PRISCILLA BUNBURY'S VIRGINAL BOOK

Abstract

IN a recent article in 'Music & Letters' (April I954) Thurston Dart described a number of sixteenthand seventeenth-century virginal manuscripts which had not previously been noticed. To his list can be added another privately owned virginal book, which I have been privileged to examine. This manuscript dates from the mid-seventeenth century and may not add much important music to our repertory; but it certainly deserves recording, and the evidence it provides about ornamentation and fingering must be of value to those who study early keyboard instruments and techniques. The manuscript is at present in the library of Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green of Poulton-Lancelyn in Cheshire, and his family has owned it for many years. But it originally belonged to a member of another old Cheshire family; for it bears the name of Priscilla Bunbury stamped on the cover, twice written on the fly-leaf and once in the heading of a short piece of music. It has always been connected with Priscilla, the daughter of Sir Thomas Bunbury of Stanney, as her half-sister Ursula married Richard Greene of Poulton; and the second of the fly-leaf signatures is identical with a known autograph of hers. But this Priscilla was born about 1675 and thus cannot have been the first owner of the virginal book or the dedicatee of' Mrs. Prissilla Bunburie hir Delight'. This must have been another Priscilla, daughter of Sir Henry Bunbury, of whom little is known beyond her death in 1682 at the age of sixty-seven1; she would thus have been about thirty in the mid-I64os, when the manuscript is most likely to have been written. The volume now contains thirty folios of music, but the last two of these are loose, and at both beginning and end the music is incomplete. The stubs survive of three leaves cut out from the beginning, but the traces of ink on them are not enough to show whether they all held music; there may have been an index, or such marginal scribblings as appear on other pages. Again, there is nothing to indicate how many leaves of music are missing from the end of the book; but not many have been lost, to judge from the slimness of the binding. This is of brown leather, measuring 11 tall by 8 wide, and is tooled in gold after the taste of the period. The front cover bears the name PRISCILLA BVNBVRY, with a conventional ornament between the two words, and the back cover has the same