When John Dowland published Lachrimae he was contributing to a genre that was about a century old. The idea of developing instruments in several sizes to play polyphonic music, mimicking the ranges of the various voices of a vocal ensemble, seems to go back to the late fourteenth century, when a tenor-range bombard was developed from the soprano-range shawm. The flute, the recorder and the douçaine (probably a soft type of shawm) were developed in sets or consorts during the fifteenth century. But it was not until the 1490s that the idea was applied to bowed instruments.

The viol consort was apparently developed in Brescia around 1495 on the orders of Isabella d'Este, the wife of Francesco Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. The model was an existing tenor-sized bowed instrument recently imported into Italy from the Valencian area of Spain. The Valencian viol, like other mediaeval bowed instruments, only existed in a single size and had been used to play monophonic music using drone techniques with a flat bridge or no bridge at all. So to make it suitable for polyphonic music it had to be fitted with an arched bridge, and two other sizes were developed, making a consort of three. The violin consort was apparently developed in a similar fashion about a decade later at the neighbouring Este court in Ferrara by deriving a bass and a soprano from the alto-range vielle.