The processional manuals, especially of the English rites observed at Salisbury, York, Canterbury and other cathedral centers, offer descriptions and sometimes illustrations showing the order and vestments of the clergy, the position and functions of the choir, the appropriate acts involved, together with the complete text of the antiphons, psalms, other scriptural passages, hymns, prayers and rubrics. Turning to the processional hymns which were rendered in these centuries, one is impressed by the gradual disappearance of hymns typical of the efforts of the St. Gall school and its contemporaries. A tremendous vogue of the original _Salve festa dies_ of Fortunatus which had never been lost sight of, together with its centos, variants and copies, takes possession of the field. There were in all, perhaps, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty true processional hymns in circulation throughout the whole medieval period, if one enumerates those which are edited in the _Analecta Hymnica_. One half of these may be considered to be of the _Salve festa dies_ type while similar elegiac metrical forms are found in half of the remainder. What has been said of the cultural background in which the sequence developed and multiplied is equally true for the processional hymn. The same influences which created new seasonal feasts and additional feasts for the saints, produced new processional hymns to accompany them. There is, however, a great disparity between the number of sequences and processional hymns that were written. The sequence was regnant in sacred and secular verse, both in Latin and the vernaculars. Office hymns, too, far outnumbered processionals. This may be another way of saying that the office hymns and the sequences had a liturgical function and setting, while the processional was always extra-liturgical and either superfluous or purely ornamental from this point of view. The antiphons and psalms were sufficient to satisfy the essential choral demands of any procession. Unfortunately Thomas Aquinas did not include a processional hymn when he furnished the hymnody for the Feast of Corpus Christi. He could hardly have envisaged the thousands of Corpus Christi processions throughout Catholic Christendom which have marked the Feast even to this day. Nor could he have foreseen that his hymn _Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium_, written in the tradition of Fortunatus, would be widely appropriated for that purpose. Other processionals for Corpus Christi appeared almost at once, especially of the _Salve_ type. Contemporary devotion to the Virgin Mother and her festivals was felt in the expansion of the Marian hymnology for processions. The establishment of St. Osyth in Essex was a center in which new hymns were used for the Visitation, Salve festa dies, toto venerabilis aevo, Qua Christi mater visitat Elizabeth. (_A. H._ 11. 51)