Thomas Ashwell

Thomas Ashwell (c.1478 – after 1513) was an English composer of the Renaissance. He was a skilled composer of polyphony, and may have been the teacher of John Taverner.

His admission to St. George's Chapel as a chorister in 1491 suggests a birthdate of approximately 1478, but nothing else is known about his early life. He stayed at St. George's until 1493, and he is known to have been a singer at Tattershall College in Lincolnshire in 1502 and 1503. He was in a position of authority at Lincoln Cathedral in 1508, according to records there, and was cantor at Durham Cathedral in 1513; no further records survive of his life.

Only scattered remnants of Ashwell's music survives. As was common for pre-Reformation music in England in Latin, the large majority of manuscripts were destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII (and a large proportion of English-language sacred music was destroyed during the subsequent reign of Mary, during her attempt to re-impose Roman Catholicism on the island). Two masses, both for six voices, survive complete in the Forrest-Heyther Partbooks, which were copied in the early 1530s, though the dates of composition were considerably earlier; a few other works survive in other sources. A song, "She may be callyd a sovrant lady", printed in a 1530 collection, is Ashwell's only surviving secular composition.

The connection with John Taverner is tenuous but suggestive, since the Forrest-Heyther Partbooks were copied either by him or for him when he became a chorister at Cardinal College, Oxford; since he used them as models it has been suggested that Taverner studied with the older composer.

Ashwell's reputation survived at least until the end of the 16th century, since Thomas Morley listed him as an authority in his 1597 treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.

Sources

• John Bergsagel, "Thomas Ashwell," and also "Sources, MS, §IX: Renaissance polyphony, 19" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742