Greet manuscripts

The Greet manuscripts are a set of 21 tunes found, when working in his loft, by Peter Hill who was then living at Littleworth, Greet, near Winchcombe. They were entitled “a few favourite airs adapted for the German (ie transverse) flute”. Many are dance tunes, though four seem to have been somebody’s “party pieces” for the flute: the two scotch airs, Myrtle Sprig and Soldier Laddie. They be a similar selection of material as described in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “so Fred was gratified with nearly an hour’s practice of Ar Hyd y Nos, Ye Banks and Braes, and other favourite airs from his instructor on the flute; a wheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and an irrepressible hopefulness.”

An Irish air adapted by Mr. Bunting, presumably from Bunting’s A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music, 1796, is Turlough o’Carolan’s Planxty Irwin.

Betsy Baker –

From noise and bustle far away,

Hard work my time employing,

Happily did I pass each day,

Content and health enjoying;

The birds did sing and so did I,

As I trudged over each acre,

I never knew what ’twas to sigh,

‘Till i saw Betsy Baker.

This is the first verse of an eponymous song sold on a ballad sheet, with ‘The Mountain Maid to her Bower has Hied’ by Thomas Willey, High Street Cheltenham, around 1835.

Favourite Scotch Airs 1 & 2 were sung by Miss Free in the Battle of Bothwell Brigg, a musical romance in 2 acts by Henry Bishop, with lyrics by Charles Farley after Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality. It was produced at Covent Garden in 1820.

Merry Swiss Boy occurs in Fesca’s ’concertina tutor’. Thomas Hardy had a jig called the ‘Swiss Girl’.

Nelson’s Hornpipe See Chris Beaumont’s manuscript and also Charles Baldwin’s’Gloucester Hornpipe’.

The Slave see John Mason’s similar tune, called The Sloe. A theatrical morris dance was performed at the Cheltenham Theatre in the 1820’s as part of a play called The Slave. This was a nut dance similar to that performed at Bacup, and the original performers were so enthusiastic as to give rise to the well known saying “to be nuts about something”. Was this the tune they used?

Poor Mary Ann is All Through the Night or Ar Hyd y Nos. It was also collected from William Shepherd at Winchcombe Union both by Percy Grainger and, a few months later, by Cecil Sharp.

Soldier Laddie was sung by Miss Stephens in ‘The Antiquary’.

Turnpike Gate The Turnpike Gate: A Musical Entertainment, in Two Acts by T. Knight, printed by Thomas Burnside Dublin, 1800

 Notes by Charles Menteith and Paul Burgess)