This week, after several years of work, we finally managed to submit an application for £1million from the ESRC Standard Grant Scheme for our project Communities and Connectedness in Informal Performance Spaces. If it is successful, I will be leading Katherine Butler, Clare Egan, Mark Levine and a number of other scholars working to look into the ways in which early modern perfomance forms might be harnessed to help modern communities redress grievances.

Let me tell you more. Back in 1536, Henry VIII lost control of much of the north of England. Thousands of his subjects felt left behind by the London government. They were angered by the impact that the closure of the monasteries had had on their local communities, not just in terms of the religious landscape but also the economic shape of the north, and they saw Henry surrounded by Protestant heretics who were determined to push further. They produced a list of demands, and made the southerners listen.

As a historian, one of the things that has always interested me about the Pilgrimage of Grace is the number of references to verses, ballads and songs in the rebellion. It is clear that they were considered seditious, and that Thomas Cromwell was collecting information about them. Many years ago I started writing an article about it, and it turned into my current book project – the one I’ve been working on for several years. And it forms the basis of the grant application.

We want to look into the ways that the sorts of songs that the rebels would have sung – ballads, rounds, libels and jigs – helped to bring the rebels together. These types of musical activity actively involved the audience – not just through singing and clapping along, but through creating shared meanings and creating a sense of community. Nonetheless, not everyone was brought along with the music. The fact that there are reports of these seditious songs in the London records shows that at a very basic level, they also divided audiences – not everyone was going to agree.

We plan to work with our amazing community partner, The Gregson, in Lancaster, to recruit volunteers for two related but different parts of the project. First, we will look for volunteers for a citizen science project who will correct automatic transcriptions of more than a thousand documents related to the Pilgrimage of Grace, and they will tag different types of information within the documents. These transcriptions will form the basis of a website, making the documentation available for scholars worldwide. The volunteers will discuss the social concerns of the rebels, and identify any modern parallels within their own communities.

Next, we will teach the volunteers various sixteenth-century musical forms that they can then use to come up with their own musical performances. Those performances will be developed with the assistance of the director we used for John Balshaw’s Jigge, and performed in informal community spaces such as marketplaces with the support of early musicians from Passamezzo. The performances will harness the power of communities to make positive social change.

The project combines history, music and English literary criticism with social psychology, making it unusually interdisciplinary. The psychological aspect of the project looks at the development of community feeling within our volunteer group, and among members of the audience, and how far they are engendered by contact with the documents, and with the music. We will also support the volunteers in developing their own legacy projects so that change doesn’t end with the project, and create a toolkit so that the process can be repeated elsewhere.

It is a really exciting proposal, and although it is of course a long shot, we are hoping that this time next year we will be taking the first steps towards finding out how early modern musical forms can bring communities together and create a force for good in the present day.