Cool Finds

Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks Whose Monasteries Were Dissolved by Henry VIII

A university choir has revived music found hiding in plain sight in a book once used by monks at southern England’s Buckland Abbey

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

August 20, 2025

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In the 16th century, England’s Henry VIII broke with the pope, established the Church of England and named himself its supreme head—a sequence of events now known as the Reformation.

By that point, the country was home to more than 800 monasteries and convents. Because they served as reminders of the Catholic Church’s power, the king had them dissolved in the late 1530s. This act put an end to monastic life in England, which included, among other practices, singing.

Now, singers are performing some of that long-lost monastic music. A 500-year-old book was recently discovered at the British Library, and along with monks’ daily rituals, it included a “rare collection of medieval music,” according to a statement from the University of Exeter. On August 16 and 17, the university’s Chapel Choir sang those songs in Buckland Abbey in southwestern England.

This weekend #medieval monastic music returns to @nationaltrust Buckland Abbey for the first time in 486 years, thanks to @UofEChapelChoir @UniofExeter pic.twitter.com/CvKcBrAoni

— James Clark (@James_G_Clark) August 16, 2025

“It’s an extraordinarily rich, textured sound,” James Clark, a historian at the University of Exeter, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “They’re all singing together but following different melodies. It’s a sort of melodious cacophony of sound.”

Clark discovered the pages of music while researching Buckland Abbey for the National Trust, the organization that operates it. He was leafing through the Buckland Book, which “contained the instructions the monks needed to carry out their daily religious rituals and services,” when he found some parchment pages that had been added during the early Tudor period, per the statement.

“Those leaves contained pieces of chant—text and notation,” Clark tells the Guardian. “Though there were 800-plus monasteries in medieval England, you can count almost on one hand pieces of music that survived. … The Tudor state scrapped Latin worship, and the lyrics and music that went with it were largely discarded. Most of this stuff is lost. But there it was, shoved into the back of the book.”

Most of the Buckland Book was written in the 1400s, but the music was transcribed in the early 1500s, meaning it was written by the “last generation of monks in the medieval English tradition,” Clark tells the Guardian.

By the time Henry kicked them out of their homes, monks and nuns had been living in communities in England for a millennium. The monk St. Augustine had arrived in Britain to spread Christianity in 597; by the late 15th century, England’s monasteries were thriving. They were the “wealthiest institutions in the country,” owning more than a quarter of England’s cultivated land, according to Historic U.K.’s Ben Johnson.

Buckland Abbey was founded in 1278 as a Cistercian monastery. Its inhabitants, known as “white monks” for the color of their habits, lived austere lives of prayer and manual labor. The monastery created and performed music to worship God and impress patrons, Clark tells the Guardian.

“Monasteries were competing in a very crowded marketplace for investment from patrons,” he says. The 14th-century monks even hired an organist and choirmaster, Robert Derkeham, to improve their singing.

The newly discovered music itself is in the plainchant style, also known as plainsong or Gregorian chant. The songs are meant to be performed by a large group.

“Whoever compiled this collection seems to have been unusually creative, pulling together words and music from many different sources,” says Daisy Gibbs, a music historian and National Trust research officer, in the statement. “The pieces found in the book ask for God’s mercy, forgiveness and protection from harm. They share a real feeling of anxiety and fear. It looks as though they were once sung as a complete sequence, perhaps to help the monks through a crisis of some kind.”

Maybe that crisis was a terrifying plague that struck Tudor England: a violent illness called the sweating sickness. Symptoms included profuse sweating, headaches and delirium, and those infected could die as soon as three hours after the onset of their symptoms.

Researchers from the National Trust and the University of Exeter transcribed the Buckland Book’s music for performance. They also had to determine its rhythms, which weren’t noted in the book’s pages, Michael Graham, the university’s chapel music director, says in the statement.

Hearing the music monks wrote in the 1500s reminds us that medieval religion was a “sensory experience,” Clark tells the Guardian.

“I like that sense that it carries us back to a moment in time,” he says. “If we’re going to do these people who died 500 years ago some sort of justice as historians, we’ve got to understand the world as they saw it and as [they] experienced it.”

Editors’ note, December 12, 2025: This article has been updated to correct the location where the book was housed.

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.