The ideal equipment for consideration of the fully developed Sarum mass-rite would be three pairs of manuscript books, a missal and an ordinal: a pair each to represent the circumstances there at roughly the ends of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries; and then a printed missal of the end of the fifteenth. As should be clear from the previous chapter, the first putative pair simply does not exist. There is neither anything that can be fairly called a Sarum missal surviving from the twelfth century – that is, a massbook of the kind that would have been in use at Old Sarum – nor a separate ordinal from that period. Lacking these, we have had to perform a good deal of rather wearisome extrapolation to get at elements of some sanctorale texts which look to be discernible as “Sarum” peculiarities, though not identified as such. Two hundred or so years later, by the end of the fourteenth century, a high degree of both elaboration and standardization seems to have been reached, and the very full rubrics which reflect what we shall study as the New Ordinal are widely copied into missals. When books with unambiguous titles like Missale ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum begin to be printed at the end of the fifteenth (the two earliest are 1487 and 1492), the relevant material from ordinals has been thoroughly incorporated into the text of the missal.

The present chapter aims to sketch the outlines of a picture that might be representative of the situation in, say, about 1290.