Thomas Weelkes
English composer
Thomas Weelkes (1576 (?) – November 1623) was an English composer and organist. He became organist of Winchester College in 1598, moving to Chichester Cathedral. His works are chiefly vocal, and include madrigals, anthems and services.
Life
Early life
There is no documentary evidence about Weelkes's early years. According to the biographer David Brown, circumstantial evidence points to the possibility that Weelkes was a son of John Weeke, rector of Elsted in Sussex and his wife Johanne. If this was so, the boy was the Thomas Weeke baptised at Elsted on 25 October 1576; he had at least five siblings. Brown adds that there is no firmer evidence about Weelkes's childhood and musical training, although one piece of information is found in the preface to Weelkes’s collection Ballets and Madrigals (1598), where he states that he had been in the service of "his master Edward Darcy Esquire, Groom to her Majesty’s Privy Chamber".
Early musical career, organist at Winchester College
In the preface to his first volume of madrigals (1597) Weelkes states that he was a very young man at the time of their composition – "my yeeres yet unripened" – which, in Brown's view, confirms that he was born in the middle or later 1570s. By 1597 Weelkes, by his own account, had enjoyed the "undeserved love, and liberall good will" of George Phillpot, who lived at Compton, near Winchester.
Towards the end of 1598 he was appointed organist of Winchester College at a salary of 13s.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q553908. VIAF identifies the subject as 69117169. The Library of Congress control number is n79081239. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1576, 1623, 1598 and 1597.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Weelkes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.