"Lis­ten­ing to music, espe­cial­ly live music, can be a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. These days, most of us say that fig­u­ra­tive­ly, but for medieval monks, it was the lit­er­al truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much clos­er to God, but espe­cial­ly the times when every­one came togeth­er and sang. For Eng­lish monks accus­tomed to that way of life, it would have come as quite a shock, to say the very least,"
"As reported by the Guardian's Steven Morris, University of Exeter historian James Clark found the latest example while researching the still-standing Buckland Abbey in Devon for the National Trust. "Only one book - rather boringly setting out the customs the monks followed - was known to exist, held in the British Library.""
Monastic chant functioned as a literal pathway to God for medieval monks, with communal singing central to monastery life. Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-1530s to early-1540s dispersed inhabitants and scattered sacred music. Researchers found a few parchment leaves of early sixteenth-century chant, containing both text and notation, hidden in the back of a Buckland Abbey book. The fragments represent a vanishingly rare artifact of English monastic musical practice. The recovered chants were performed again within Buckland Abbey after almost five centuries, renewing audible connection to that liturgical tradition.
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