Music for St Cuthbert, ‘Patron Saint of the Faithful North’: The Musical Repertory of St Cuthbert’s Catholic Church, Durham, 1827–1910

270This hymn, so characteristic of Victorian Catholicism in north-east England, can be found in The Parochial Hymn Book of 1883, ¹ a copy of which still survives in the choir loft at St Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic Church, Durham, along with a271 considerable quantity of uncatalogued nineteenth-century manuscript and printed music books. ² Such materials enable us to reconstruct the vibrant musical repertoire of St Cuthbert’s, and thus something of the character of a fairly substantial, but not untypical, Catholic community in nineteenth-century northern England.