(Punctuation and capitalisation according to the Book of Common Prayer.)
We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. |
In Praise of God the Father |
Holy, Holy, Holy : Lord God of Sabaoth; |
The Sanctus from the Mass |
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee. |
In praise of the whole of the Kingdom of God |
The Father : of an infinite Majesty. |
A Trinitarian Doxology |
Thou art the King of glory : O Christ. |
In praise of Christ. |
We therefore pray thee help thy servants : whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. |
A supplication to Christ. |
O Lord save thy people : and bless thine heritage. |
Psalm 28 vv. 8-9 |
Petitions and |
Day by day : we magnify thee; |
Psalm 34 v. 3 |
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Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin. |
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O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us. |
Psalm 123 v. 3 |
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O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee. |
Psalm 32 v. 22 |
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O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded. |
Psalm 31 v. 1 |
The earliest manuscript we have of a complete, musically notated, plainsong setting of the Te Deum dates from the twelfth century and is part of a Carthusian Gradual discovered in a monastic library on the Italian island of Capri. A slightly later document from the Sarum Rite (a liturgical rite peculiar to Salisbury, and a variant of the Roman Rite, which was prevalent across the south of England from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries) is almost identical to its Italian counterpart, despite the geographical distance between the two locations. A very similar thirteenth-century manuscript of a complete Te Deum also exists in the Worcester Antiphoner – a liturgical service book written at Worcester dating from the 1230s. Fragments of the Te Deum also exist in the Musica Enchiriadis, which is an anonymous musical treatise from the ninth century and is the earliest known document to set out guidelines for the notation of music. In this document, occasional verses exist in parallel organum – a system in which one voice chanted the plainsong melody and a second voice provided a descant, but at a fixed interval from the lower voice – usually a perfect fourth or fifth above. There is also an isolated early-English manuscript in which the final few verses of the plainsong melody of the Te Deum are notated, but with two parts above it, again at fixed intervals, essentially generating a progression of identically-spaced chords moving up and down the scale. (Usually 6:3 chords, with occasional 8:5 and 5:3 chords at cadences.) This type of organum is derived from the Notre Dame school in Paris, which was prevalent through the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.