[Most of this description is summarized from O'Neill, "A manuscript missal," 2018]
Damaged fourteenth-century missal recovered in the nineteenth century from a house in Ashprington, near Totnes, Devon; likely the missal belonged to the medieval parish church of St David's.
Only two chants are given with notation. Many of the quires are lost, as is the binding, and what remains is charred and highly fragile.
Originally the missal probably comprised some 175 folios, of which 63 survive.
The script suggests a mid-to-late fourteenth century date, and the surviving initials are similar to those of English manuscripts of the mid-fourteenth century. The inclusion of Relic Sunday on the Sunday after the feast of Thomas Becket points to a Sarum use after the year 1319.
In the calendar, a later hand has added St David and St Chad, which may have occurred after the upgrading of these saints in England in 1415; it is also possible that the missal was acquired by St David's parish during its fifteenth-century refurbishment, and these saints added at that time. References to the pope have been removed throughout, meaning the missal was still in public use at the time of Henry VIII's edict of 1539.
Parts of ten quires survive, most of which were originally eight folios. It is possible to estimate that some seven or eight quires are missing from the Temporale, and a similar number from the Sanctorale; thus what survives is approximately one-third of the original missal.
Most of the missal is not notated. However, there are two columns of chant for the liturgical reading of the genealogy at Epiphany, in a mode 3 formula; why this is written out, and few other chants, is not obvious. Similarly, St Anne is given a sequence written out in full; possibly this reflects the relative novelty of the feast of St Anne, which was given official status in a papal bull transmitted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1383.
O'Neill, Tim, "A manuscript missal in the library of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland," Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 148 (2018), pp.70-100.
