Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Banastre, Gilbert

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BANASTRE, BANESTER, or BANISTER, GILBERT (d. 1487), poet and musician, probably belonged to the Yorkshire family of that name (cf. Harleian MS. 805, ff. 29-30, and Cal. Patent Rolls, 1467-1477, p. 257), and may have been educated at Bardney Abbey, Lincolnshire, where in later life he held a corrody. He devoted himself to the study of literature and music, and his earliest work was probably composed about 1450. This is extant in British Museum Addit. MS. 12526, the greater part of which consists of a transcript in Banastre's hand of Chaucer's 'Legend of Ladies,' or 'Legend of Good Women;' appended to it in the same hand is an English poem in seven-line stanzas on 'Sismonda,' which in the last stanza Banastre says he wrote at the request of one John Rayner. This poem appears to be the earliest known English version of the legend of Sismonda and Guiscard;' [cf. art. Walter, William]; in the 'Cat. of Additonal MSS.' the manuscript is erroneously ascribed to the end of the fourteenth century; a nineteenth-century transcript is in Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 20775. Another work by Banastre was his 'Miracle of St. Thomas,' written in 1467, and extant at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (MS. Q. viii.); and he is also said to have written a drama, or more probably a sort of interlude, in 1482.

Banastre was a musician as well as an author, and in 1482 he appears as 'master of the song,' otherwise of the children of the chapel royal. On 22 Aug. 1486 Robert Colet was granted two corrodies, one within the monastery of St. Benet, the other within the monastery of St. Oswald of Bardney, co. Lincoln, 'upon the surrender of the same by Gilbert Banastre' (Campbell, Materials for the Hist. of the Reign of Henry VII, Rolls Ser. i. 547). On 1 Sept. 1487 Thomas Worley, 'one of the gentlemen of the king's chapel,' was granted 'the corrody or sustentation in the monastery of Bardney,' vacant by the death of Gilbert Banastre (ib. ii. 189). He was succeeded as master of the children of the chapel royal by William Newark. Banastre left behind him several musical compositions in a somewhat stiff and unpretending counterpoint. Some three-voiced pieces are in Pepys' MS. 1236 at Magdalene College, Cambridge; there are others in a manuscript at Eton College, and one song for three voices is in the 'Fayrfax Boke' now in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 5465, f. 90 b). Leland (Collectanea, ed. 1770, ii. 520) mentions a William Banastre who was author of 'Prophetiæ quædam,' and Tanner says 'one or other' of three was extant among the manuscripts of one Henry Worsley, while Brian Twyne [q. v.] cites some 'Vaticinalia Carmina' by this William as belonging to one H. Mason. Tanner suggests that this William may have been the Gilbert Banastre who, he says, was prebendary and canon of Wells in 1368 (Bibliotheca Brit. Hibern. p. 72).

[Campbell's Materials for the Hist. of Henry VII, Rolls Ser.; Cat. of Addit. MSS. in Brit. Museum Library; Ritson's Bibl. Anglo-Poetica, p. 44; Warton's Hist. of English Poetry, ed. Hazlitt, iii. 81, 132, 188; Grove's Dict. iii. 270; Davey's Hist. of English Music, passim.]