Appendix B - References to gitterns from 1542 to 1605

Summary

The following texts were gathered using (1) a search of numerous property inventories in various classes of TNA, notably E 154 and probate inventories in PROB/2; substantial runs of unpublished inventories were also examined in Norfolk County Record Office and Leicester County Record Office where holdings are especially large; (2) a search of printed probate inventories, which are now abundant; (3) the probate inventories printed in Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories (BCI; all readings have been checked against the originals in the University Archives); (4) a search of electronic databases, including EEBO; OED; MED; Google Books; British History Online; Oxford Scholarly Editions Online; ODNB; LEME; National Archives; English Poetry 600–1900; Early Modern Festival Books Database (the character recognition software used by some of these sources (notably EEBO) is fallible); (5) studies by Ward (especially Sprightly and Cheerful Musick), Woodfill (Musicians in English Society) and Helms (Heinrich VIII, notably the valuable conspectus of private inventories at 419–43), and articles rich in data, particularly those by Fleming and Kisby; and (6) material from the countrywide archival work undertaken for both the published and as yet unpublished volumes of the Records of Early English Drama series, since the editors graciously shared their materials with me. I have not made a comprehensive search of probate inventories for those who died in the first half of the seventeenth century, although the terminal date has here been extended beyond the death of Elizabeth to 1605 in order to show the kind of material that might emerge.

NOTE: This Appendix omits texts translated into English from foreign languages or from Latin, unless they are of some relevance to interpreting the situation in England (whence 1547₁, concerning Paris, and 1577₂ on the use of ebony for manufacturing gitterns). Travelogues using the word ‘gittern’ to describe the instruments of other civilisations are also omitted.

Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae. Eliotis librarie (1542), sv ‘fidicula’: ‘fidicula, a rebecke or gytterne’. The pairing of rebec and gittern is explained by the fact that both were small instruments and therefore their names provide adequate alternative glosses for a Latin term formed with the diminutive – ula. The same gloss is taken from here into Richard Huloet's English/Latin Dictionarie newelye corrected, amended, set in order and enlarged (1572), but naturally in reverse, thus with ‘Gitterne, or rebecke’ as the headwords.