Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Popular music of the olden time > Volume 2

BEVERLEY MINSTRELS, ROTE.
767
written after the death of Bede, 735, and before the death of Boniface, the apostle of
Germany, 755. Lull, who waa created a bishop by Boniface, bad written from Ger-
many to England for some of the minor works of Bede, and the letter is in answer to
that request. Abbot Gutberct sends him Bede's life of St. Cuthbert in prose and
verse, and excuses bimself for not sending more because the winter had been so severe
in cold, ice, and tempests of wind and rain, that the hands of the young men were
retarded. He asks Lull if it will be possible to send two young men to the monastery,
one who can make glass vessels well, and the other skilful in playing the rote. He
reminds him that he had sent to him a present of a gown made of otter-skins, and twenty
knives for the fraternity abroad, six years before, and that the receipt of them had not
been acknowledged. He hopes his present request will not be treated as trivial. The
passage of the letter in which the rote is mentioned is as follows : — " Truly it delights
me (meaning " it will delight me") to have a harper who can play upon that kind of harp
which we call rotta, because I have an instrument, but no one skilful in the craft." a
The abbot here added the Anglo-Saxon name, because the Latin word cithara
answered for several instruments, and would not define which of them he required.
Among the musical instruments which are copied from a manuscript of the ninth
century, formerly in the monastery of St. Blaise, representations will be found of the
" Cythara Anglica," and of the " Cythara Teutonica." (Gerbert's Be Cantu, ii.,
tab. 32.) The latter agrees completely with the descriptions given of the rote, and
we find the same instrument depicted in Anglo-Saxon psalters in and after the eighth
century. The following is a representation of King David playing upon one of these,
from an Anglo-Saxon illumination of the eighth century (Vesp., A. i., Cotton MSS.) :
» This letter is printed among the Epistola S. Bonifacii
Martyris, Primi Moguntini Archiepiscopi, Germanorum
Apostoli, per Nicolaum Serarium, 4to. Moguntiae, 1629.
Epist. 89, p. 123-4. " Delectat me quoque cytharistam
habere, qui possit cytharisare in cithara quam nos appel-
lamus rotttp, quiacitharamhabeo, etartificemnonhabeo."
(Here he writes rotta instead of rotta, and so in the fol-
lowing passage.) " Si grave not sit, et istum qunque
mea dispositione mitte." The abbot says he had lived
forty-three years in the monastery, but evidently he had
forgotten his Latin grammar.