Hugh Davis's Commonplace Book: A New Source of Seventeenth-Century Song

Abstract

Among the Stafford family papers in Staffordshire Record Office is a small bundle of miscellaneous musical items which is as yet uncatalogued. There are incomplete sets of Richard Dering's Cantiones Sacrae (1617) and Cantica Sacra (1618) for five and six voices respectively, Giovanni Croce's Musica Sacra: To Sixe Voices (1611 edition), Agostino Agazzari's Madrigali a Cinque Voci (1602), George Kirbye's First Set of English Madrigalls (1597), and Thomas Watson's Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), as well as the Abbé Duval's Principes de la musique pratique par demandes et par réponses (1764). The only manuscript item in the collection is a commonplace book that appears to have been compiled over a number of years by a certain Hugh Davis. Its varied contents range from songs, catches, poems, and Latin orations written in the early 1650s, to folk remedies for various ailments, extracts from Charles Butler's The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (1636), and a verbatim copy of James II's first Declaration of Indulgence of 4 April 1687. Although the first ten pieces have been torn out and those that remain are roughly and at times inaccurately notated, the manuscript is of interest in that it provides a rare insight into the musical and literary tastes of an undergraduate in mid-seventeenth-century Oxford, and preserves not only a number of hitherto unrecorded songs but also new sources of acknowledged works by such figures as Nicholas Lanier, John Wilson, Thomas Holmes and the Lawes brothers.