The thirteenth century was a time of turmoil in Occitania, starting with the buildup to the Albigensian Crusade during the first decade and its eruption in the second and third, which resulted in the establishment of the university in Toulouse in 1229, the founding of the Order of Friars Preachers a short time later and the unleashing of several decades of inquisition led by these Dominicans, and ultimately the dissolution of the powerful county of Toulouse. France profited both economically and politically from this plundering of the rich culture to its south: the consolidation of power by the late Capetian monarchy owed much to the absorption of Occitania into its holdings. The inhabitants of the Midi continued to demonstrate their fierce independence from their conquerors in myriad ways, some overt, some subversive. But the tempestuous events in their homeland caused some trauma among the troubadours, and although this did not necessarily result in a general deterioration in the quality of the songs that they produced, it probably is at least partly to blame for a decline in the number of both songs and composers.

For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The appearance in the ninth century of a system of signs to represent music thus not only comes as something of a relief but also raises certain questions. How would the signs have been understood? How would something with no immediate history have been comprehended? Recent answers to such questions have placed notational signs within the context of oral history, positing a degree of continuity and interaction across oral and literate domains. Much insight has been gained through this awareness of oral issues, and it is not intended to challenge claims made in this area.

The following observations make no claim to either profundity or finality, but attempt to improve on the texts and translations currently available, to comment on their metres (some rudimentary information being given in Appendix A), and to offer a few conjectures concerning authorship. This last question has interested Du Fay scholars, who generally allow him to be the author at least of Salve flos/Vos nunc: whereas Laurenz Liitteken denies him all else, David Fallows writes that ‘Some at least of his song and motet texts are likely to be by him’, singling out Salve jlos for the first-person reference at the end of the motetus; Alejandro Enrique Planchart, having pointed out that Du Fay's literary talent in Latin was recognised at school with a copy of Alexandre de Villedieu's Doctrinale, would give him some others as well. In principle, a composer may write his own text, like Machaut; or collaborate with a poet, as Du Fay evidently did with Périnet in Ce moys de may, and one Nicholas with one William in Argi vices; or be given a text to set by a patron or employer, as when Du Fay was sent texts from Naples on the fall of Constantinople, presumably including 0 tres piteulx, de tout espoir fontaine (OO vi, no. 10).

Most mid-seventeenth-century English songbooks are, as one might perhaps expect, concerned almost entirely with native repertoire. Though there was, it seems, a certain amount of Italian (and some French) solo vocal music available, it appears to have circulated mainly in imported prints and in manuscripts copied by a variety of foreign scribes. Among the very few sources in which both ayres and arias are combined by an English copyist (as yet unidentified) is an interesting little anthology of 63 pages dating from the early 1660s which, to the best of my knowledge, has never yet been described in print. Formerly in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, it is now in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, where it is bound up with a copy of Henry Lawes's third book of Ayres and Dialogues published by Playford in 1658 (Day & Murrie 11). Also included under cover of the same press-mark (Mus.ant.pract. P 970) are copies of Playford's Select Ayres and Dialogues For One, Two, and Three Voyces; to the Theorbo-Lute or Basse-Viol (1659; Day & Murrie 14) and the second (1655) book of Lawes's Ayres and Dialogues (Day & Murrie 8). Pasted on the verso of the title-page of the first of these is the beautifully engraved bookplate of ‘Charles Barlow Esq; of Emanuel Colledge, Cambridge’ (whose signature, together with the name of his college, also appears on the title-page itself).

Ever since the publication of Frank Harrison's book Music in Medieval Britain in 1958, the study of the cultivation of liturgical music in late-medieval England has been based on the institutional structure of the Church: on the cathedrals, colleges and parish churches, and on the household chapels of the monarchy and higher nobility both spiritual and lay. In that and most subsequent studies, however, male figures have been seen to dominate the establishments under investigation. If art history (perhaps musicology's closest sister discipline) can be shown to have characterised the patronage of Renaissance art as a system dominated by ‘Big Men’, so too has musicology placed the development of English liturgical music in a culture shaped largely by noble male patrons – kings, princes, dukes, earls, archbishops, bishops and the like.

Looking back over the past half century of research into the music of early Tudor England, it is clear that interest has been focussed principally upon sites of wealth, privilege and power. Dominating the arena are courts and household chapels, cathedrals and colleges, and the men and women who headed them. Perhaps that focus has been inevitable, since by their very nature wealthy and powerful institutions have the means to leave behind them rich deposits of evidence: not only high-art music, itself often notated in fine books, but also detailed records of expenditure, of the contractual duties carried out by or expected of musicians, and of valuable assets such as books and musical instruments. Moreover, where magnificence is on show there will often be eyewitness accounts to report on what has been seen and heard. All of those forms of evidence survive in quantity from early Tudor England, and it is hard not to be drawn to them.