 1462, and des Mares appeared at Evreux Cathedral probably at least by 1463, since he was a canon there when he presented the new bishop with his treatise on the Eucharist early in 1464. How long he then served as master of the boys in Chartres is not recorded. Des Mares next emerges in mid-July 1471 as a tenor at St. Peter's. Mid-July 1471 is also exactly the date of the other mention of Faugues in the records of the Sainte-Chapelle at Bourges. The chapter agreed on 16 July 1471 to send for Faugues—to no avail—following the death of a chaplain. From 1472 until circa

[26] See Reg. vat. 389, fols. 224-24v (10 Aug. 1449), which describes Guillelmus as a "familiaris continuus commensalis" of the cardinal; and of the same date, Reg. vat. 433, fol. 36v. These references are listed in Romualdo Sassi, Documenti sul soggiorno a Fabriano di Nicolò V e della sua corte nel 1449 e nel 1450 , 132-33 and 203.

[27] The expansion occurred on 2 Aug. 1449. See Emil Göller, Die päpstlichen Ponitentiarie von ihrem Ursprung bis zu ihrer Umgestaltung unter Plus V, 2: 66.

[28] Barthélémy Amédée Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, Les papes et les ducs de Bretagne: Essai sur les rapports du Saint-Siège avec un état , 2:609, n. 8.

1477-78 des Mares sang in the papal chapel. And the possibility that he was a familiar of Cardinal d'Estouteville in the 1450s would support the theory that Faugues wrote his Missa Le serviteur for the coronation of a pope.

I know of two potential sources for the name "Faugues," which was not at all a common French name. Faugues is derived from the Latin fagus —as in fact he is identified in CS51 over the Missa La basse danse —meaning beech tree, and as such is actually related to the more common French words faigne and fay or fayt , which occur far more frequently as geographical and familial names, as in "Du Fay." However unusual, in Normandy near the town of Mayer in the province of Sarthe, a Chateau de la Faugue (also, "faigne") functioned as the center of an important seigneurie in the fourteenth century;^[29] also in Normandy, there was a fief named "Fauges" attached to Belleville-sur-Mer, north of Rouen.^[30]

But there is another possibility for associating the names Faugues and des Mares. Faugues, like several other composers of his age, may have included a cryptic reference to his own name in the title to one of his compositions. I am referring not to the practice of inserting a name into the text, as Du Fay did in his motet Ave regina or Compare did in Omnium bonorum plena , but to puns or adaptations such as Busnois's motet Anthoni usque limina (and its final words "omnibus noys "), Vincenet's Fortuna vincinecta (in Per431), Molinet's chanson He molinet engreine , and Martini's chansons and Mass on La martinella . This list should also include the Credo Mon père by Compare (to my knowledge, the only Mass movement based on this chanson).^[31] If Faugues

[29] On this chateau, also called "de la Faigne," see Recherches historiques sur Mayer , 1:250-52; and Auguste and Émile Molinier, Chronique normande du XIVe siècle , 350-51. The name Faugues may also be related to Faoucq, a common name in Normandy.

[30] See Beaurepaire, Dictionnaire topographique du Dèpartement de Seine-Maritime .

[31] The earliest mention of Compare also associates his name with the Credo text. In the chanson He molinet engreine , probably by Molinet, Compère's name tropes a Credo verse, in the manner of a choirmaster admonishing a young singer: "visibilium omnium, chant, Compère, et invisibilium." In the same vein, perhaps Gilles Joye and Pierre Fontaine were the objects of the anonymous chansons Adieu joye (edition in Howard Mayer Brown, A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale MS Banco Rari 229 , music volume, no. 89) and Fontaine a vous dire le voir (edition in Marix, Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle, 1420-1467 , no. 10).

and des Mares are the same individual, then the Missa Je suis en la mer and the lost chanson on which it is presumably based would fit into the same category of self-referential double-entendre, equating the French and Latin words for sea.

Multiple names of northern singers in Italy were commonplace. Northerners could be identified by city, region, country, or religious order and also by court nicknames (as in Milan) or the name of an important patron. Of the many possible examples, one of the most varied is that of Faugues's contemporary Johannes Legrense (d. 1473), also known as Johannes de Namur, Jean de Chartreux (or Johannes Carthusensis), Johannes Gallicus, and even Johannes Mantuanus. While I have not encountered any reference to "Guillaume des Mares dit Faugues," this identification would parallel the usage of the Frenchmen Jean Sohier dit Fede, Jean Escatefer dit Cousin, Estienne Guillot dit Verjust, and Jean Houlvigues dit Mouton. For reasons unknown, compositions by all of these latter composers are always ascribed under one name rather than the other.

Or northerners might be called simply by a first name, as happened all too often in pay records at St. Peter's. Thus in 1461 the basilica hired a musician from March to October identified only as Guillelmus, paying him to sing tenor and to compose and copy music into the "book of the church." This music presumably survives in the earliest layer of SPB80, folios that contain the Missa Pour l'amour d'une that is almost certainly by Faugues, as well as the Missa (fols. 129v-43) that shares significant features with Masses known to be by Faugues, particularly the Missa Le serviteur .

It is therefore worth considering the possibility that this Guillelmus is Faugues. Like Faugues a composer, and like des Mares a tenor, he may also have been employed at St. Peter's in the 1450s. Payments to a Guillelmus at St. Peter's occur in the transitional year 1455, which began with the death of Pope Nicholas V in March and the accession of the austere Calixtus III. It is not clear exactly when this Guillelmus arrived. For the first several months of 1455 there are no records that refer to singers by name; indeed, between March and October the only reference to singers at all comes on 6 April, when the chapter fed some singers for the Mass they sang at Easter. Then in October three salaried singers returned to the basilica, Guillelmus along with the northerners

Johannes Corbie and Britoni. Since these two others had been at St. Peter's for several years—Corbie may have arrived as early as 1449 or 145O, and Britoni was there by September 1452—there is the possibility that Guillelmus had been rehired as well. And remembering that · des Mares may have been a familiar of the cardinal from Normandy, Guillaume d'Estouteville, it must be noted that d'Estouteville had returned from a sixteen-month diplomatic mission to France just two weeks before (12 September 1455).

Additionally, one or both of these references to Guillelmus at St. Peter's involve a singer at the Padua Cathedral. During these years a singer and priest known in Padua as Guillelmus da Francia sang between extended trips to Rome.^[32] The cathedral chapter first elected him on 15 January 1456, though no mention of a salary occurred until 29 July.^[33] He was hired in Padua to replace "Giovanni tenoriste ," whose duties included teaching the boys. Toward the end of the next year (3 November 1457), the chapter at Padua met to consider "certain apostolic bulls" presented on behalf of Dominus presbiter Guillelmus, with the bishop of Padua, Fantinus Dandula, interceding in his favor. Guillelmus must have left Padua in 1458 because a deliberation of 4 June 1459 granted him his salary despite his having been in Rome for the past year, "absens a civitate Padue." In 1460 he was still absent.^[34] It is unclear whether he spent this time at St. Peter's, since the Exitus for 1458 names only Nicholas and Lupo. And until March 1461, when the presence of Guillelmus tenorista is recorded, the St. Peter's records are either incomplete or nonexistent. Shortly after Guillelmus's arrival, the St. Peter's chapter paid him for composing and copying music into the basilica's book of polyphony, music possibly preserved in SPB80.

The Cathedral of Padua began to prepare for the return of Guillelmus during the fall of 1461. At a meeting on 18 September it was determined that he should be paid half his salary, but a month later

[32] Raffaele Casimiri first printed many of these in "Musica e musicisti nella Cattedrale di Padova nei secoli XIV, XV, XVI," 8-II, and 152-56.

[33] Ibid., 152-53.

[34] For the record of June 1459, see ibid., 154. Casimiri did not print one from 8 Feb. 1460: "licentiam concesserunt domino presbitero Guillielmo quod M. Luce capellano dicte ecclesie , ut se absentare posset ad ipsa ecclesia et civitate Padue" (Archivio Capitolare, Padua, Acta capitolare 1453-70, fol. 69).

(13 October) the case of Guillelmus was reopened, and at a subsequent meeting (5 November) the chapter decided by a vote of ten to two to honor only four of the months he had spent in Rome.^[35] Payments at St. Peter's ceased after October 1461 except for I ducat paid for part of December. Once Guillelmus returned to Padua, he evidently remained into July 1462, by which time the cathedral chapter had returned the "bulls and documents" of his that they had been keeping in the large sacristy.^[36]

The difficulty of identifying the St. Peter's singer(s) named Guillelmus with the one at Padua arises from a short period of overlap between payments to the two; that is, by the time payments to Guillelmus cease at St. Peter's, payments to Guillelmus in Padua had begun. While St. Peter's paid Guillelmus at least through February 1456, the French tenor in Padua was present for his election on 15 January, although there is no record of him collecting wages there until the end of July. And in fall 1461 there is this sequence: Guillaume is paid through October in Rome; Guillelmus arrives in Padua by 16 November when an accord was reached to pay him through June 1462;^[37] and St. Peter's pays him a ducat in December. This probably does not indicate that he returned to Rome, or that the basilica's chapter was willing to pay him in absentia as had the cathedral chapter of Padua; rather, as in the retroactive payment to Johannes Monstroeul in February 1459 after Johannes had joined the papal chapel the preceding September, the basilica seems to have been slow in paying singers who had left.^[38] The same conflict between concurrent jobs in different cities also exists for Guillelmus's colleague Egidius (Crispini), who was paid at St. Peter's through October and in Savoy from September. Later in

[35] Casimiri, "Musica e musicisti," 9, 155.

[36] Ibid., 156. In "The Music Chapel at San Pietro in Vaticano in the Later Fifteenth Century," 152, I suggested that while at Padua Guillelmus da Francia was paid in one account book (the Quaderni di Canavetta ) under the name "Guglielmo da San Pietro" from 1456 to 1467. However, further investigation of these records suggests that these were two separate individuals, since in 1457 payments distinguish between "Guillelmus S. P." and "Guillelmus cantor" (fols. 82-82v), and payments to Guillelmus da San Pietro continue after the musician had explicitly resigned and been replaced.

[37] Casimiri, "Musica e musicisti," 155.

[38] See also the records of legal action against St. Peter's required to secure tardy payments on the organ in 1501; docs. 1501e and 1502a.

the century another northerner in Rome also worked in Padua simultaneously. While still a papal singer, Crispin van Stappen spent six months as maestro di cappella at Padua Cathedral in 1498.^[39]

A short overlap also arises for the Paduan Guillelmus da Francia and Faugues. Having just negotiated the terms of his employment for the coming year in Padua on 29 June 1462, Guillelmus suddenly decided to leave. The last record of him there is his severance from the cathedral on 26 July.^[40] Meanwhile, in Bourges payments to Faugues probably commenced about 16 or 17 July 1462.^[41] Assuming that the 26 July meeting in Padua acknowledged actions taken earlier in the month (which is probable since at the same meeting the cathedral chapter also managed to ratify the appointment of Guillelmus's replacement, a singer at St. Mark's in Venice), and assuming a quick but entirely possible journey of ten days between Padua and Bourges, he would have had to leave Padua by 6 or 7 July, shortly after renewing his contract on 29 June. There is a parallel to this rapid transition with Josquin's last pay in Ferrara on 22 April 1504 and his first appearance as provost of Notre Dame in Condé on 3 May 1504, not even two weeks later.^[42]

Regardless of the identity of the Paduan Guillelmus, there are several reasons for placing Faugues in Rome: (1) Faugues himself may have corrected the Sistine Chapel copies of his Masses; (2) a presumptive early layer of SPB80—probably copied by the composer and scribe

[39] On Crispini, see pp. 44 and 94-95. Musicians were by no means the only travelers between Rome and Padua. Regarding scribes who worked in both cities, see L. Montobbio, "Miniatori, 'scriptores,' rilegatori di libri della Cattedrale di Padova nel secolo XV," 113. Sightings of French musicians named Guillelmus also occur at Treviso in 1465 (Guillelmus francese ) and at the Basilica del Santo in Padua in 1487 (Frater Gulielmo Gallus); see Giovanni d'Alessi, "Maestri e cantori fiamminghi nella Cappella Musicale del duomo di Treviso (Italia), 1411-1561," 147-65; and Claudio Sartori, Documenti per la storia della musica al Santo e nel Veneto , 14. The latter singer is further identified as "Frater Gulielmo Pitavensi Provinciae Turoniae" in Bernardo Gonzati, La Basilica di S. Antonio di Padova , 1:xxii-xxiii.

[40] The documents are in Casimiri, "Musica e musicisti," 156.

[41] Paula Higgins kindly communicated to me this estimation based on his salary.

[42] Herbert Kellman, "Josquin and the Courts of the Netherlands and France: The Evidence of the Sources," 207. On the speed of travel, see Robert Lopez, "The Evolution of Land Travel," 17-29. Regarding the possibility of reimbursements for expenses prior to a singer's arrival, the enticements that Ercole d'Este offered to the singer Victor Tarquin of Bruges, then at Milan, are instructive (Lewis Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400-1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century , 175-76).

named Guillelmus—contains a previously unrecognized Mass by Faugues and also an anonymous Missa that is close to his style; (3) Masses with structural repetition were evidently popular at St. Peter's between circa 1460 and 1475; (4) Faugues's music was extremely well known in Italy by the 1470s, as indicated by his influence on Martini and on the Italian composer Serafino (who quoted from the Missa Je suis en la mer in his BolQ16 Credo),^[43] and perhaps also by Franchinus Gafurius's unique awareness of the correct title of the Missa Vinnus vina vinum in his Tractatus practicabilium proportionum (ca. 1482);^[44] and (5) Masses on the chanson Le serviteur may have been especially appropriate for honoring popes. Gerber has suggested the coronation of Pius II in 1458 as a possible occasion for Faugues's Missa Le serviteur .^[45] If Faugues was also the Norman tenor Guillaume des Mares, then he may have been present intermittently in Rome from as early as 1449 until about 1478.

[43] Christopher Reynolds, "The Counterpoint of Allusion in Fifteenth-Century Masses," 234-36. Adelyn Peck Leverett, A Paleographic and Repertorial Study of the Manuscript Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio, 91 (1378 ), 199, describes "Martini's near-monopoly on Faugues's Mass cycles" after he came to Italy.

[44] The manuscript is Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS A 69; the citation is from fol. 19. See Wegman, "Guillaume Faugues and the Anonymous Masses," 43-44. This section of the treatise was overlooked because when Gafurius later published it as book 4 of his Pratica musice (Milan, 1496), a treatise readily available in facsimile editions and translations, he revised this paragraph, excising his criticisms of Faugues, Johannes de Quadris (motet Gaudeat ecclesia ), Bartholomeus de Broliis, and Johannes Fede (motet O lume ecclesiae "pro S. Dominico").

[45] Rebecca Gerber, "The Manuscript Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, 88: A Study of Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Transmission and Repertory," 137 (see also 127-28); and Geoffrey Chew, "The Early Cyclic Mass as an Expression of Royal and Papal Supremacy," 268-69. In this regard it is also telling that the anonymous Missa D'ung aulter amer in SPB80 quotes a passage of four-voice imitation from the Faugues Missa Le serviteur (Wegman, "Guillaume Faugues and the Anonymous Masses," 29-30).