Index to Tunebook

History of Snowshill Manor

Snowshill Manor is a typical, traditional Cotswold house, built of golden yellow local stone and set on a hillside above the Vale of Evesham. It lies on the Gloucestershire side of the county boundary, just above Broadway (Worcs).

Snowshill Manor was owned by Winchcombe Abbey as early as 821, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. It was at one point part of Catherine Parr’s marriage dowry, although she probably never visited. The house passed through many different hands and the way it has been added on to at different points in its history reflects this. The northern end of the house is the oldest surviving part, dating from around 1500, still medieval in its design. It was extended and reshaped in around 1600 but it was the additions by the Sambach family in the early part of the eighteenth century that from one viewpoint radically altered the aspect of the manor from an Elizabethan to a Georgian house. The south front displays classical details of c1720.

By 1919, the manor was a semi-derelict farm. It was bought and restored by Charles Paget Wade. Ironically the neglect that the house had suffered from was exactly what attracted Wade. A house with no modern additions or alterations was the ideal place to display his historic and unique collection.

Charles Paget Wade
Charles Wade was an architect and craftsman from Yoxford in Suffolk, who inherited sugar estates in the West Indies from his father. This enabled him to devote his life to amassing his enormous and varied collection of craftsmanship, which he acquired mainly from antique shops and dealers in the UK. Wade spent many hours in the Manor house arranging and restoring his collection, whilst living in the old priest’s house in the courtyard. He designed the garden in collaboration with Arts and Crafts architect, M H Baillie-Scott laid out its terraces and ponds between 1920 and 1923 on the site of the old farmyard.

Wade amassed his collection from 1900 until 1951, when he gave it with the Manor to the National Trust. His desire was that people could learn to appreciate and love good craftsmanship from the objects he had collected. There are 22,000 items including this tunebook, plus a 2000 piece costume collection. Wade believed that every object was invested with the spirit of the craftsman and the age in which it was created. He raised even everyday functional objects like butter stamps, cow bells and locks to the status traditionally given to paintings and sculpture.

Acknowledgement
We wish to thank the National Trust for permission to publish these tunes on the web.

The Tunebook
I have photocopies of one tunebook, which were made by Graham and Amanda Collicutt. They also copied an index of the tunes, in which the book they copied is referred to as no 10. They only made copies of the pages with music, leaving out words of songs. Amanda Collicutt has informed me that the book had been in Wade’s family. He brought it from East Anglia. The duets were played by two flautists, relatives of his.

Items in the book are numbered in the order in which they occur. The hand is different and more recent than the original. I have included these numbers in the T: fields of the ABC file, as well as before the title of the Midi files. I have not included them in the Pdf transcription.

Three other books are mentioned in the index, numbered 4, 6 and 9. Book nine contains words. The other two appear to contain a considerable number of dance tunes, including many in 3/4, in contrast to the few waltzes in book 10. Since the Collicutts visited the Manor, its contents have been moved out to allow the building to be renovated. The missing books have not been located.

Grace notes
In the manuscript grace notes occur with various lengths, and may or may not be slurred to the following note. This suggests that they are appoggiaturas, not acacciaturas, and probably took something approaching their full value from the following note. This is likely in a document of the probable age of the manuscript. The pdf file indicates all these variants, including also where grace notes are placed before a barline, not after it, suggesting that the value of the grace notes is to be taken from the preceding notes. This may also be the case for grace notes in the middle of a bar.
notes by Charles Menteith