CHAPTER 8

Leaming from Documents:

Payroll and lnventory Notices

How and where do we find the information needed to reconstruct the life of
Du Fay or, for that matter, any other composer of the period? Occasionally,
biographical tidbits can be ferreted out of the music itself. For instance, we
assume that Du Fay was closely associated with the Malatesta family during the
1420s because he wrote a series of compositions that celebrate inmportant events
in the lives of three family members. In general, though, the music itself does
not go very tar in this respect.
It is therefore to the archives that vwe go, to the repositories of the centu
ries-old, everyday records of the institutions served by the composers and other
musicians: princely courts, urban municipalities, churches large and small, and
the body to which so many roads led, the greatest dispenser of all kinds of
perquisites, the papal curia (governing body). In the archives we find payroll
registers, correspondence, minutes of the chapter meetings of the great cathe-
drals and collegiate churches, supplications for benefices, dispensations from
vows, and the multitude of documents that record the fabric of everyday life,
from house rentals to legal disputes.
We will examine three different kinds of archival documents from the fif-
teenth century. Here, we look at two payroll notices and the inventory of Du
Fay's library. Chapter 12 will test our ability to reconstruct a small slice of
Johannes Tinctoris's life from two jargon-filled legal notices.

TWO PAYROLL NOTICES

These notices come from opposite ends ot Italy and from different quarters
of the century. We look first at the one that is easier to read.

Mid-Century Naples
Figure 8-1 shows a page from a payroll register drawn up in the treasury of
the Aragonese court of Naples. The entry is written in Catalan-the language
of the court's treasury under Alfonso I, who had ruled his kingdom of Aragón
from Catalan-speaking Barcelona before becoming King of Naples in 1441
and records payments to five of the king's employees. It dates from December
13 (evident from the very first line: "Item/ a xiij del dit et present mes de
Dehembre) [1448]," the year having been identified on a previous folio.'

1. The document is preserved at the Archivio di Stato, Naples, Tesoreria antica frammenti, St.
227, vol. XIII, fol. 12. In the transcriptions of the documents, scribal abbreviations are
resolved in italics.
 nvaeq deldot@fnt meseLebe»bt emovo

antaadgmatzt D( g-m* acn e r o s r

fn'la panits eren* es
m athom 1*1llants

pert>ebia onioaddar
ena rus cibrzs pts

e-

wphmiPDEM

. atebea plaa

Figure 8-1. Page from

SlntndAm.
payroll register, Aragonese
court of
anoAreH" Naples, 1448
(Archivio di Stato,
Naples).

The record of the payments to the

of the page:
two chapel members begins in the middle

a fra giordi dela capella del Senyor Rey To Fra Giordi of the
per la provisio sua del ppassat mes de chapel of the
Novembre et son
king, for his salary of the past month
acompliment de vj of November, the sum of six
ducats,
ducati la resta per lo elatge. the deduction for the
v ducati iij tari xvi
payroll tax.
5 ducats 3 tari 16 [grani]
a fra Ruberto per la dita raho. To Fra Ruberto for the same reason.
v ducati iij tari xvi 5 ducats 3 tari 16
[grani]
Before turning to the substance of the
the folio number
document, we should take note or
(not shown in the
reproduction above): ccccl. Obviously,
this large register (more than 450 folios), probably containing
was a
an entire
year's worth of entries. Yet owing to the of time and such
ravages catastropne
as fires, earthquakes, and wars-not to mention the
ever-present need for wrd
ping paper (between the time the document was no longer needed and tne
time that its historical value
was
recognized)-it has been reduced to a meie
fragment. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-frequent situation, and losses
measured not only in terms of a
individual folios, but in whole volumes, Sci
 wneuosiuis

Figure 8-2. Page fronm

payroll register, Brescian
court of Pandolfo I1I
Malatesta, 1416 (Sezione
di Archivio di Stato,
Fano)

of volumes, and entire collections. Thus archival

research depends very much
on chance, on what has and has not
survived. And it is not uncommon to tind
gaps of decade here
a or a
quarter century there in the records of a given
institution. For some institutions, nothing at all remains.
The
payroll notice tells us that Giordi and Ruberto were clerics
(trom the
designation "fra"), members of the king's chapel, present at the court in No-
vember 1448, and presumably still there when their salaries for that month
were recorded in mid-December
(payment was usually made only after services
were rendered). Each received a
monthly salary of six ducats, though a 4 percent
payroll tax, the elatge, reduced the take-home pay to 5 ducats, 3 tari, 16 grani.
This three-tiered monetary system, only one
among the many then current,
worked as follows: 1 ducat = 5 tari, 1 tareno = 20 grani, and1 grana= Y600
of an ounce of gold. Finally, though Giordi and Ruberto were members of the
chapel, they were not necessarily singers or, more to the point, singers of po-
lyphony. As we will see in Chapter 13, a princely chapel was not made up of
singers only.

Early-Fifteenth-Century Brescia
Figure 8-2 presents a page from another payroll register, this one from the
court that Pandolfo III of the Malatesta dynasty maintained in the northern
Italian city of Brescia from 1404 through the middle of 1421:2

MCCCCXVI
Beltramus de Francia cantator magnifici
domini nostri debet dare numerati sibi
die xvii martij per Yoachinum de
Florencia texaurarius domini nostri et
Scriptos sibi in credito in libro novo
vindi dati et scripti in fo V/ et fuit pro
solucione unius mensis
libre xj solidi iij
2.
The document is preserved at the Sezione dell'Archivio di Stato di Fano, Codici malates
tiani, vol. 58, fol. 114.
[1416
(To Beltramus of France, singer of
ourmagniticent lord, must be given
his pay, 17th day of March, by
Joachim of Florence, treasurer of our
lord, and written by him in credit in
the new green book, entered and
written on folio 5 / and it was for one
month's salary
lire 11 shillings 4 pence O
108 LEARNING FROM DOCUMENTS: PAYROLL AND INVENTORY NOTICES (c
NOTICES (CH. 8
Written in the somewhat cramped hand of Gioacchino of Florence, the co
bookkeeper, and crawling with abbreviations, this notice has a very differen
court
Tent
look from the first. Other differences catch our eye as well. The treasurer nor.
otes
that this entry is derived from one on folio 5 of the "new green book," ind
cating that this must be some kind of secondary entry. n tact, volume 58 n
the Codici malatestiani, from which this page 1s taken, 1s a master ledger ofso
that not only brings together multiple entries tor a single person that wera
originally scattered through a number of registers, but then gathers together in
a single list all the individuals of the same occupation. An archival researcher
dream!
There is also a ditferent monetary system at work: l1re-soldi-denar1 imperiali
in which 1 lira = 20 soldi and 1 soldo = 12 denari. This is the three-tier systenm

that England, for example, only recently abandoned. Obviously, the difference
in monetary systems could cause problems if we wished to compare the relative
worth of Beltramus's salary at Brescia in 1416 with that of Giordi and Ruberto
at Naples in 1448. For not only would we need to take into account thirty
years worth of possible inflation and possible differences in the cost of livine
at the two places, but we would have to determine the exchange rates between
the Neapolitan ducat and the imperial lira. Yet here too the archives come to
the rescue, since fifteenth-century bankers and merchants, faced with the same
problem when conducting everyday business, left behind notes about exchange
rates. Thus we know that at about mid-century, 1 ducat traded for about 3.2
lire. On paper, then, Giordi and Ruberto earned about one and a half times as
much as Beltramus.
By itself, this entry does not provide much information about Beltramus,
who can be identified as the composer-singer Beltramus Feragut, the composer
ofthe motet Franconunm nobilitati (discussed in Chapter 7). But it becomes mean-
ingful when placed into context: the first entry for Beltramus at Brescia is noted
on November 4, 1415, and credits him with 22 lire and 17 soldi, which, since
his base monthly salary was 11 lire and 4 soldi, must be two months' salary,
payments to him are then recorded again on March 17, 1416 (Fig. 8-2), April
16, June 20 (for May-June), and July 3; and since he had just been paid for
June two weeks earlier, this last payment must be an advance for the month of
July. Stringing these notices together and keeping in mind that payment was
normally made after services were rendered (the advance on July 3 norwith-
standing), we can conclude that Beltramus arrived at Brescia at the beginning
of September 1415 and left at the end of July 1416. The lack of payments in
December 1415 and January-February 1416 does not necessarily mean that
Beltramus was absent for a while; we simply do not have records for those
months.
In all, then, the four payment notices fill in eleven months of Belramus
life. And when we gather further information from other archives, a picture ot

the basic whats, whens, and wheres of his career slowly begins to emerge

3. Only the most experienced paleographers go to work without a copy of Cappelli s D

zionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane at their side.

 Figure 8-3. Page from inventory of Du Fay's library, 1474-76
(Archives départementales du Nord, Lille).

D U FAY'S LIBRARY

We now turn to the first page of the executor's inventory of Du Fay's library
ditficult-to-read French
(Fig. 8-3)." Here is a good chance to try transcribing
a

hand. The following is a translation of the

title and first two entries (which
backward from the English):
might help some to work
RECEIPT FOR BOOKS

First for a small missal covered with Ix sous

black chamois skin leather
xxviij livres
Item, for fine breviary in vellum
a

covered with black velours with two

silver clasps
(Not everything in life is simple!

at Cambrai," 214.
The inventory is preserved at Lille,
4. Reproduced after Wright, "Dufay G 1313, pp. 6-7, 66.
Archives départementales du Nord, 4
110 LEARNING FROM DOCUMENTS: PAYROLL AND INVENTORY No

NOTICES (CH.
THE MORAL
There are several lessons to be learned from this mini-suryVey
documents. First, those who use archives in their work must have so
survey ot archiw
with the involved and possess the ability to decipher
languages ha
that was often intended to be read by no one except the writer. Sec
must have time. Reading through thousands of payroll entries or hu
handwriting
letters can't be done hundreds of
quickly; archival researchers generally measure thei
Scale projects in terms of months, the larger ones in years.
Third, architl
possess patience! They sometimes sit for days without finding anvrhi
mediately relevant to their study. m-
Finally, archivists need luck. They are looking to discover material.
unknown, if not to everyone, at least to those in their field. (M that is
generally pick up archival leads through studies of political, social, or (Musicolog
econom
history a tip from a friendly local archivist.) And sometimes they sim
or
don't find it, either because it doesn't exist, which becomes
evident only- simply
an unsuccessful
search, or because no one has any idea where it mightatter
hidden. For example, if the singers of a
prince's chapel accompanied him conbea
military campaign, the payments to them might be recorded not in the
registers but among the "military expenses." In the end, archival chansl
somewhat like looking for the research:h is
proverbial
archivists not only possess the instincts a
needle in the haystack, and
succesfil
of bloodhound, they learn as much a
possible about the organization of their archives betore they
ticket. buy the plane

A POSTSCRIPT: NEW YEAR 'S DAY

As we learned in
Chapter 7, when the Florentines celebrated the consecration
of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Feast of
the Annunciation on March
they were also celebrating New Year's Day. 25, 1436,
on which the new
Though in some localities the
day
year began was
of the Circumcision and which January (which coincides with the Feast
1
became more and more the
sixteenth century rolled along), that custom as the
day was by no means universal during the
fifteenth century: Venice celebrated on March
ities 1, French-speaking local-
most
popped champagme on Easter Sunday, and
perhaps the most
Christmas, on December 25. To make popular
Year's Day coincided with New
matters more
confusing, different establishments within the same
the year from different days, with the
new city sometimes reckoned
guilds
going against the established grain. Thus the of notaries in
particular often
when, say, a letter from the archival researcher must be alert
on December
papal chancery (which celebrated New Year's Day
25) to the King of France
dated December 27, (who celebrated on Easter Sunday
some nine and a
1452, and the response is dated
March 3, 1451, actuu
half weeks later. The
be converted to "modern style"
solution: the date of both
(New Year's Day on January 1). Thus
must

lettes the
papal letter really dates from
written December 27, 1451, while the royal respo was
on March 3, 1452.