An overview of the surviving collection

Scores of service settings, anthems, chants and miscellaneous litur-gical items sung by the choir of the Chapel Royal survive in two significant sets of music, held at the Representative Church Body Library, Dublin: thirty-two volumes (the ‘loft books’ and ‘score books’), mostly manuscript, which were transferred from St Patrick's Cathedral in 2014; and a further thirty-two volumes (‘Services’, ‘Anthems’, and ‘Services and Anthems’), all bound printed editions, transferred from Trinity College chapel in 2021.

These volumes together account for around two thirds of the music removed from the Chapel following the cessation of services there at the end of 1922. This music was listed in an inventory prepared in early 1923 by the last Chapel organist, William Edmond Hopkins. All of this collection was transferred in May 1926 to St Patrick's Cathedral on the request of Hugh Jackson Lawlor, Dean of St Patrick's and former Sub-Dean of the Chapel Royal. The exact circumstances of this transfer will be discussed below.

The inventory of the Chapel music collection prepared by Hopkins in 1923, later amended and typed up by the government officials who handed this material over to Lawlor in 1926, is reproduced in Table 1.3 Of these volumes, items 1, 4, 5 and 6 of the choir volumes are extant in the RCB Library, as are all of the organ volumes, and a single copy of T. H. Weaving's Communion Service. All the remaining material is lost.

What the cases of parts for ‘Cathedral Anthems’ might have contained is difficult to determine, since it is uncertain if ‘Cathedral Anthems’ was the name of a publication or merely a generic term for individual printed copies of music. It is possible that it may have been Vincent Novello's 1849 edition of William Boyce's Cathedral Music, which is a late example of a collection published with separate scores for individual vocal parts. The term ‘Cathedral Anthems’ may have been used by Hopkins in his inventory as an unconscious reference to the anthem word-book of the same name, which was also used in the Chapel.

Since none of the ‘Old Anthem’ books survive, it is difficult to determine what these volumes may have contained. There is, however, a clue in an annotation made by Hopkins to his inventory regarding these books: