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to have known it to be able to identify it. It is strange that the rest of MU. MS 647
does not appear on Dent’s list, but he may have taken Items XI and XII to stand
for the rest of what was probably a pile of loose papers, or the list may be
incomplete, perhaps because not all the items had been sent to him when he
compiled it, or he was interrupted for some reason in the process of evaluating the
collection.
As it happens, there is evidence that more items were transferred from
Magdalene College to the Fitzwilliam Museum than appear on Dent’s list. MU. MS
641 is a bifolium containing solo bass viol suites in A minor and A major by
Benjamin Hely; all found in The Complete Violist except the air that ends the A
major suite. 56 It seems to have been copied by Hand B of MU. MS 647. MU. MS
643, four mostly blank nested quarto leaves, came from the same source, for the
bass parts of two D major pieces on f. 1, a ‘Minuett’ and a triple-time air marked
‘Slow’, were also copied by Hand B. A third manuscript, MU. MS 645, contains
some more solo gamba music, though the hands do not seem to be found in Mu.
MS 647 and most of it is clearly rather earlier than the rest of the collection. It
consists of two nested bifolia containing (ff. 1-2v) the bass parts of nine
movements by Jenkins in D minor and D major entitled (wrongly) ‘M r . Jenkins 5.
Bell Consort’. 57 A different hand added three preludes for solo bass viol by
Christopher Simpson (ff. 4v-4R), presumably copied from The Division-Violist
(1659) or one of the later editions, 58 and two anonymous dances in D minor for
solo bass viol, ‘An Almaine plain way’ and ‘A Saraband plain way’ (ff. 3vR). 59 A
third and later hand added an untitled and anonymous jig in the treble clef (f. 3R).
In addition, the Magdalene College Part-Books, an enormous collection of
instrumental movements from English, French and German theatre works,
assembled by the French bassoonist and music copyist Charles Babel around 1710,
is known to have been transferred from the Old Library at Magdalene to the
Fitzwilliam Museum in March 1916, where it remained until it was returned in
1969. 60 Perhaps the other items I have been discussing were transferred with it in
March 1916.
56 VdGS, Hely, nos. 1-9; see fn. 17.
57 VdGS, Jenkins, Lyra Consort in D minor, nos. 1-8, Lyra Consort in D, no. 1. See A. Ashbee,
‘Music for Treble, Bass and Organ by John Jenkins’, Chelys, 6 (1975-6), 25-42, at 39; J. Jenkins, The
Lyra Viol Consorts, ed. F. Traficante, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 67-68
(Madison WI, 1992), esp. xii.
58 VdGS, Simpson, Preludes and Divisions for Solo Bass Viol, nos. 1-3.
59 VdGS, Anon, nos. 211, 212.
60 Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, F435. See R. Herissone, ‘The Origins and
Contents of the Magdalene College Partbooks’, RMA Research Chronicle, 29 (1996), 47-95, at 47. For
Babel, see esp. B. Gustavson, ‘The Legacy in Instrumental Music of Charles Babel, Prolific
Transcriber of Lully’s Music’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Actes du Colloque /Kongreβbericht, ed. J. de La Gorce
and H. Schneider, Neue Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, 18 (Laaber, 1990), 495-516;
id., ‘Charles Babel’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. L. Fischer, Personentheil, 17 vols.
(Kassel, 1999), i, cols. 1250-1251; P. Holman. ‘Did Handel Invent the English Keyboard
Concerto?’, The Musical Times, 144 (Summer 2003), 13-22; Schneider. ‘Un Manuscrit de Charles
Babel restitué à sa bibliothèque d’origine’, Revue de musicology, 87 (2001), 371-394.
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