While this book is not primarily a biographical study, it will be necessary to give some idea of my main protagonists’ lives and, where possible, to sketch an outline of their practical engagement with music. This might present a somewhat irregular group picture, given the diverse circumstances of their individual attitudes and experiences and the uneven nature of documentary survival. Both Stukeley and Hartley were musical amateurs whose involvement was in many ways typical of our accepted picture of the cultivated gentleman in the eighteenth-century world of societies, meetings and public concerts. It is only in the special role music fulfilled in their interior worlds that they emerge as extraordinary. This, up to a point, is also true of Roach, except that in his case the level of his interaction with the musical world around him seems almost to reach obsessive proportions and thus to be at odds with the norms of cultivated restraint. We also need to keep in mind, though, that this impression is inevitably strengthened by the relative wealth of detail on his musical activities that happens to survive in his diaries and papers, at least in relation to some periods of his life. It does mean that the material in this chapter on Roach's musical life may appear somewhat disproportionately detailed, but it does at least enable me to draw on a good deal of evidence that has received little attention to date. In stark contrast, we shall find that any inference of external musical circumstance associated with Sterry's life can only be indirect and speculative.

Peter Sterry

Sterry was born in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, across the river from the Tower of London. The record of his baptism bears the date of 22 September 1613. He was the son of Anthony Sterry, an apparently prosperous cooper or wine merchant who, together with Peter's uncle, had moved to the city from the family home in the Forest of Dean. In addition to this commercial background, at least one member of the family may have held a church ministry back in Gloucestershire during the sixteenth century, in which case there is precedent for the religious orientation that would shape Sterry's own life.