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1701: the last piece in the main sequence is a transposed version of a recorder
sonata by Finger published in that year. 34 The manuscript is labelled ‘Divisions for
y e Bass Violl’ and includes pieces from the traditional bass viol repertory, including
divisions by Christopher Simpson, Peter Young and Withy himself, though it also
includes a good deal of violin and recorder music, including divisions attributed to
Nicola Matteis (a spectacular version of La Folia), and sonatas by Lelio Colista,
Robert King, Finger and fake Corelli – the last probably copied from a collection
published by Roger of Amsterdam in 1697. 35 It is possible that Withy played the
violin and the recorder, or played with other Oxford musicians who did so, but we
cannot discount the possibility that he copied these pieces to provide extra
repertory for his bass viol – again using the octave-transposing treble clef
convention.
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This brings me to GB-Cfm, MU. MS 647, the main subject of this paper. Actually,
it is not a single manuscript, but a collection of thirteen separate items, none larger
than four leaves or two interleaved bifolia. Today, they are collected together in
eight modern bindings, kept in a box, but they seem to have been a loose pile of
papers around 1915, when they were transferred to the Fitzwilliam Museum from
Magdalene College, Cambridge as part of a collection of early eighteenth-century
music prints and manuscripts; for an inventory, see Appendix I. There are a
number of different types and sizes of paper, with different stave rulings, and only
Items II and III have the same watermark. 36 Nevertheless, most of the items seem
to have been together since they were copied, for the main hand, B, occurs in
most of them, and he can be connected with one of the others, Item I, by virtue of
the fact that two of the pieces he copied, ‘M r . Withy’s Trumpet Tune’ and ‘Jigg’
(Item II; nos. 8, 10) were also copied by Hand A (Item I; nos. 1, 3), where no. 1 is
labelled ‘The Trumpet / E Wythie’. It has been suggested that this (and thus the
rest of Hand A’s work in Item I) is an autograph of Edward Withy, Francis
Withy’s probable brother. 37 He is recorded as ‘gentleman’ of Buckland in Berkshire
in a document of 1677, and married into the Catholic Eyston family of East
Hendred, also in Berkshire; several of the Withy family are known to have been
Catholics. I will return to the identity of the main copyist, Hand B, later.
Like the other manuscripts I have been discussing, MU. MS 647 has a mixture
of pieces from the traditional viol repertory, arrangements of vocal music, and
pieces written for other instruments. What is remarkable, however, is the range of
34 The D major sonata, pp. 50-53, is in F major in Finger, Dix sonates, op. 3, no. 8. See Rawson,
‘From Omolouc to London’, ii. 209, no. R1109.
35 The D major sonata, pp. 40-43, is in Sonate à violino solo col basso continuo composta da Arcangelo
Correlli (Amsterdam, 1697), no. 4; see RISM A/I, ii. 214, C 3855; Lesure, Bibliographie des éditions
musicales publiées par Estienne Roger et Michel-Charles Le Cène, 36. For other sources, see the modern
edition, A. Corelli, Historisch-kritische Gesamptausgabe der musikalischen Werke, v: Werke ohne Opuszahl,
ed. H.J. Marx (Cologne, 1976), 90-95, 120-121.
36 I am grateful to Robert Thompson for supplying information about the watermarks.
37 Robert Thompson, personal communication. For Edward Withy, see The Viola da Gamba
Society Index of Manuscripts, vol. 2.
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