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inches marked on a rule that was probably made shortly before 1545 vary by
up to 8%, but this rule was intended primarily for calculating the volume of
timber and the length required to make a square foot of board of given width,
not for precision joinery such as instrument-making. 16 No honest English 17
viol-maker would have used any units other than the standardised values given
above, although a modular system might have been employed for determining
the relative sizes of components of a single instrument, or for relating
instruments of different sizes to one another.
Despite this consistency in units of length, twentieth-century writers have
suggested that some measurements given during the period were expressed in
inches that were different from the modern inch. For the otherwise
enlightened Gerald Hayes, for instance, no bass viols of the size indicated by
Christopher Simpson were known, so he opined that 'Other measurements
given by Simpson (i.e. of the bow) show that he was using a unit much smaller
than our standard of today.' 18 Like so much common sense, this is bad
scholarship and leads us away from the truth. Instead of assuming that the
practices with which he was familiar and comfortable were correct, and that
documents contemporary with the viols he was discussing were misleading,
Hayes should have remarked that [20] the bow, like the string length, seemed
long by the standards of his own time, instead of suggesting that the unit was
short. He would then have found it easier to accept Simpsori s measurement as
reasonable and, if he had survived, he would have found Simpson to be in line
with the longer-than-familiar viol bows described to readers of this journal by
Hans Reiners. 19
Hayes was writing in the first half of the twentieth century, but the string
length given by Simpson is still commonly considered to be impractically long
and to be the source of unnecessary difficulties when playing Simpsori s virtuosic
divisions. 20 Nathalie Dolmetsch suggested that the following
measurements would be suitable for the string lengths of bass viols to be used
16 R. Knight, 'A Carpenter's Rule from the Mary Rose', Tools and Trades, [Journal of The
Tool and Trades History Society] 6 (1990), 43-55.
17 For heterogeneous units in Italy see O'Brien, 'The use of simple geometry' and M. Tiella,
'Italian units'.
18 G. Hayes, The Viols and Other Bowed Instruments (1930, repr. 1969), 37, n. 1. In The
Division-Violist (1659), 2, Simpson wrote 'A Viol-Bow for Division, should be stiff, but not
heavy. Its Length, (betwixt the two places where the Haires are fastned at each end) about
27 Inches. The Nutt, short. The Height of it, about a Fingers bredth, or little more'. For all
quotations in this article original spellings and punctuation (including use of capital letters)
have been preserved, but the use of italics has been eliminated (except for the quotations
from Johnson's Dictionary).
19 H. Reiners, 'Baroque Bows', Chelys 28 (2000), 59-76. Simpsons engraved diagram of viol
shapes is to scale for a string length of 30 inches and a bow of 27 inches from the tip to
where the hair is attached to the stick at the end of the nut (giving a total length of just
over 30 inches). This is true both for the first two editions and the newly engraved copy
of this illustration in the third. The illustration of the viol player is the same in all three
editions except the hat is removed after the first, and an octave fret was added for the
second edition. An octave fret was also added for the illustration of the viol shapes in the
second edition, but was removed for the third.
20 Although some modern violists use instruments with a 30 inch string length, hardly any
modern bass viol commissions are specified to be as large as Simpson recommended,
especially if they are intended for divisions.