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Also, four of the items in the Fitzwilliam collection, MU. 524-7 (Williams, Six
Sonata’s in Three Parts), MU. 1170 (Humphries, XII Sonatas), MU. 1172 (Ayres &
Symphonys for y e Bass Viol), and MU. 1002-3 (Gorton, A Choice Collection of New
Ayres), have old blue paper covers that are similar to the ones covering Ferrar Box
nos. 11-13 (printed parts of John Ravenscroft, Sonate de Camera a doi Violini col Basso
Continuo) and 25 (The Ladies Pocket Guide). The first violin part of MU. 1170 can
help us date these covers because the sheet of blue paper used as its cover is a
recycled printed advertisement dated 13 April 1734 for several publications,
including George Vertue’s The Heads of the Kings of England proper for Rapin’s History,
Translated by N. Tindal (London, 1736). In addition, annotations labelling the parts
of MU. 524-7, 1170, 1172 and 1002-3 are in a large eighteenth-century hand that is
also found on some of the items in the Ferrar Box, including nos. 2 (printed
continuo part for the overture to Haym’s Pyrrus), 11-13 (Ravenscroft, Sonate da
Camera), 14 (printed score of the overture to Bononcini’s Almahide), 17 (fragment
of a printed score of the overture to Handel’s Rinaldo), and 25 (The Ladies Pocket
Guide). Thus, the Fitzwilliam collection and the Ferrar Box of Music came from
the same source; presumably the items in the Ferrar Box were not transferred to
the Fitzwilliam Museum around 1915 because they had not come to light by that
time.
It has been known since the 1990s that the contents of the Ferrar Box of
Music, together with the Magdalene College Part-Books and a copy of George
Bickham’s Musical Entertainer (London, 1737-9), originally formed part of the much
larger collection of papers from the Ferrar family, bequeathed to Magdalene
College by the Revd Peter Peckard (1717-1797), Rector of Fletton in
Huntingdonshire, anti-slavery campaigner and Master of the College from 1781. 63
Peckard was the husband of the poet Martha Ferrar (1729-1805), who was the
daughter of Edward Ferrar junior (1696-1769), a Huntingdon lawyer and the last
direct male heir of the Ferrars of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. 64 The
brothers John (c.1588-1657) and Nicholas (1593-1637) Ferrar, members of a
prominent family of London merchants, settled with their extended family at Little
63 The provenance of the music in the Ferrar Box of Music was established by Richard
Luckett, present Pepys Librarian. I am most grateful to him and to David Ransome and Bryan
White for information about the collection and for helping me to assess the hands in the Ferrar
Music Box and the Fitzwilliam collection. For the Ferrars and the Ferrar papers, see the
‘Introduction/Finding List’ to the microfilm and CD-ROM edition, The Ferrar Papers 1590-1790
from Original Material held by Magdalene College, Cambridge, ed. D.R. Ransome (Wakefield, 1992)
(http://www.microform.co.uk/guides/R97513.pdf, accessed 4 September 2007). See also
Herissone, ‘The Origins and Contents of the Magdalene College Partbooks’, esp. 48; B. White, ‘“A
Pretty Knot of Musical Friends”: the Ferrar Brothers and a Stamford Music Club in the 1690s’,
Music in the British Provinces, 1690-1914, ed. R. Cowgill and P. Holman (Aldershot, 2007), 9-44. For
Peckard, see J. Walsh and R. Hyam, Peter Peckard: Liberal Churchman and Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner,
Magdalene College Occasional Papers, 16 (Cambridge, 1998); Walsh, ‘Peter Peckard’, ODNB
(accessed 4 September 2007).
64 For Martha Peckard, see J. Fullard, ‘Martha Peckard [née Ferrar]’, ODNB (accessed 4
September 2007).
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