JOHN PLAYFORD AND MUSIC BOOKSELLING

London was the unrivalled centre of England’s book trade in the seventeenth century, with traders concentrated around St Paul’s churchyard and the surrounding areas. The principal music bookshops were located around the Inns of Court. Ned Ward (1667–1731), satirical writer and author of the London Spy, provides a lively contemporary description of such music shops:

Bookshops varied in physical form and in the sorts of customers for whom they catered: counters, shelves of bound and unbound books, and a variety of pictures and prints all feature in illustrations showing the interior of booksellers’ shops from this period.Footnote ¹⁰ Roger North recalls that John Carr’s music shop included ‘a secretary’s office . . . for wrighting the theatricall tunes, to accomodate learners and country fidlers’.Footnote ¹¹

Bookshops fulfilled not only a commercial purpose, but were also important social centres in this period, providing public access to and opportunities to exchange printed materials as well as continuing manuscript circulation practices, and were designed to attract customers to browse and swap news. In his diary Samuel Pepys describes the nature of customers’ encounters in John Playford’s shop in the Inner Temple Churchyard: writing on 25 May 1661, he tells us he went ‘at noon to the Temple; where I stayed and looked over a book or two at Playfords and then to the Theatre’.Footnote ¹² Reading in the premises before choosing whether to buy was a common part of the customers’ experience: on 8 May 1663, Pepys ‘sat till one a-clock, reading at Playford’s in Dr Ushers Body of Divinity his discourse of the Scripture’.Footnote ¹³ Exchange of books as well as second-hand purchases were both familiar aspects of the bookshop trade. On 13 February 1660, Pepys did just this at Playford’s shop: ‘I went to Playfords; and for two books that I had and 6s. 6d. to boot, I had my great book of songs, which he sells always for 14s.’Footnote ¹⁴ The lending of books also appears to have been one of the services of the general bookshop. Francis Kirkman (1632–c. 1680), a bookseller and writer, advertised his shop just outside Temple Bar in 1669 as a place where ‘you may be furnished with all the Plays that were ever yet Printed, and all sorts of Histories and romances, which you may buy or have lent you to read on reasonable Considerations. Also you may have ready Money for any Library, or other parcel of Books.’Footnote ¹⁵ Playford also appears to have loaned books for a fee: a reference in the Treasurer’s Accounts of Westminster Abbey for 1661 reads: ‘To John Playford for a sett of Mr Barnards collections of services and Anthemes conteyning tenn Bookes in ffolio bound in rough Leather with one Quire of Ruled Paper xiiil xs and for the Loane of another sett for foure or five Sundayes and for Portage and carrying them xs in all xiiiil.’Footnote ¹⁶

Playford’s home doubled as a site to sell and promote his books. The home was an important outlet for the wares of stationers in seventeenth-century London, as it could be used as a place of meeting and discussion. Playford, an enthusiastic amateur musician in his own right, was heavily involved in the London music-making communities of the 1650s and used his home to host music meetings. There is no evidence that Playford used his earliest dwellings for such a function, but the family’s move to Islington in 1656, where his wife set up a boarding school, provided the opportunity for the stationer to host musical gatherings.Footnote ¹⁷ In the preface of his devotional song anthology Cantica Sacra . . . The Second Sett (1674), Playford described musical gatherings in his home:

Bookselling was not, however, limited to London and the city’s customers. The general book trade included shops across the country and temporary stalls in markets or on the open street by chapmen across the country. Oxford, and to a lesser extent Cambridge, had university publishing houses that produced a small amount of contemporary printed music, including Henry Bowman’s Songs (1678) and Thomas Mace’s Musicks Monument (1676) respectively. In the early seventeenth century, Robert Martin operated as a journeyman for the London bookseller Henry Fetherstone,Footnote ¹⁹ and William London, a Newcastle-based bookseller, advertised music books in his 1657 catalogue.Footnote ²⁰ However, little is known of the networks between the London-based music publishers and wholesalers and the provincial booksellers and customers.Footnote ²¹ Henry Playford listed a ‘Mr. Dolliff Bookbinder in Oxford’ as a supplier of the publisher’s 1690 sale catalogue, indicating at least one working relationship with a bookseller outside London.Footnote ²² It is possible that the specialist nature of the music publishing trade required different methods of dissemination from the general book trade. Provincial cathedral musicians such as Daniel Henstridge may have acted as a conduit for printed music in a similar way as the scribal networks that operated for liturgical and instrumental consort music.Footnote ²³ Provincial booksellers were certainly still important for at least the binding of music books and provision of manuscript paper.Footnote ²⁴ A handful of surviving trade bills and receipts indicate that the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral relied almost exclusively on local book traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are references to ‘mending and putting paper’ into anthem books by the Durham bookseller William Werdon in March 1691, and a bill in May 1692 from Durham-based Joshua Hughes includes ‘new binding of four books for the organ and quire’. A bill of books to the cathedral from William Werdon covering November 1693 to July 1694 includes a ‘quire of large ruled paper by Mr Owen’ and ‘4 anthem books got by Mr Greggs for ye boys’. Further bills including for large ruled paper and binding anthem books survive for 1694–6.Footnote ²⁵

William London, a bookseller in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 1650s, published A Catalogue of Most Vendible Books (1657, with supplements in 1658 and 1660). London’s catalogues contain over 3,700 titles, probably ‘the most extensive stock of any North of England bookseller before the eighteenth century’,Footnote ²⁶ and includes nineteen music-related publications – ten published or primarily sold by John Playford. Such evidence demonstrates that at least some music books were sold by booksellers outside London, and that there was sufficient market demand for such books to be stocked. Instrument sellers outside London may also have sold manuscripts and prints as part of their trade. There is good evidence that instrument makers were based in provincial centres as well as London. Thomas Britton mentions a viol-maker in Oxford,Footnote ²⁷ and more recently, Christopher Marsh has listed fourteen instrument-makers in Bristol during the early modern period.Footnote ²⁸ Marsh suggests individuals may have joined their instrument-making skills with other trades such as wood-working, indicating that music was not their sole industry. However, no evidence of bookselling as a by-product of this trade has yet come to light.

Another avenue through which consumers could obtain music books was professional music teachers. Some teachers certainly sold instruments – Pepys received ‘two new great Ivory pipes’ from flageolet-teacher Thomas Greeting on 19 July 1667, for example.Footnote ²⁹ Teachers may have sold printed books, particularly copies of their own compilations, published ‘for the Author’. John Moss’s Lessons for the basse-viol (1671) was printed ‘for the Author’ and consisted of 104 pieces in tablature and arranged to take the player through ‘all [the] Keys usually play’d on in the scale’. Moss dedicated the book to his father, and presented it with an address to his scholars, ‘this way to ease myself of so many tedious Transcripts’.Footnote ³⁰ Such self-publications primarily intended for a teacher’s pupils were not new during this period, and in fact, there are fewer books of this type produced in the middle decades of the seventeenth century than at the beginning or the end of the century. The printing and publishing of music by teachers for pupils seems to have gained momentum in the second half of the seventeenth century, probably due to the developments in cheap and more accessible engraving technology as well as the influx of foreign musicians seeking to make a living as freelance musicians.Footnote ³¹ Roger North recalled that Nicola Matteis in the 1670s had ‘found out a way of getting mony which was perfectly new. For seeing his lessons, (which were all duos), take with his scollars, and that most gentlemen desired them, he was at some charge to have them graven in copper, and printed in oblong octavos.’Footnote ³² Nicola Matteis used engraving techniques for printing single compositions for his students and subsequently collecting the sheets together into a book for the public print market. As Richard Leppert has highlighted, ‘music teachers wrote tutors not only to augment their income from direct sales, but also in the hope of attracting new students from the books’ readership’.Footnote ³³ The German composer Gerhard Diesineer similarly published his [Instrumental Ayrs in Three, and Four Parts] around 1680, which contained music written ‘for the Use and Practice of my Scholars; and the little Consort of Music I often have at my owne House, to entertaine my Friends’.Footnote ³⁴ Pietro Reggio’s The Art of Singing (1677) is another treatise undoubtedly published to augment the musician’s teaching services. Many title pages of these self-publications list the composer’s home as a venue for obtaining a copy of the book, but composers were undoubtedly still reliant upon the bookshop network for wider public exposure, with business relationships that were necessarily financially beneficial for all parties.

The majority of these books are self-publications published by the composer-teacher rather than a music publisher, which suggests such a genre was not the most commercially successful product of the time.Footnote ³⁵ John Playford certainly seems to have decided not to publish such single-composer pedagogical books following Matthew Locke’s Little Consort (1653). It is unclear whether Matteis or his contemporaries suggested other printed music books to their pupils, or acted as agents between pupils and booksellers, although this is possible. John Playford thanked composers who contributed to his Choice Ayres and Songs . . . The Second Book (1679) ‘for their Assistance in promoting this Work’.Footnote ³⁶ Playford clearly hoped teachers would use his books as a teaching resource. In Musick’s Hand-maid (1678) Playford suggests that ‘For the satisfaction of the aforesaid persons, and likewise for the ease of such Teachers, who account it too much pains to write down all that is necessary for their Scholars, I have in this new Edition adventured to publish the following Instructions’.Footnote ³⁷

Amateur musicians living outside London may have relied upon London family members, friends or agents rather than teachers to supply them with music books. We lack surviving evidence during Playford’s publishing years, but these networks are highly probable, based on evidence primarily from surviving household accounts from both the early seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Agents of the Cavendish family located instruments and music books during London visits between 1601 and 1606, for example, and William Byrd and John Cooper acted as agents in locating music books for their pupils and patrons.Footnote ³⁸ Sir Christopher Hatton III had direct dealings with the music supplier Robert Martin in 1638.Footnote ³⁹ In the eighteenth century, Charles Avison in Newcastle supplied printed music and manuscript paper for the Bowes family at Gibside.Footnote ⁴⁰ Pepys was certainly asked by provincial relations to supply musical instruments:

THE PRINTED MUSIC-BOOK MARKET

With a range of possibilities for the music customer to pick up a book, from the bookshop either in or outside London, from their teacher, agent, or through networks of friends and relatives, it is quite possible that Playford’s music books circulated far beyond the cultural sphere of the capital. An analysis of his books gives us insight into the types of customers whom Playford was at least attempting to entice to buy one of his books, their gender, occupation, wealth and musical ability. Over 200 music publications were produced in England between 1650 and 1700,Footnote ⁴² and the Playfords were responsible for the largest contribution by a single business. Many of these books were published in numerous editions or reprints, indicating a flourishing market, particularly when the majority were printed using the laborious method of movable type. The printed music-book fulfilled a number of musical functions, some of them potentially overlapping, and they were used by a variety of different consumers. Playford appears to have relied upon professional men, gentlemen students, and ladies as the clientele for the majority of his music output, although his customer base was not limited to these. Cathedral choirs were reliant on specific publications following the Restoration, purchased from Playford: John Barnard’s The First Book of Selected Church Musick (1641) and Thomas Tomkins’s Musica Deo Sacra (1668) are recorded in a number of cathedral account books as sold by Playford.Footnote ⁴³ The parish-church congregation was also catered for by Playford, with his Psalms & Hymns in Solemn Musick of Foure Parts (1671), and more successfully, The Whole Book of Psalmes in Three Parts (1677).Footnote ⁴⁴

The amateur male and female beginner has long been regarded as the main customer cohort of Playford’s market. Certainly the printed music book was available to anyone with the financial capacity to purchase it, although the market was undoubtedly a tiny percentage of the population. Robert D. Hume has suggested that few members of the British population around 1700 were likely to have had enough spare money to indulge in expensive culture,Footnote ⁴⁵ and some may not have been interested in cultural activities, so the percentage specifically interested in music or who were even musically literate must have been even smaller. The narrow concentration of the population able to purchase cultural goods was limited to members of the upper class and the ‘middling sort’, the latter being a contemporary term applied to such persons who ‘fell, economically, somewhere between artisans (who lived a notch above subsistence level) and the gentry’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This section of the population included gentlemen, merchants, persons in office (including parliament, army and navy) and the law, clergymen and artisans. The magnitude of cultural consumption among these groups is difficult to establish. Not only are patterns of spending personal, but Hume highlights the differentiation between habitual and sporadic purchasers of culture: most ‘could indulge in relatively cheap books or amusements but could not regularly afford expensive ones’.Footnote ⁴⁷ A certain level of financial outlay is essential for the practising of music in order to fund resources such as instruments (including second-hand instruments), teachers and manuscript paper, not to mention manuscript-copying services and printed music books. The customer base for printed music books in seventeenth-century England must have been small and, of course, not all levels of musical society were reliant on print, with the continuing tradition of scribal networks and recreational music based on oral transmission still playing a significant role in the cultural lives of the majority.Footnote ⁴⁸

Evidence of the amateur clientele of Playford’s printed stock chiefly comes from the prefatory material of the books themselves as well as a few contemporary source references. The placement of the Playford business and the music shop of John Carr around the Inns of Court was an ideal location for attracting the young gentlemen students. Both the Middle Temple and Inner Temple shared their daily services in the Temple church, and Playford’s shop, located under the arch of the Temple Church Porch at the West End, must have depended much upon these potential customers. Playford’s first music book, The English Dancing Master (1651), was addressed to the ‘Gentlemen of the Innes of Court’ for ‘much commend it [dancing] to be Excellent for Recreation, after more serious Studies, making the body active and strong, gracefull in deportment, and a quality very much beseeming a Gentlemen’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, Playford’s Court Ayres (1655) is dedicated to ‘the most accomplish’d Gentleman, William Ball, Esq. (eldest Son of Sir Peter Ball) of the Middle-Temple’, and the contents ‘have bin graced with performance of your part’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Music meetings were numerous during this period, although most surviving evidence naming individual musicians reports on meetings held between professional musicians and highly musically skilled amateurs in London and cathedral cities.Footnote ⁵¹ Less musically educated amateurs probably met informally with friends in such venues as taverns and coffee-houses, providing important centres for community identities of urban professional men. Michelle O’Callaghan has highlighted the social basis of the early seventeenth-century tavern societies in the Inns of Court, which ‘were home to a new class of lawyers eager to fashion a professional identity in which notions of fellowship, civility, and gentility were vital constituents’.Footnote ⁵² Music was a principal form of entertainment at many of these male convivial gatherings, and numerous contemporary accounts refer to music-making in taverns by a wide range of people. Pepys, for example, described ‘the King’s Head, the great musique-house’ at Greenwich,Footnote ⁵³ and Roger North referred to a tavern near St Paul’s where ‘some shopkeepers and foremen came weekly to sing in consort, and to hear, and injoy ale and tobacco; and after some time the audience grew strong’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such groups presumably found it more difficult to obtain music without the strong personal connections and networks associated with the more formal music meetings of professional and gentleman amateur. Both print and manuscript publication, either bought, borrowed or hired, would have been useful for these individuals. Playford’s Catch that Catch can was based on the repertories of more formal music meetings held in the 1640s and 1650s and the published series was aimed at such a ‘Mutuall Society of Friends in a Modest Recreation’, suggesting a market demand to emulate the popular repertory of such musical gatherings.Footnote ⁵⁵ John Hilton noted in the first edition that ‘Catches and Catchers were never so much in request’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Roger North, on describing the tavern meeting near St Paul’s, mentioned that ‘their musick was chiefly out of Playford’s Catch Book’ and that ‘this shewed an inclination of the citisens to follow musick’.Footnote ⁵⁷

A different sort of evidence survives for the users of printed beginner instrumental books: the title-page illustrations often depict the expected performers of the books’ contents, providing important information about associations of gender. Series such as The Pleasant Companion, Musick’s Delight on the Cithren and The Division Violin clearly portray male music enthusiasts. Depicted sitting at a table with instrument in hand, the gentleman hovers over a book learning how to play. Either on the table or hanging on the wall behind are other instruments, representing other (possible) accomplishments of the musical amateur. Women are seldom represented alone,Footnote ⁵⁸ but performing as a singer or keyboard player as part of an ensemble with a gentleman amateur, such as in the Musick’s Hand-maid and Deliciae Musicae series. Such depictions of female amateurs performing in musical ensembles were probably designed more for the marketing of the book to both male and female amateurs than illustrating commonplace performing contexts, as much female music-making during this period is thought to have been solitary.Footnote ⁵⁹ Musical skill was clearly regarded as an accomplishment to gain in the pursuit of a husband: as Andrew Woolley notes, female owners of music manuscripts ‘tended to be unmarried as they often sign them [the manuscripts] with maiden names’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Social pressures were clearly a motivation for women to obtain musical skill, an ability that the contemporary female writer Hannah Woolley thought was essential as without it ‘a Lady or Gentlewoman can hardly be said to be absolutely accomplished’.Footnote ⁶¹

Many of Playford’s books appear to be marketed at the ‘middling sort’ of amateurs with little or no musical literacy. While A Musicall Banquet (1651) contains a list of teachers in London with Playford’s advice that ‘the successe in the practick part [of music]; would be obtained by the help of an able Master’,Footnote ⁶² the majority of his amateur books suggest the cutting down on costs for the ‘middling’ amateur. As early as Thomas Robinson’s Schoole of Musicke (1603), printed tutor books claimed to spare readers the cost of hiring teachers as they began to learn the lute, bandora, orpharion or viola da gamba, promising to show them ‘how you may be your owne instructor . . ., without any other teacher’.Footnote ⁶³ The clientele in mind for such books must have included ‘recreational musicians for whom regular payments to visiting tutors were close to the limit of what seemed affordable’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This long tradition of music books aimed at the amateur and for the most readily available instruments and for voice, with many providing rudimentary directions for self-instruction, was continued with John Playford supplying such books for lyra viol, cittern, gittern, harpsichord and violin. The second edition of Musick’s Hand-maid (1678) included ‘Instructions for the Learner on the Virginal or Harpsichord to Play by Book’, for

Playford’s beginner instrumental books have long been described as meeting the needs of the beginner amateur without the need of a teacher, with the books containing rudimentary instructions covering basic musical literacy, reading notation, understanding pitch, and basics specific to each instrument. Advertisements such as ‘A Brief and Plain Introduction to the Skill of Musick. By which Book may have learn’d to Sing, and Play on the Bass-Viol, and also on the Treble-Violin, without the Assistance of any Teachers’ further suggest the ability to learn music without a teacher.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, Playford subtly distinguishes between the learning of music theory by book study and the ‘practick part’ of playing with the aid of a master. There are numerous passing references to teachers or to further study in the prefaces of his beginner instrumental books. The well-known list of teachers in A Musicall Banquet (1651) is prefaced with this statement:

Playford further advises the supervision of a teacher in later instrumental beginner books. In Musicks Hand-maid (1678), for example, he suggests the assistance of a teacher, ‘having briefly set down these plain and useful Instructions, for such as learn on the Virginal or Harpsichord, I doubt not but by putting them in practice, and a little assistance from an able Master, they may in a short time learn to play all these Lessons by Book’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Thomas Greeting, in his Pleasant Companion series (published and sold by Playford), similarly suggests that ‘though at first it may seem difficult to Beginners, yet the Practice of a few Hours, observing these following Directions, and a little assistance of a skilful Master, the knowledge hereof may be readily obtained’,Footnote ⁶⁹ suggesting that a teacher to complement his book provided potential employment, as Greeting was a London-based flageolet teacher. Greeting points towards Playford’s Introduction for further theoretical study: ‘If what is said here concerning the Common Time be not sufficient to instruct a Beginner, I refer him to Mr. Playford’s Introduction to the Skill of Musick, where he may not only be instructed in this, and the Triple Time, but in all the Grounds of Musick, both Vocal and Instrumental.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Rather than replacing the teacher, Playford’s beginner instrumental books appear to provide rudimentary instruction with accompanying lessons and tunes that are a complement to at least some music lessons with a teacher for the absolute beginner, similar to modern-day tutor books.Footnote ⁷¹ Music teachers must have been available outside London, at least in regional centres, although records tend to lack specific details beyond the description of musician.Footnote ⁷² A counter-example is of William Smith (d. 1646), a musician who ‘techt childre [sic] to play of the virgeners’ in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.Footnote ⁷³ Only in Apollo’s Banquet, a beginner violin book, does Playford suggest there is no need for a teacher in the learning of the violin, which the publisher describes as ‘the only Instrument in fashion, and the delight of most Young Practitioners in Musick’ – a marketing strategy perhaps? In the preface to his fifth edition, Playford outlines

Another type of customer for Playford was the collector. A number of presentation copies survive, including Psalmes & Hymns (1671) ‘humbly presented’ by John Playford to ‘the R^t Hon^ble S^r Francis North, his Majesties Solicitor Generall’ held at the British Library.Footnote ⁷⁵ The survival of such presentation copies, flawless and evidently unused, links with the contemporary culture of collecting and the rise in antiquarianism.Footnote ⁷⁶ Samuel Pepys is a prime example of a consumer in the urban elite in pursuit of luxury goods, and the discrepancies between his library catalogue and diary entries demonstrates the difference between antiquarian and educational functions of music books. Table 1 lists English music publications issued between 1650 and 1700 that form part of Pepys’s library collection, as taken from Robert Latham’s catalogue.Footnote ⁷⁷ In addition to these books, we know from Pepys’s diary entries that he owned, or had use of, further music books, listed in Table 2. A comparison of these two tables certainly suggests a distinction made by Pepys between books for personal musical development and those suitable for a library collection. Both the library catalogue and diary have a combination of vocal and instrumental publications, but the type of printed music book differs between those referred to in the diary entries and those in the library catalogue. The diary refers to numerous Playford beginner instrumental music lesson books and song anthologies such as Musick’s Hand-maid (1663) and Catch that Catch can (1667), as opposed to the more monumental single-composer volumes in the library catalogue, including Purcell’s Sonnata’s of III Parts (1683). It is interesting to note that Henry Lawes’s Ayres and Dialogues volumes appear in the diary between 1660 and 1665 as important sources Pepys consulted for songs, but that the collected Henry Lawes works in Playford’s three-volume Treasury of Musick (1669) is the only vestige of the composer’s output in the library catalogue. The distortions between Pepys’s library and diary are possibly due to the fact that the diary only covers the 1660s whereas the library collection was amassed over Pepys’s lifetime: it is probable that his musical and collecting interests changed between the 1660s, when he was an active musician, and the 1690s, when he was primarily a bibliophile. However, this contrast between music books mentioned in Pepys’s diary and those gathered into his library does highlight a distinction he made between those books used daily for pedagogical and recreational purposes and the important ‘collectable’ volumes.

Table 1

English music publications (1650–1700) recorded in Samuel Pepys’s library

Source: Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, ed. R. Latham, iv: Music, Maps and Calligraphy (Cambridge, 1989).

Table 2

English music publications mentioned in Samuel Pepys’s diary

Source: The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews.

^a S. Godman, ‘Greeting’s “Pleasant Companion for the Flagelet”’, Monthly Musical Record, 86 (1956), pp. 20–6.

PRINTED MUSIC-BOOK OWNERSHIP

Identifying individual amateurs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been severely limited by the paucity of surviving sources.Footnote ⁷⁸ Few references provide information beyond a name and an instrument, and they have no guarantee of the instrument’s use; for example, one Christopher Cooke of Keverstone, Durham, is known to have owned a ‘great pair of virginals’, but no other information survives of his musical activities.Footnote ⁷⁹ References to the ownership of music manuscripts or printed books are even more scarce. Pepys refers to ‘some very good song=bookes’ in the collection of Mr Davis, a navy office clerk and the storekeeper at Deptford – our only known reference to Mr Davis owning music books, and containing no indication of what music he owned or whether he used the books.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, an examination of a selection of surviving printed sources brings to light new information about contemporary ownership of printed music books in late seventeenth-century England, which can aid our understanding of the types of consumers that formed Playford’s market as well as hinting at the reception and dissemination of musical texts across geographical and social boundaries.

Study of the evidence identifying the provenance of printed music texts has been largely overlooked until recently, despite the abundance of book-history research exploring marginalia and readership, undoubtedly due to the infrequent presence of annotations and marks of ownership in extant copies.Footnote ⁸¹ Marginalia allow us to explore how a printed book is a ‘carrier of relationships’,Footnote ⁸² catching glimpses of individuals and tracing relationships between friends and patrons, booksellers and customers, professional and amateur musicians.

My survey of English music publications produced between 1650 and 1700 included the examination of 275 surviving copies of printed music books,Footnote ⁸³ and revealed only sixty-two sources containing annotations of any sort. This is a relatively small sample to help us understand the function and use of these books by their contemporary consumers. The lack of annotations in surviving copies may suggest an absence of use but it might also indicate the loss of potentially heavily used or annotated copies partly due to modern library trends of collecting ‘neat’, clean copies. Monique Hulvey has pointed out that ‘the destruction of manuscript annotations reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when printed leaves were washed and bleached in a concerted effort to “clean” the margins of the books, and the edges were cropped as much as possible in rebinding, in order to get rid of all the “mutilating” marks’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In addition, Jonathan Wainwright has highlighted that ‘music was rarely included in general library catalogues of the period (except for theoretical music books); it seems that music was regarded as “performing material” and was therefore kept separate from the main body of a library collection (possibly stored in moveable chests)’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In addition, music books may have been seen in a similar light to pamphlets or sermons, which were frequently not regarded as valuable and were discarded after use or by subsequent generations of the family.

Few copies contain performance or educational annotations similar in scale to modern-day markings found regularly on equivalent musical scores. The British Library copy of A Choice Collection of Ayres for the Harpsichord or Spinet (1700) is unusual for its numerous scribblings, including ‘Excellent’ against many of the pieces, suggesting that the print may have been used as a teaching resource or an indication of the user’s fondness for the contents.Footnote ⁸⁶ Surviving annotations more often than not involve corrections of misprints, implying stop-press alterations and hand-corrections either in the print shop or by people studying different copies. Examples include William King’s Poems of Mr. Cowley and Others (1668) and Henry Purcell’s Dioclesian (1691).Footnote ⁸⁷ Other annotations mostly offer illegible scribbles; however, there are a handful of handwritten additions worth noting. Blank staves inserted by the printer to fill up a page after the end of a piece were sometimes used by early owners to write out ornamentation, transposed parts or additional pieces. One of the most extensive examples of such staff-notated marginalia in late seventeenth-century English printed music books is the Library of Congress copy of The Theater of Music . . . The Fourth and Last Book (1687). Here the blank staves were used to copy out a tune, presented upside down and with apparently no correlation to its surrounding printed counterparts.

Few contemporary signatures of owners or bookplates remain, and the survival of such marginalia does not necessarily guarantee identification: to whom did the initials ‘JJ’ in the Huntington Library copy of Comes Amoris . . . The Fifth Book (1694) belong, for example? Many of the music books that have survived are copies originally in the libraries of book collectors and antiquaries, and the absence of annotations in these copies is hardly surprising as they may have been primarily purchased as a status symbol or for interest, study and collection rather than performance. They should therefore be looked at with caution as they tend to emphasise a certain type of owner – the practising musician and highly educated amateur – and are consequently not representative of typical household music collections. Furthermore, the only printed music book produced by subscription during this period for which a subscription list survives is not a typical music book: 300 subscribers are registered in the preface of Thomas Mace’s academic publication Musick’s Monument (1676), with almost half of these subscribers connected to Mace’s institution, the University of Cambridge.Footnote ⁸⁸

Interest in antiquarian material by music collectors often dates from the late 1640s, when many were excluded from other responsibilities due to the tumult of the Civil Wars and abandonment of the Court. The only survey of music collectors from the seventeenth century is Alec Hyatt King’s 1963 list of Some British Collectors of Music c. 1600–1900. The inventory listed in Tables 3 and 4, the details of which have been compiled from various sources including the books themselves, serves as an addition to King’s research and acts as an initial record of provenance marks in surviving seventeenth-century English music publications upon which future research can build. Table 3 lists known music owners in England in the seventeenth century, most of whom were professional musicians, highly educated amateurs of an elite social class, and academics: King states that ‘collectors of this period were to be found not solely in academic circles, but also among the country gentlemen’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thomas Hamond and Robert Orme fall into this latter category, but their ownership of printed sources, as opposed to manuscripts, is undocumented. The amateur ‘small-coal’ musician Thomas Britton is a rare example of a ‘common tradesman skilled in the arts and . . . an antiquary armed with a first-rate library’,Footnote ⁹⁰ undoubtedly the primary source of material for his concert series. A copy of John Playford’s Dancing Master (1665) was owned by the parish of Warnham in West Sussex, but we have no details of when the book was obtained or why,Footnote ⁹¹ although dancing was a popular form of entertainment for a country parish community in early modern England.Footnote ⁹²

Table 3

Known seventeenth-century owners of English printed music books

Table 4

Marks of ownership on examined copies of English printed music books

Table 4 lists both identified and unidentified owners of copies of printed music books examined. This list is dominated by owners about whom nothing is currently known, but the small quantity of identifiable owners provides much evidence concerning contemporary music book ownership. The copy belonging to John Jackson (d. 1689) of The Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (1686), given to the organist at Wells Cathedral as a gift from John Playford, for example, suggests Jackson may have been involved somehow in the preparation of the volume. Francis Withy’s possession of Christopher Simpson’s A Compendium of Practical Musick (1667) bound with his commonplace book clearly indicates the use by the Oxford-based musician, himself a string player and composer of sets of divisions for solo bass viol.Footnote ⁹³ Withy’s copy of Simpson’s Compendium includes the inscription ‘Francis Withey His Booke Octobre 12 1667’ and ‘baght at Mr Jons in Worster’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In contrast, Baron Dartmouth’s possession of a copy of Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius (1687) is undoubtedly due to his political connections to both Charles II and James II. The lack of any practical purpose for the book – a large folio, one-volume, full score of the opera – coupled with no evidence of Dartmouth’s interest or even literacy in music, suggests that ownership of the opera score was more likely a political move than a musical one, showing allegiance and support for royalty and the cultural sphere surrounding it.Footnote ⁹⁵

The list of currently unidentifiable owners includes those whose background is obscure due to indecipherable annotations or an absence of clear provenance: it is unknown who was the initial owner of the Tabley House songbook, for example. Insufficient evidence for the ownership of the British Library copy of Catch that Catch can (1663) means it is impossible to determine the correct John Smith. It is possible that the book belonged to ‘Sir John Smith Barronett’, who was one of the stewards of the 1696 St Cecilia Day celebrations, and whose signature survives on a ticket for the event.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, Table 4 does shed light on a number of issues concerning book ownership in seventeenth-century England. First, it is important to note multiple ownership of a single copy. Examples include at least two owners of the British Library’s The Genteel Companion (1686) and three of Durham University Library’s copy of The Pleasant Companion (1676), two of which provide dates, of 1668 and 1678 respectively, and show evidence of both male and female ownership. In addition, the time span between initial publication date and the dated signature can be large, such as the Huntington Library’s Musick’s Delight on the Cithren, published in 1666 and annotated ‘Jarvis Houghman 1715’, also implying multiple ownership. The absence of additional provenance markings makes it unclear how many people owned this book prior to Houghman. Secondly, the combination of these unidentifiable music-book owners with the prevalence of beginner instrumental music lessons and song anthologies listed in Table 4 may provide a representative sample of the less musically educated amateur of the ‘middling sort’, with both male and female owners represented, and evidence of the dissemination of printed music books outside London. The Royal College of Music’s copy of The Musical Companion (1673) contains the inscription ‘John Day his Book liveing in Letchlade gloucestershei’, and the British Library copy of Youth’s Delight (1697) was the property of ‘Edmundi Herbtiy de Whittlewood in com. Northamptoni’. Table 4 provides the beginnings of reconstructing the fragmented evidence of early music book ownership in seventeenth-century England.