Richard Turbet wrote in 1985 that, with few exceptions, no piece of British music ‘attracts more excitement than Tallis's gigantic Spem in alium’. In the nineteenth century, however, it was not the Song of Forty Parts, nor any of his now highly regarded Latin motets, but Tallis's modest settings of the Preces, Responses and Litany that were identified as ‘the principal means of conferring immortality upon Queen Elizabeth's organist.’ These fragments of harmonised plainchant were more frequently published and performed, more intensely debated and more highly regarded than any other portion of Tallis's output, or indeed almost any other piece of sixteenth-century music.

The responsorial portions of the Anglican liturgy, described by the Rev. John Jebb as ‘the deepest, most affecting, and most comprehensive prayers that have ever been framed in the Church of Christ, under the guidance of the Spirit of God’, were the subject of a great deal of interest in the nineteenth century. Their prominence was reflected in the first edition of Grove's Dictionary, which contains articles on ‘Response’ (written by John Stainer), ‘Litany’ and ‘Versicle’ (both by Rockstro). Stainer observes that ‘The musical treatment of such Versicles and Responses offers a wide and interesting field of study’, and defines a ‘Response’ in its ‘widest sense, as any musical sentence sung by the choir at the close of something read or chanted by the minister’.