I have another similar story! This one kind of blows my mind.<p>In 1978, Corpus Christi College in Oxford, England was being renovated, which involved breaking down a wall that had been standing for centuries.  When they broke open this wall, they found that there was a leaf from a manuscript dating to the 16th century.  It had been stuffed in there as a sort of building material.<p>On this leaf was music, which was quickly identified as being a fragment of a piece by Thomas Tallis (c.1505 - 1585) called <i>Gaude Gloriosa</i>.  The piece is known because it survives in other sources.  It&#x27;s pretty popular among music from the period and several recordings of it have been made in the last 50 years.<p>But what was unexpected is that the text on this leaf was not the same text as we have in the other sources.  This text was in English instead of Latin.  Clearly the composer had reworked his piece to fit a different text.  But what was this other text?  Nobody knew, and the pages they found in this wall were highly incomplete, so they only had a small fragment of this alternate text.<p>The mystery wasn&#x27;t solved until just last year (2015).  A British scholar named David Skinner typed the fragmentary text into Google, and out popped an excerpt from a book.  It turns out the author of the text is Henry VIII&#x27;s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr.  37 years after the discovery of the leaf, and almost 500 years after the actual event, Google allowed scholars to connect the dots on this mystery.<p>(I&#x27;m not 100% sure whether the search that revealed the mystery came from Google books or the regular Google search, since the scholar who did the search didn&#x27;t specify. But since the complete works of Katherine Parr are on Google Books (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;about&#x2F;Katherine_Parr.html?id=cBzuka1QBKkC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;about&#x2F;Katherine_Parr.html?id=...</a>), it seems likely that it was a Google Books search.)<p>By the way, this whole story is being published in an upcoming paper called: ‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies&#x27;: A Tallis Contrafactum in Time of War.  The abstract is available here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;sites&#x2F;researchwebsites&#x2F;tudorpartbooks&#x2F;Abstracts_Tallis.docx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;sites&#x2F;researchwebsites...</a> (scroll to the bottom)