Editorial

One of the delights of research in historical musicology is finding remnants of music in unexpected places. Graffiti cut into the walls of medieval churches may contain snippets of musical notation or depictions of instruments and singers. Scholars of medieval music in England have found fragments of Latin chant and polyphony, discarded in the Protestant reforms of 1549–50, surviving in the bindings of post-Reformation manuscripts such as parish registers. More recently, in 2020 scraps of musical notation were among the manuscript fragments found under the floorboards in the attics of Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. In 2025 the project that I lead—‘Music, heritage, place: unlocking the musical collections of England’s county record offices’—uncovered two significant new sources of Henry Purcell’s music: an autograph of his keyboard music, repurposed as the index to the town council records for Thetford, Norfolk; and a fragment of a previously unknown song among legal papers found in a demolition site in Worcester in 1964–5 and now held in Worcestershire Archives.