English Chorister: A History

Boy choristers have sung the daily liturgy in English cathedrals and collegiate churches for fourteen hundred years. They are treasured as a unique part of our religious and cultural heritage, unmatched anywhere else in the world. Yet their history, in cathedrals and monasteries, in royal and collegiate chapels, from the middle ages, through the upheavals of the Reformation, in Georgian neglect and Victorian revival, to their CD-celebrated triumphs of today and the introduction of girls, has never before been told. The English Chorister, with its vivid, sometimes bizarre, sometimes hilarious detail, will interest musicologists, church historians and a wide general readership.

Alan Mould is an ex-headmaster of St John’s College choir school, Cambridge. His other publications include Choirs and Spaces Where They Cling.