Among at least the better-favoured of the English monasteries, their first halfcentury under the Tudor regime appears to have been a period not at all unpropitious. In these houses, numbers of monks or canons appear to have been predominantly stable, sources of revenue were secure, and provision was made for higher education in the universities for the younger monks able to benefit thereby. This prevailing level of stability and even vitality sufficed to generate and sustain certain instances of the promotion of real intellectual and artistic enterprise. One which hitherto has been somewhat overlooked was the recognition at many houses of the value of making provision for incorporating within the liturgical service the performance of a newly invented body of virtuoso polyphonic music, generated for the purpose and executed by teams of expert singers specially trained. The greatest houses led the way in accomplishing this, subjecting from about 1480 onwards small-scale provision already made during the preceding 100 years or so (for the execution of a less demanding repertory) to major transformation and expansion. Hereby they established an example soon to be emulated eagerly at other houses great, middling, and even small. The grandeur of their liturgical service, most particularly on festivals and in honour of the Blessed Virgin, was something in which the monastics were by now electing to take a constructive and emphatic pride.

In respect of its artistic content this was not a departure inaugurated and developed on the initiative of the monastics themselves. Rather, they were adapting to their own circumstances an enterprise generated a little earlier by the musicians of the secular Church, and it was common (though not universal) for the monks to draw on and engage the expertise of professional lay musicians in their adoption of these developments within their own churches. By the 1530s this degree of enterprise had succeeded in producing a culture of liturgical and musical observance of genuine significance.