<p style='text-align: justify;'>Dd.4.22 is a manuscript of modest size with just 25 items in lute tablature copied c.1615 onto 24 pages in a single hand (plus two more items in mensural notation for keyboard copied inverted at the other end). It is not one of the manuscripts copied by Mathew Holmes, but has a related shelf number (allocated around 1753 when the library holdings were catalogued, i.e. adjacent to his solo cittern book Dd.4.23).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The majority of the tablature is copied in the same hand that entered a few items in the lute book of Henry Sampson (London, Royal Academy of Music, MS 602) and Holmes' manuscript <a href='/view/MS-DD-00009-00033/1'>Dd.9.33</a>, and wrote out a single loose leaf of lute tablature found recently in Westminster Abbey library (London, Westminster Abbey, MS 105, see Peter Holman, 'A New Source of Jacobean Lute Music', The Lute xxxix (1999), pp. 7–15). Thus it is most likely to have arrived at Cambridge University Library from Westminster in the same bundle as the Holmes manuscripts.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The contents also tie in closely with the court, with composers represented who were employed there or were associated with royal maskes or with music for the London theatres, including almaines by Robert Johnson (1) and John Sturt (1), lute solos by Richard Allison (1), John Dowland (1) and Daniel Bacheler (2), as well as maske dances (3), almaines (5), jigs (2) and courantes (3), and settings of the popular tunes <i>Fortune my foe</i>, <i>Monsieur's Almaine</i> and <i>The Spanish Pavan</i>.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This small anthology also includes clues that its owner was a student who used it for private study with a page of instructions on rhythm and some easier lute solos, as well as orphaned single parts of 3 lute duets, suggesting the owner had companions with lute books containing the other parts for social music making. He or she seems to have copied the first 6 items, but then most of the rest were copied by the hand known from other lute books mentioned above, who may have been the teacher, or else a later owner. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>John H. Robinson, Lute Society</p>
