Sarum Use (Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis secundum usum Sarum)
Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis secundum usum Sarum
Deus in adiutorium meum intende. Domine ad adiuvandum me festina.
Our renderingO God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.
What it is
The Sarum Use was the dominant liturgical rite of medieval England from the Norman Conquest through the Reformation, employed in virtually every Plantagenet royal chapel and providing the calendrical and structural framework for the great majority of English Books of Hours. Its daily office divided prayer into eight hours — Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline — each centred on the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with Penitential Psalms, Gradual Psalms, the Litany, and the Office of the Dead completing the full cycle. The Bohun Psalters, the Alphonso Psalter, the Taymouth Hours, the Queen Mary Psalter, and the Book of Hours of Richard III all deploy the Sarum calendar. Through this rite every Plantagenet child was taught to pray; through its cadences every royal household structured daily time under God. The attribution of its origins to St Osmund (d. 1099) is a medieval tradition seriously questioned by modern scholarship, which assigns the first written codification to Richard Poore in the early thirteenth century.
Why it still matters
The Sarum Hours of the Virgin remains one of the most complete and beautiful structures for daily prayer in the Western Christian tradition; modern editions, digital facsimiles, and online chant resources make all eight hours fully accessible, and their rhythm of praise, intercession, and surrender can anchor any Christian's day regardless of denomination.
Kept alongside
Orthodox Psalter (Chasoslovnyi Psaltyr)
Псалтирь
The complete Psalter, divided into twenty kathismata, was read through weekly at Orthodox services and served as the foundational personal devotional text across the entire Romanov era and the whole of Byzantine-Slavic Christianity. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich kept the Psalter among his personal desk-books alongside the Horologion, as documented by the Presidential Library of Russia. Empress Alexandra's Bible in Church Slavonic, recovered at Ekaterinburg with underlined passages and dried herbs pressed between pages, testifies to the Psalter's intimate daily use during captivity. The Psalter was also the primary text from which the Romanov children learned to read Church Slavonic.
Te Deum laudamus
The great Latin hymn of praise and thanksgiving, performed at Napoleon's coronation Mass by Paisiello on 2 December 1804, at his Italian coronation in Milan on 26 May 1805, and ordered sung in all diocesan churches after each major imperial victory. Napoleon issued formal letters mandating the Te Deum after key battles, and Jean-François Le Sueur composed a solemn setting for the imperial court chapel. The attribution to Nicetas of Remesiana, long standard, was conclusively challenged by Ernst Kähler in 1958 and the hymn is now considered anonymous; its late 4th-century date and Ambrosian stylistic milieu are not in dispute. The text moves from the praise of the heavenly court to intercession for the Church militant, ending with a sustained sequence of psalm verses.
Seven Penitential Psalms
Septem Psalmi Poenitentiales
The Seven Penitential Psalms are a sub-group of the canonical Psalter — Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 (De Profundis), and 143 — collected by Cassiodorus and declared a standard Lenten devotion by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). They appear in virtually every surviving royal and noble Book of Hours between 1250 and 1550 as a fixed section following the Office of the Virgin, and were also recited publicly by penitents in church. They express the sinner's plea for mercy and forgiveness across the full range of human distress — sickness, sin, shame, desolation — and were believed to shorten souls' time in Purgatory, giving them urgent personal relevance for nobility who prayed daily for deceased family members. Their presence across every corner of medieval European devotional practice makes them the most universally transmitted prayer texts in the entire Books of Hours tradition.