As recently as 1975, Cyrille Vogel, in his Introduction aux sources du Moyen Age, was obliged to forego a demonstration of the transmission of the antiphoner, “given the complexity of research still in progress”.[1] Since then, with the completion in 1979 of the six-volume Corpus Antiphonalium Officii (= CAO) of René-Jean Hesbert, the foundations have been laid for all future historical research on the origins of the Roman office hours. Twelve selected sources are edited, first text-incipits of the sources in their original form, and then each complete text separately; more than this, in the two concluding volumes Hesbert undertook the task of classifying 800 sources of the office by means of statistical methods, in order thereby to facilitate the reconstruction of an archetype.[2]

Surprisingly few antiphonals were to survive “the King's order for bringing in popish rituals”, the Statute of 3 and 4 Edward VI, c. 10., following an Order in Council, 25 December 1549.[1] This was put into effect with great assiduity by the Church, under the auspices of its bishops, each bishop having been made personally responsible for seeing that the law was obeyed in his diocese. The destruction of books was deplored by some of the Protestants themselves, for instance by Bishop John Bale, who was a fierce enemy of the papacy,[2] but they were not permitted to do anything about it. The text of the statute acquires an ominous inevitability as every kind of liturgical book in turn is condemned to annihilation. Since divers unquiet and evilly-disposed people wanted to have their Latin services back (begins the statute), their “conjured bread” and water and suchlike vain and superstitious ceremonies, the king had decided to put an end to such expectations by instructing each bishop immediately to command every clergyman in his diocese to deliver to him or to a deputy “all antiphoners, missales, grayles, processionalles, manuelles, legendes, pies, portasies, jornalles, and ordinalles after the use of Sarum, Lincoln, Yorke, or any other private use, and all other bokes of service …” Bishops were explicitly instructed to “take the same bokes … and then so deface and abolyshe that they never after may serve eyther to anie soche use, as they were provided for …”

The feast of the Crown of Thorns was one of the most important and enduring among the numerous cults that arose in medieval times, focusing on the supposed relics of Christ's Passion. As such, the feast provided the stimulus for the wide dissemination of a succession of liturgies, often with sections in picturesque devotional language. Very few sources of these liturgies survive complete with music. One of them, Liverpool University Library manuscript F.4.13, a 14th-century antiphoner from Pisa, is the principal subject of the present article. The Liverpool manuscript contains what we believe to be the only extant complete text with music of this version of both Office and Mass. As will become clear, the version is neither of the two commonest extant offices, which are Parisian and Dominican respectively; instead, it appears to reproduce an earlier and fuller form of the Dominican office than can be found in other Dominican books. We examine the texts and music of the Liverpool manuscript, together with associated evidence, and provide a discussion of the history of the feast and its special promotion by the Dominican order.