The famous manuscript Harley 978 in the British Library is best known for containing Sumer is icumen in. Several of the problems of this fascinating book were disposed of in a masterly article by Schofield; but, with the notable exception of Kingsford, few of those who for one reason or another have used the manuscript have given their readers an adequate picture of the source on which they were drawing. It is a species of miscellany, but compiled on systematic lines. It is written in several hands, but the most obvious explanation for this is that the compiler was in a position to tell others to copy things out for him. The size and ruling of the pages is uniform, apart from the ruling of those on which the Conflict of Body and Soul (Noctis sub silentio, item 75 in the Harleian catalogue, item 78 in Kingsford's table) has been added. Format and type of interests alike suggest that the compilation is the work of a single mind, though the compiler's own handwriting may well be one of the cursives rather than any of the book hands.

The poems which served as the basis of the secular songs of the 12th and 13th centuries – the songs of the troubadours and trouvères – have been known for a long time, much longer in fact than their music. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the large body of lyrics that forms the foundation for the music of the 14th century, except, of course, for the works of Machaut, which were published in 1909 by V.Chichmareff in his Oeuvres lyriques de Guillaume de Machault. In the present article I should like to discuss the general character and some of the many interesting aspects of the French, Italian and Latin poems that have come down to us in the musical manuscripts of the 14th century as the texts of ballades, rondeaux, virelais, madrigals, or ballatas.

It is idle to pretend that a complete picture of 16th-century English musica ficta practice can be built up wholly by quoting unusual examples and wondering what they mean. This article, though delayed, complements my article (Bray, 1970) in which I did this. Since we rely on manuscripts for most of our information (though, as we shall see, not even printed sources are necessarily entirely reliable), we have to consider the scribes of these manuscripts, their circumstances, sympathies, and motives. If we can discover anything about scribal practice, or even see that a source has been tampered with later, then we can begin to understand more deeply the problems involved, and eventually we may wonder a little less.