This article presents a detailed account (provenance, codicology and contents) of Surrey History Centre, Woking, MS LM/1 083191/35, a late Restoration manuscript of lyra-viol and keyboard music. Originally from the papers of the More-Molyneux family of Loseley Park, LM/1083191135 is a source of otherwise unknown music by John Moss and Gerhard Diesineer. Two of the lyra-viol pieces in particular demonstrate that the Waking manuscript dates to at least 1687 or 1688, making it the latest known English source of viol music in tablature. The primary purpose of the manuscript seems to have been didactic. It was copied by a single scribe, who was evidently a musician actively engaged with the popular music and current political events of mid- to late-1680s London. LM/1083191/35 allows us a rare glimpse into the amateur musical world of 1680s London.

In the winter of 1704–5 Henry Playford advertised ‘a Choice Collection of Vocal and Instrumental Musick in Italian, French, and English’ owned by Gottfried Finger and partly collected by him ‘in his Travels to Italy’. Finger had evidently sold the collection to Johann Gottfried Keller and John Banister junior prior to his abrupt departure from England in 1701 after coming last in the competition to set Congreve's masque The Judgement of Paris. The discovery of a copy of the printed catalogue throws light on Finger's collecting activities in Italy and on the reception of Italian music in England. It also includes a list of ‘Mr. Finger's Great Pieces for his Consort in York-Buildings’, providing us with valuable new information about his concert activities in London in the 1690s, and about the size and composition of groups performing at York Buildings, London's first purpose-built concert hall. The list includes many pieces richly scored with brass, woodwind and strings, evidently performed with sizeable forces: most of the sets of parts are said to have been ‘Prick'd 3 times over’. It adds a number of new pieces to the catalogue of Finger's known compositions, and enables us to attribute to him an anonymous sonata for four recorders and continuo that was published in the twentieth century as by James Paisible.

Born in Tønder, Denmark, Stephan Kenckel (1661–1732) had a short career in schoolteaching before becoming, in 1697, a customs master based in the provincial port town of Helsingør. Remarkably, Kenckel was a major collector both of musical instruments and of printed and manuscript music. We know this, since his music and instruments were put up for public auction after his death. The printed sale catalogue, the relevant contents of which are listed, described, and analysed, also includes, in the example studied, the handwritten names of purchasers and the prices they paid. The range of instruments—familiar and exotic, antiquated and newfangled-owned by Kenckel and the breadth of his musical repertory, which suggests the existence of a thriving collegium musicum active in Helsingør, testify to a higher state of musical development in early-18th-century Denmark than has been generally recognized.

Beginning in 1750, Handel gave annual performances of Messiah in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital in London, and the series was continued by others after his death, until 1777. The Hospital's archives include complete itemised lists of performers for many of these events, and provide information about income and expenditure relating to all of the performances. The performers’ lists from 1754, 1758 and 1759 are well known, since they provide the only detailed contemporary record of singers and players for Handel's oratorio performances. However, the complete run of surviving lists enables us to track individual performers in London over a longer period, as well as revealing changes in the management, composition and remuneration of the ensembles. Transcriptions of the lists are here accompanied by an index of names and a summary analysis of the financial accounts for each performance.

The library of William Boyce is one of the most interesting eighteenth-century collections of music to be sold at auction (by James Christie in April 1779). Though only four copies of the sale catalogue survive, that still in the firm's archives provides both the names of the buyers and prices fetched. Among the items sold were a good many manuscripts and rare printed books whose present whereabouts are known; several of these have lot labels still attached to the original bindings. The main purpose of this article is to make this material readily available not only to musicologists, but also to bibliographers and others concerned with the history of libraries. Prefaced by an introductory essay and a section on the buyers, its central core is a diplomatic transcript of the sale catalogue itself together with copious notes on the contents of each lot. An index of composers and of buyers is also provided.