The research for this article was conducted at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The microfilms of chant manuscripts consulted in its preparation are from the collection assembled by Dr.Ruth Steiner with funding provided by the Dom Mocquereau Foundation.

This article was originally designed as an essay supplementing the edition of tropes of the proper of mass of the Easter season in Corpus Troporum III (cf. the essay on the Christmas tropes in CT I, 1976). The circumstances of publication of CT have changed meantime, and the editor of this Journal is grateful to the author and to Dr.Ritva Jonsson, director of the CT project, for having made possible the publication of the essay here.

Chant scholarship provides a fairly standard description of the Kyrie, in terms expressing very clearly what a typical example was like in the post-Carolingian era. There is no disagreement here, as there is with the sequence and trope, over how to treat the genre. Describing it seems to be a simple task. The chants are nine phrases long, with one phrase for each petition of the Ordinary text:

The relation among the phrases varies from complete identity of all nine to nearly the opposite extreme, yet in most cases the phrases are grouped by threes, giving the melody a tripartite shape like that of the text. Certain of the melodies were sometimes underlaid with syllabic texts expanding or replacing the Ordinary petitions (e.g.: Kyriefons bonitatis, Pater ingenite, a quo bona cuncta procedunt, eleison). Medieval commentaries on the liturgy (such as Amalar's Liber officialis) and exegesis of these texts make it clear that the Kyrie was thought of as being Trinitarian, with the first three petitions directed to the Father, the next three to the Son, and the last three to the Holy Spirit.

It is well known how, at the time of the Conquest, Osmund, son of Henry, Count of Sées, and Isabella, sister of William the Conqueror, accompanied the new king to England; how he there became first William's chaplain, then Chancellor (1072), and finally Bishop of Salisbury (1078).