If a pictorial metaphor for the present book may be offered, it is that of a tapestry rather than a mosaic. A mosaic is characterized by clarity and coherence; if undamaged, it is a tidy whole. What we hope to trace here is never tidy, certainly never a static entity fixed in a framework: the medieval liturgy. There will always be loose threads and, all too often, faded patches, some of them scarcely recognizable. Indeed, we might best think of the picture we shall attempt to confect, of regular, formal public worship in England between about 600 and 1535, as a tapestry-in-progress. Because surprisingly little has been written towards the end here envisaged, of trying to get some idea of the history of the liturgy in medieval England as a whole, a bit of preliminary musing as to what can reasonably be expected from an attempt such as the present one – its shape and main emphases, along with its self-imposed limitations – may be helpful.

We know in a general way that Christian worship was carried on in England by those who professed that religion from the early seventh century on. Although we shall pay the most careful attention possible to that earliest period, our understanding of the details of worship during it will remain unavoidably exiguous for the early centuries, roughly up until the late tenth. From that time on, however, there survive consider able bodies of evidence, all of which need to be weighed and then balanced. Three such bodies are of the greatest importance, one of them indeed paramount.