‘Musick & Poetry, Mixed’: Thomas Jordan's manuscript collection

Abstract

During the turbulent years which immediately preceded the birth of Henry Purcell many Royalist poets and sympathizers gathered together collections of songs and poems illustrating major events in Britain's political history between the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy 18 years later. In 1949 the University of Nottingham acquired one such collection, a manuscript of 34 Cavalier poems with music (see table 1), compiled by the poet and actor, Thomas Jordan (c.162o-1685).' Bound during the 18th century with Jordan's 1637 publication Poeticall Varieties: or, Varietie of Fancies, the anthology was one of several hundred literary manuscripts presented to the university by the 7th Duke of Portland, and now bears the shelfmark PwV18.2 The current catalogue entry to the volume-'1637 Tho. Jordan: Poeticall varieties (printed; with manuscript additions) (small qto. vol.)'-belies the significance of PwV18. The manuscript layer, which extends to 124 pages (pp.112-23 are blank), contains a mixture of political medleys and ballads, love poems and jigs, many of which are new to the corpus of 17th-century English song. The texts are set to anonymous popular tunes and to the airs of John Wilson, Thomas Gibbes, Davis Mell, John Gamble, Mr [?John] Taylor and W[alter] Y[ockney]. Furthermore, the discovery of the manuscript identifies Jordan as the first textual scribe of John Gamble's famous songbook,3 and places him within the literary circle connected with London's theatre musicians and composers during the middle decades of the 17th century. The chain of provenance of PwV18 is an intricate one (see table 2). The volume's earliest identifiable owner was the Cervantean scholar, the Rev. John Bowle (1725-88), whose bookplate can be found on the front pastedown.4 Bowle's primary area of study lay in the romance languages; his edition of Don Quixote was published in 1781. He also accumulated a substantial library of early modern English literary works, and wrote on a wide range of subjects, including music; for Lynn Hulse is a research fellow at Clare example, his 'Remarks on some antient Musical Instruments menHall, Cambridge, and editor ofChelys, tioned in Le Roman de la Rose' were published in the 1785 issue of the journal of the Viola da Gamba Society. antiquarian journal Archaeologia. Bowle acquired Jordan's collection