As I see it, the course of English economic history in the later Middle Ages is as follows. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries medieval civilization had reached a climax of material prosperity and spiritual confidence which it was never to surpass. A cessation of economic advance in the first half of the fourteenth century was followed by a positive decline in the second half, continuing and deepening in the century following, to reach its lowest point between 1450 and 1470. Recovery first started in the last twenty or twenty-five years of the fifteenth century, leading directly to the great economic renaissance which came to flowering in Tudor England. Then began that ‘cumulative crescendo’ which was to lead, at an ever-increasing pace, through the Industrial Revolution, to the command over Nature and the vast material resources of our own day.

It was recently my good fortune to discover in the Muniment Room of King's College, Cambridge, in a very unusual situation, the manuscript of a fourteenth-century love-song. Mr. Flower kindly drew my attention to a love-song of the early sixteenth century preserved in a rather similar manner at the Public Record Office. Both manuscripts included musical settings. That of the fourteenth-century song, Bryd one brere, has been edited and arranged by Mr. F. McD. C. Turner, of Magdalene College, Cambridge; that of the song from the sixteenth century by Professor E. J. Dent, of King's College; and they will be found in later sections of this paper. Meanwhile I shall endeavour to describe the manuscripts themselves, the literary texts of the two lyrics, and what can be inferred of their history.