In the centuries following the Norman Conquest, dependent priories – that is, satellite or daughter houses – of larger abbeys were founded in large numbers in England. Some were dependent on mother houses within England; others were the daughter houses of continental, especially Norman, foundations. Both types have been somewhat neglected in medieval ecclesiastical history, as well as in music history. This article argues that not only did some dependent priories in medieval England support musical life, but also in certain situations they could play host to a remarkably creative culture of musical exchange, production and performance. As a case study, it presents extensive new archival evidence concerning the traffic of people, books and music between the Norman abbey of Lyre and its dependent priories in England, proposing that other musical manuscripts may warrant reconsideration in the light of these findings.

This article reconsiders the polyphonic music fragments used within in an English manuscript copy of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, now Princeton University Library, Garrett 119. Extensive reuse of parchment characterises this manuscript: in addition to three music rolls, a chronicle roll and multiple account rolls were systematically repurposed to assemble the parchment used as the manuscript’s endleaves and also internally, when some of the rolls were erased and overwritten with the Alexandreis text. Through a close analysis of all these materials, the specific local contexts of the manuscript’s production is considered. The article demonstrates that this occurred in two stages, begun in the early thirteenth century and completed in the fourteenth century. While previous scholarship had located the host manuscript and music fragments in Lincolnshire, a Yorkshire location and a Cistercian institution is proposed here, possibly Rievaulx Abbey, at least for the initial compilation of the host manuscript and the copying of at least one of the music fragments. This opens up new possibilities for a flourishing network of written polyphony in this region.

The Office of Compline, sung to plainchant melodies adapted to English words, has become ‘firmly fixed in the Anglican tradition’. Yet, in the absence of a service of Compline in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, this office was once perceived as a niche Anglo-Catholic devotion. The present article examines how sung Compline became a staple of the English choral repertoire by examining six settings composed during the ‘English plainchant revival’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the editors’ sources, their methods of adapting Latin chant to English words, and the intended audience for each setting, it shows how successive editions remedied deficiencies perceived in earlier versions in the light of developing scholarship of plainchant and the growing popularity of public services of Compline. While earlier settings relied on medieval and contemporary Catholic sources of Latin chant, the latest imitated the contents of previous English editions, a ‘self-referential’ turn indicating that particular English Compline chants were now seen as part of a standard repertoire. The ongoing popularity of the setting attributed to John Arnold and published by the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society in 1929, issued in a second edition in 2005, shows how music for Compline published around the turn of the twentieth century has now become a musical ‘fixture’ in the English choral repertoire.