Almost no music survives from the English Jesuit colleges (indeed very little at all has come down from the European Jesuit colleges as a whole from the period 1550-1773), so the importance of the Selosse Manuscript for the history of English Catholic music, and Catholic music in general, cannot be overstated. The manuscript provides evidence to suggest that there may have been a link between Catholic and Protestant musical circles at a time when penal laws made life for English Catholics extremely difficult.