Evidence of reworkings by Restoration composers of their own pieces is not difficult to find, but inevitably such material has survived in a haphazard fashion. Only rarely does one come across examples like Matthew Locke's scorebook of consort music, London, British Library (GB-Lbl), Add. MS 17801, where alterations have been made systematically. Even where such examples do exist, the common contemporary practices of cutting out rejected leaves or of scraping away the original notes on a page often make it impossible to analyse the revisions made: of course the composers themselves could never have imagined that anyone would be interested in their cast-offs and made no attempt to preserve them. It is something of a stroke of luck, then, that three distinct and almost complete versions of an anthem by William Turner should be extant: they allow an unusually detailed study of the revision processes of a successful Restoration composer. What emerges as most important from such a study is the fact that Turner's reworkings of each section of the piece appear to show a consistency of purpose that one simply cannot search for in the odd revised phrases and bars which survive for most other composers of the period.
