Excerpt from The Hereford Breviary, Vol. 3

Incidentally the comparison may throw considerable light on the general history of the medieval secular breviary, its sources and its compilation. At many points we may be tempted to pursue these subjects further, and may well desire to estimate them more exactly: but we must confine ourselves to such brief and general treatment as befits the Introduction to the Hereford Breviary.

At the root of every system of Divine Service, according to the Latin Rite, there lie certain common features, notably the Psalter as the main source of the psalmody, and the Holy Scriptures as the main source of the lessons. These two features therefore must be considered first.

The medieval secular breviaries adopted that disposition of the psalter for ordinary weekly use, apart from Eastertide, which is generally called Gregorian; and our English trio offer no exception to this general rule. The one unstable feature in this scheme was the position of Psalms xxi. - xxv. Together with Psalm cxvii. They do not come in their place in course at Mattins, but are select psalms allotted to Prime. Our breviaries use them as extra psalms to be said on Sundays. They have not preserved the Older custom, which had been, to say these five psalms daily: nor, on the other hand, have they adopted the expedient Of distributing them over the days of the week. This latter practice began to be general with the Tridentine Breviary, and it was apparently designed to recover the use of the psalms in questiona: for, as early as the time of Ralph of Tongres (t1403), there were complaints, that in fact this great group was being habitually omitted on the Sundays for which it was prescribed, as well as at Eastertide and Christmastide, when the pretermission Of these psalms was recognized. There is thus no divergence between our three rites as regards the general use of the Psalter.

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