No . 131 The Trusty Servant
Moundsmere Manor , which had been acquired a century earlier for just such an evacuation .
2 . Perhaps the answer lies in a neighbouring entry in the accounts , referring to the College servant Roger Oades . ‘ Rogero Oades attendenti portas et portanti victualia ad Crawley ’. For this he received ten shillings . If only a portion of the scholars were to be housed remotely and yet sustained by provender from Winchester , it would make sense to be within easy reach of Roger . Here we have the first glimmer of a link between historical fact and ‘ Domum ’. Was this really Roger ( Heus ! Rogere fer caballos / Ho ! Roger , bring the horses (‘ Domum ’, verse 5 )) whose anticipated arrival would have cheered some young men in exile ?
3 . There is the suggestion of another link in the Bursar ’ s entry ‘ Pro impedito prati foeno per lusos puerorum ’ (£ 2 compensation paid because the boys ’ games in the meadow damaged the hay crop ). Sabben-Clare encourages us to think that the same pratum ( meadow ) is described in verse 4 : Ridet annus , prata rident / the season smiles , the meadow smiles .
Entry in the Bursar ’ s book showing payments to ‘ Henrico Tamage ’
4 . John Reading was Chapel organist from 1681-92 . He was either a skilled negotiator or the beneficiary of bursarial largesse as his salary rose for £ 5 to £ 50 per annum over those 12 years . Jeremiah Clarke , his more famous successor , must have been pleased . Whether the tune was Reading ’ s own or an arrangement of something much older , there is no reason to deny him authorship . It also means that the marriage of tune and words so well practised by Wykehamists for centuries can be dated to the 1680s .
These facts bring us to the legend that fits so neatly into our present era of pandemic and isolation . Charles Stevens ( Coll , 1917-22 ) laid the first stones in his Winton . James Sabben-Clare built on them by adding several more courses in his Appendix to Winchester College . I am not the person to tell you that the Latin verses run like a ‘ schoolboy exercise ’ nor that the original words to ‘ Domum ’ might have been intended to be set to a lively tune such as Lillibulero , but I am swayed by how well the story fits the few fixed points we can deduce from primary sources .
Put simply , ‘ Domum ’ was written by a group of scholars while in sojourn at Crawley over the Whitsun break in 1666 . They were there to avoid the plague in Winchester , but whether it was benevolence ( a protective lockdown ) or retribution ( a punitive exile ) that moved Warden Burt to place them there , I will leave the reader to decide .
All this brings me to the tune . It not having altered for three hundred years , James Sabben-Clare makes little mention of it except to reflect how it does not suit the metre of the verse . Stevens suggests that the original verses were written with something like ‘ Lillibulero ’ in mind . The ‘ Lillibulero ’ we recognise is the BBC World Service theme and it comfortably fits the words , whether sung briskly or more sedately ( see below ). The modern tune is attributed to Henry Purcell ( 1659-95 ), who would have been a young child in 1666 , but it is entirely possible that all he did was to formalise a popular tune .
Whatever the reasons , the Reading tune won the argument and was sung for three centuries . To answer
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