Thomas Tallis

TALLIS, Thomas. b. ca.1505; d. Greenwich, near London, 20 or 23 November 1585. In the 1530s Tallis was successively organist at Dover Priory, Kent, singer or organist at St Mary-at-Hill, London, and at Waltham Abbey in Essex. After the dissolution of Waltham Abbey in 1540 he became a singing man at Canterbury Cathedral, and in ca. 1543 he joined the Chapel Royal, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1575 he and William Byrd were granted a royal patent to print and publish music; and in the same year the two men published their Cantiones Sacrae, containing 17 Latin motets by each of them (perhaps referring to the 17th year of Elizabeth’s reign). Tallis’s life spanned four reigns — those...