MANY OF US have cause to celebrate the recent proliferation of resources enabling study of the late medieval office. Especially notable across the last two decades has been our enhanced awareness of liturgies composed in honour of local saints, where some of the most interesting research has focused on devotional patterns in the British Isles. A fine example is John Caldwell's own article on the office of St Athelbert of Hereford, which joins similar studies by Andrew Hughes, David Hiley, Owain Edwards and others. Location of sources and identification of textual or musical borrowings has also been facilitated by the recent appearance of searchable electronic resources such as the CANTUS database of office chants (founded by Ruth Steiner in 1987) and Andrew Hughes's Late Medieval Liturgical Office project (LMLO, first published in 1994); both are welcome companions to earlier collections, such as the monumental Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi. This ever-increasing body of evidence confirms that liturgical offices composed to venerate local saints from various parts of Britain and Ireland – whatever the geographical confines of their cultus – may once have existed in their hundreds. Even so, the task of identifying, cataloguing, editing and analysing such materials is far from finished. While some offices survive satisfyingly complete in the sanctorale of antiphoner or noted breviary, in other instances the evidence is far more piecemeal: we ponder over the provenance and function of isolated fragments that may hint at much fuller observances.

One important form of self-contained devotion that sometimes appears detached from its original liturgical context is the suffrage – effectively a ‘compressed’ office, comprising no more than antiphon, versicle and collect. The suffrage was generally observed weekly or even daily after the main collect at the end of both Lauds and Vespers, often as part of a series, and sometimes throughout the entire year. Such observances serve a general votive function and reflect an ancient tradition of praying for special intentions as a conclusion to the office. The Regularis Concordia, for example, the customary devised for the monks of Winchester c. 970–973 and intended to serve as a pattern for other English Benedictine houses, prescribes daily recitation of three suffrages (to the Holy Cross, the Virgin Mary and the local saint) after both Lauds and Vespers.