Much of the surviving evidence documenting amateur music-making in early modern England pertains to the aristocracy, gentry and profes-sional classes educated at the universities and the Inns of Court. Household accounts, wills, inventories, letters, iconography, music manuscripts and printed music books containing ownership markings and marginalia provide tantalizing glimpses into recreational music-making among this social milieu. This picture is further illuminated by detailed autobiographical writings – notably those of Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), Roger North (1653–1734), Anthony Wood (1632–1695), Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), John Evelyn (1620– 1706) and Claver Morris (1659–1727). Participants of musical meetings, clubs and societies that began to be established from the mid-seventeenth century – particularly in London and Oxford – were also predominantly drawn from this social group. In London, Roger North records ‘a society of Gentlemen of good esteem’ (North himself possibly having been a member) ‘that used to meet often for consort after Babtist's manner’. John Hawkins notes that in the second half of the seventeenth century musical meetings in Oxford ‘flourished at this time more than ever’, noting that one such ‘association was formed of many of the principal members of the university, heads of houses, fellows, and others, in order to promote the study and practice of vocal and instrumental harmony in the university’; and Anthony Wood's accounts of music clubs in Oxford in the 1650s also attest that the majority of participants were associated with the university. Members of the clergy, who had participated in music societies at Oxford and Cambridge while students, were instrumental in the spread of music societies beyond the metropolis and university towns.

Literate amateur music-making, however, extended into the mercantile classes. As the nation's commercial hub, London was home to a large mer-chant community and there is evidence to suggest members of this community engaged in recreational music-making. In the ‘Epistle dedicatorie’ of Musica Transalpina (1588), Nicholas Yonge observes that ‘Since I first began to keep house in this Citie [of London] … a great number of Gentlemen and Mer-chants of good accompt’ met for ‘the exercise of Musicke daily … in my house’. The keyboard manuscript of Susanne van Soldt, daughter of a London-based merchant from Antwerp, is also indicative of the value placed on music as an accomplishment among this social group; the manuscript, dated 1599, con-tains pedagogical materials alongside settings of psalms and popular tunes.

This collection of fourteen essays grows out of a study day held in Newcastle upon Tyne in October 2014, which sought to develop a nationwide account of musical culture beyond the metropolis in early modern England. The dominant historiography of early British music studies has focused on the most fully documented contexts of London and what might be described as its satellite environments, those contexts most closely aligned – culturally, intellectually or economically – with metropolitan culture: the court, the universities, the country estates of the gentry and aristocracy, and cosmopolitan centres of leisure and recreation. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, there has been a turn within historical musicology towards developing a genuinely national narrative of British musical culture that, while not excluding the well-trodden contexts of London and its satellite environs, also looks beyond them. A scattering of articles in the first half of the twentieth century laid the foundations for such work, while Stanley Sadie's 1958–59 article ‘Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century England’ was one of the earliest to explore the development of public concerts outside London. In recent years, the pace of study has accelerated. Studies at the forefront of this development have covered a broad geographical area – some focused on Britain as a whole, others on specific cities, regions or nations – and a wider span of time, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, though the centre of gravity for much of this work has been the eighteenth century. A primary concern of such studies, building on Sadie's work, has been the nationwide development of public concerts, but scholars have also researched civic music making, institutions, regionally based musicians and recreational music making in these broader geographical contexts.

Music in North-East England, 1500–1800 adds to this growing body of work, exploring musical life in England's northernmost region from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The collection is organized into four discrete sections: ‘Centres of Musical Activity’, ‘Sources’, ‘Recreation and Education’ and ‘Print and Popular Song’. Each section ranges geographically and chronologically but is tied together by a thematic core. ‘Centres of Musical Activity’ comprises five chapters that provide case studies of musical life in Beverley, Newcastle upon Tyne, Durham and Doncaster from the Middle Ages to the turn of the nineteenth century.