The composer Nicholas Ludford was a key composer of Catholic 16th century England, active in the second and third decades of the century. Associated with the major Westminster Abbey and St. Stephens churches, he wrote in a florid contrapuntal style. Comparatively little is known about his life, and his music was not often performed outside of specialist circles until the 2010s. Ludford was born around 1485. He appears in records of renters at a house on King St. near both Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's church, suggesting that he might have been a chorister at one or both of those institutions. In 1521 he joined the Fraternity of St. Nicholas, a kind of musicians' guild, and by 1524 he was employed as a chorister at St. Stephen's, Westminster. Three years later he seems to have been put in charge of music-making at the church, playing the organ (which would play a role in much of his own music) and probably composing choral music as well. Continuing his involvement with St. Margaret's, he was paid in 1533 for a choirbook that included his own compositions as well as those of his major stylistic predecessor, Robert Fayrfax. Ludford has sometimes been regarded as a transitional figure between Fayrfax and the slightly younger John Sheppard.

Ludford was prolific by the standards of the day. He wrote 17 masses, of which eight survive in full and others in fragmentary form. Several of them are Lady Masses, sung in liturgy honoring the Virgin Mary, and some of his motets are connected with the Marian worship that he himself apparently strongly espoused. Ludford, unlike the younger Thomas Tallis, refused to accommodate his music to the demands of simplification associated with the English Reformation, and he apparently wrote no music after 1535. He died, perhaps of influenza, on May 4, 1557, and was buried at St. Margaret's. Forgotten for several centuries, he was rediscovered by musicologists in the 1960s and 1970s, and some of his surviving works were published. The first recording of his music was made by The Cardinall's Musick in 1993. ~ James Manheim, Rovi