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Abstract The more we learn of the Winchester organa the more clearly does the special position of this earliest polyphonic collection emerge. The main corpus as well as most of the additions clearly belong to the first quarter of the eleventh century.The collection is remarkable not only for its size—a total of 174 organa—but also for its systematic arrangement in fascicles, according to genre and the structure of the church year. In both respects it stands in sharp contrast to all of the other sources of polyphonic music copied before the middle of the twelfth century. From the ninth century on different kinds of organum had been dealt with in theoretical texts; however, polyphonic singing evidently belonged to a realm of ad hoc practice which required no written record. And the continental sources imply that, in every sense, the organized collection from Winchester constitutes an exception.
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