Old Hall Manuscript
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Old Hall Manuscript (British Library, Add MS 57950) is the largest, most complete, and most significant source of English sacred music of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, and as such represents the best source for late Medieval English music. The manuscript somehow survived the Reformation, and formerly belonged to St Edmund's College, a Roman Catholic school located at Old Hall Green (hence its name) in Hertfordshire. It was sold to the British Library after an auction at Sotheby's in 1973.
Overview
The manuscript contains 148 compositions overall, 77 of which are written in score rather than in separate parts. Most of the pieces are settings of parts of the ordinary of the Mass, and are grouped by section. In other words, the settings of the Gloria are together, as are the settings of the Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. Between these grouped settings are some motets and pieces related to the conductus. The beginning of the manuscript is now lost, therefore the settings of the Mass ordinary begin with the Gloria rather than the Kyrie; the omission of such settings is most probably due to historical accident, although Howard M. Brown notes that many English cyclic Masses lacked Kyries and the English generally preferred their settings of the respective texts separate to the rest of the Mass.
The Old Hall Manuscript was compiled in the early 15th century, probably over a period of about 20 years. The hands of several copyists are identifiable, and some of them may be those of the composers themselves.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q509585. VIAF identifies the subject as 177816179. The Library of Congress control number is n83139640. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old Hall Manuscript” 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.