As has been noted in the Introduction, towards the end of the nineteenth century several factors coalesced to make the comparative study of liturgical texts possible, at least in England. The most directly obvious is the availability by that time of a number of catalogues of manuscripts, however imperfect and incomplete, which made possible some sense of the range of (for example) missals available for textual comparison. These include catalogues for the Harleian, Cotton, Sloane, Egerton, and early Additional (through 34526) manuscripts at the (then) British Museum; for the University Library manuscripts at Cambridge (albeit quirkily); the Quarto Catalogues for manuscripts at the Bodleian and H. O. Coxe's two volumes for the Oxford colleges; for French manuscripts, the first twenty-five volumes of the Quarto Series of the Catalogue Général des Manuscrits des Bibliothèques Publiques des Départements, providing at least rudimentary coverage for Rouen and Orléans, and, much more importantly, Léopold Delisle's Mémoire sur d'anciens sacramentaires. Other factors that can here be only enumerated include the foundation of the Henry Bradshaw Society in 1890 (see p. 10); widespread peace in Europe and rather advanced mail and rail communications for roughly forty years after about 1875; and what seem to have been relatively low printing costs.

J. W. Legg's 1897 “Notes”

Many of these elements are reflected in the publication in 1897 of the “Liturgical Introduction” that comes at the end of the third and final volume of John Wickham Legg's great edition of the Westminster missal (on the book itself, see p. 227), of which the first volume was the initial HBS publication.