Burying the Alleluia

Before Septuagesima the medieval choirs buried the Alleluia, which was not sung again until Easter. In one form of the rite, at Nones on the Saturday, the choristers went in procession with crosses, torches, holy water and incense, carrying a turf like a coffin through the choir, and went howling to the cloister to bury it. Hone took the account from Fosbroke’s British Monachism, which cited Ernulphus’s annals of Rochester Cathedral, and added a story that in a Paris church a choir boy whipped a top marked Alleluia from one end of the choir to the other.