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he was not just transcribing mechanically, and possibly that he was using the treble
clef to cater for the bass viol.
A fifth type consists of arrangements of songs. They are mostly put down an
octave in the alto clef without text, though there are several cases where the text
was retained. One piece, ‘Strike up drowsy gut scrapers’, was copied out at its
original pitch (Item V; no. 28) and then arranged for gamba (Item VI; no. 31).
Unfortunately, Hand B got the transposition wrong: he put it down a tenth rather
than an octave, one of several mistakes of this sort. Most of the songs seem to
have been taken from printed songs books, which helps with dating. In particular,
Hand B copied a number of songs from Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth, or Pills to
Purge Melancholy, transposing them down an octave in the alto clef. This has the
potential to date Items III, V, VI and X. The songs in Items III and X were first
published in the 1699 edition of Pills, but ‘Strike up drowsy gut scrapers’ (Item
V/28) did not appear until the 1707 edition, and ‘Have you seen battledore play’
(Item VI; no. 32) was not included until the 1719 collected edition, Songs Compleat,
Pleasant and Divertive. 39 One suspects that Hand B obtained all of them from a
single copy of the 1719 edition; if so, it would place these items much later that at
first sight appears.
The last category comes in Item XIII. A new hand, F (which could be a later
version of Hand B) wrote five pieces (nos. 65-69) in score, treble and bass. At first
sight they appear to be for keyboard or possibly violin and bass. Nos. 68 and 69
have a few chords added below the melody, which could easily be thought of as
for keyboard, but they also fit easily on the bass viol down the octave. It is likely
that this copyist (assuming that he was not the same person as Hand B) was also a
gamba player because the last two pieces (nos. 70 and 71) are solo gamba versions
of the popular song ‘When the king enjoys his own again’; there is also a version
of it in score (no. 66). This is interesting because the tune was particularly
associated with the potential, and then the actual, Restoration of Charles II in
1660, and later with the fortunes of the Tories, and even the Jacobites: a broadside
of 1719 set to the tune calls for sympathy for the Old Pretender on his marriage to
Maria Sobieska. 40 Does this mean that Hand F (or B) was a Tory, or even had
Jacobite sympathies?
The most surprising discovery is that two pieces in Item XIII are by Handel.
No. 67 is the two-part Minuet in G minor HWV534, while no. 68 is the Minuet
from The Water Music HWV348/7, but in C major rather than F major [Illus. 1].
It is not clear how the copyist obtained them. The G minor minuet was not
published until 1729, when it appeared in A General Collection of the Minuets Made for
the Balls at Court, the Operas and Masquerades, though the version printed there is not
39 For the editions of Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, see C.L. Day and E.B. Murrie,
English Song Books 1651-1702: a Bibliography (London, 1940), 117-118, 121, 131-132, 133-140, 142-
153, nos. 182, 188, 203, 204, 208, 210A, 213-216, 218, 222-224, 227, 228, 231-240, 242. There is a
reprint of Songs Compleat, Pleasant and Divertive (London, 1871).
40 C.M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick NJ, 1966), 764-768.
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