England in the 17th century was a country marked by civil war, a war fought between Crown and Parliament, with Catholic royalists ranged against Puritan republicans. These were politically turbulent times and yet from a musical point of view it was an astonishingly fruitful period. In general the fine arts suffered badly at least in the public arena and above all in the 1650s, when the Stuart dynasty was overthrown by the austere regime of the self-styled Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. But this public neglect was more than made up for by the way in which chamber music flourished in the salons of well-to-do burghers and of members of the nobility. Writing in 1706, the English lawyer, biographer and music theorist Roger North noted that “many chose rather to fiddle at home, than to goe out, and be knockt on the head abroad”. The preferred instruments for this “private Musicke” were the harp, various types of recorder and, last but not least, the viol. From the Renaissance onwards, viols had been built in families from the bass to the soprano register, and they tended to be played as a group in the form of a “consort”. By the first half of the 16th century a consort of recorders is known to have existed at the court of Henry VIII. But in England there was also a great fondness for viols and especially for the typically English lyra viol, which, with its special tuning, was well suited to playing chords. As the writer on music Thomas Mace observed in 1676, with such an instrument “you have a Ready Entertainment for the Greatest Prince in the World”.
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