Relatively little is
known about Tallis's life, particularly about his early
years. His year of birth is usually taken to be about
1505 making him eighty years old at his death on 23rd
November 1585; he had described himself as "very
aged" eight years before. Since his entire career
was spent in London and southern England he was probably
born in the south, perhaps in Kent. In any case this
was the county of his first known appointment, Dover
Priory, and the location of the Manor of Minster,
the house later leased to him by Mary Tudor. Tallis in Dover
The first record of Tallis dates from
1532, as organist of Dover
Priory, a small Benedictine monastery consisting
of about a dozen monks. It is not know whether Tallis's
duties were restricted to organ-playing, or whether
he also had the opportunity to work with professional
singers. The more affluent monastic houses of the period
certainly endeavoured to participate in the fashionable
cultivation of elaborate church music by employing a
small choir of professional lay singers; such a choir,
which was quite distinct from the monks' own choir,
would usually have performed in the Lady Chapel of the
monastery, because this was often the only part of the
monastic church to which the laity had access.
Dover
Priory, however, was far from wealthy. In the early
1530s its annual income was about £170, less than
a tenth of that of a major Benedictine house, and it
can hardly have been in a position to spend lavishly
on music. On the other hand, the fact that the priory
employed a lay organist at all could be taken to imply
quite a serious commitment to music. In addition, Dover
was a cell or dependent house of Canterbury Cathedral,
which was itself a Benedictine priory. The cathedral
had a long and lively musical tradition involving not
only the maintenance of a professional Lady Chapel choir
but also the encouragement of the monks' own musical
talents; it seems quite possible that this could have
assisted the exploitation of music at Dover. Even so,
any choir available to Tallis at Dover Priory must surely
have been tiny. There seems to be no record of Tallis's
departure from Dover, but the priory itself was dissolved
in the autumn of 1535.
Later Life
Tallis appears in records again in
1537-8 in London, where he is employed (it is not clear
whether as a singer or as organist) by the parish church
of St Mary-at-Hill in Billingsgate, a little to the
west of the Tower of London. The next reference to Tallis
is in 1540 at the Augustinian abbey of Holy Cross at
Waltham Abbey in Essex where he was a senior gentleman.
On March 23, 1540, Waltham became the last English abbey
to be dissolved. After the dissolution of the monasteries
Tallis was a Lay Clerk (i.e. a singing gentleman) at
Canterbury Cathedral.
Tallis’s final appointment was
as a senior gentleman at the Chapel Royal from around
1543 onwards. During his time in the royal household
Tallis served four monarchs, Henry VIII to 1547, Edward
VI from 1547 to 1553, Mary I from 1553 to 1558 and Elizabeth
I from 1558 onwards.
Thomas Tallis was fortunate in that
he was in Queen Elizabeth's favour although he was a
Catholic during a period of religious unrest in English
history, resulting in the state religion of England
switching from Catholic to Protestant. In 1575, Queen
Elizabeth granted Tallis and William Byrd (Tallis’s
pupil) a monopoly in England on printing music.
Rather late on in his life, in or around
1552, Tallis married a woman named Joan. He died on
23rd November 1585 leaving his house in Greenwich to
his wife who survived him by four years. He was buried
in St. Alphege, Greenwich.
Tallis’s Music
Tallis’s early works were written
for the Sarum rite, the liturgy in use in England until
the Reformation. The music is large ritual music for
the Catholic mass and office hours. The Reformation
and with it the new prayer book of 1549 created the
need for simpler music and settings of vernacular texts,
a need to which Tallis was quick to respond.
The accession of Mary Tudor who re-introduced
the Catholic rite enabled Tallis to return to the large
scale English Catholic style of composition, although
works from this period clearly show Tallis’s more
developed style and the first signs of continental influence
which was to affect all English composers in the second
half of the 16th century.
The act of settlement introduced by
Elizabeth in 1559 abolished the Catholic rite for ever
and Tallis reverted to writing English services and
anthems for public use, though he continued to produce
settings of Latin texts which were allowed for devotional
use.
In all this, Tallis demonstrated a
most remarkable versatility, changing and adapting his
style to suit the prevailing political environment.
Viewed as a whole his music holds up a mirror to the
political and religious changes of the sixteenth century.
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