There is an established literature on office-holding in the English royal household, which has focused on those members of the court involved in the royal body service and ceremonial; those associated with the domestic needs of the monarch, the royal family and wider domus and those involved in its administration. Yet this mainly deals with the late seventeenth century and beyond; comparable detailed and comprehensive information on this particular aspect of court history for earlier periods has yet to appear in print. The courts of the Tudors have, for example, suffered in this respect. This is surprising, for recent historical scholarship has shown that far from ossifying into a purely domestic establishment as an older generation of scholars thought, the Tudor Court was rather of central importance in the political, administrative, religious and cultural history of sixteenth-century England. By that time the royal domus was the centre of politics, patronage and power and access to the sovereign—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch ‘either… [his/her] ear or… eye’ headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. A published investigation of the patterns and procedures of office-holding within this important institution is, therefore, long overdue.

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.

Almost thirty years ago John Morehen noted the presence of a common hand in four important pre-Commonwealth sources of sacred music: Pembroke College, Cambridge MSS Mus. 6.1–6 (six part-books; hereafter Cpc 6.1–6); St George's Chapel, Windsor MSS 18–20 (three partbooks; WRch 18–20); British Library, Harley MS 4142 (a wordbook; Lbl Harl. 4142); and Christ Church, Oxford Mus. 1220–4 (five partbooks; Och 1220–4). All four sources appeared to date from the early 1640s. Morehen also observed that the same scribe subsequently copied the earliest post-Restoration part-books at Windsor (WRch 1 and 2). Identifying the copyist(s) is a crucial stage in the study of the sources, with important implications for provenance, date and function, as well as their authority relative to other sources of the period.

The circumstances surrounding the compilation of many seventeenth-century English keyboard manuscripts remain unknown. The most concrete information exists for the early-seventeenth-century repertory, and scholars have also identified several copyists from sources dating from the end of the century. Without considering the question of repertory, the focus on the earlier manuscripts can be explained in part for the following reasons. A few volumes are associated in some way or another with famous composers (for example, Thomas Tomkins and his autograph Conservatoire National de Musique (in Bibliothèque Nationale), Paris, (F-Pc) MS Rés. 1122), and others are noteworthy for their expansive contents (Fitzwilham Museum, Cambridge MS Mu 128, the famous ‘Fitzwilliam Virginal Book‘). Others are well known because their copyists are familiar personalities, such as British Library, London (Lbl) RM MS 23.1.4 and F-Pc MS Rés. 1185—both connected with Benjamin Cosyn, organist of Dulwich College and conspicuous for his knowledge of John Bull's music. However, the copyists of most mid-century keyboard manuscripts remain unidentified. Concrete information concerning the copyists of a few sources exists, but most identified copyists are unknown men or women—keyboard music in the hand of a prominent musician is quite rare.

As is well known, the Nanki Music Library, Tokyo, contains numerous prints and manuscripts of Purcell's music, not least an important copy of Dido and Aeneas. Once belonging to the Purcell scholar William H. Cummings (1831–1915), these were acquired at auction in 1917 by the Marquis Yorisada Tokugawa, who intended them to form part of a music foundation (including a concert hall destroyed in the earthquake of 1923). On Tokugawa's ‘economic failure’ in 1931 ownership passed to Mr Kyubei Ohki, and, since 1996, to his successor Mr Itaru Ohki. Between 1970 and 1979 the material was accessible to the public through the Tokyo Music Culture Centre, and some of the collection was put on microfilm (now held by the Kunitachi College of Music). The manuscripts, however, are still unavailable to scholars, other than on microfilm.