ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Holywell scene in the eighteenth century with the intention of redressing the balance at least somewhat. In this chapter, the authors' concern is not primarily to chart the changing fortunes of the Musical Society's concerts at Holywell during the second half of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. Their outline has been amply reconstructed by the author from the range of documentary sources at his disposal. The right to hold benefit concerts was guaranteed to the principal performers in the band by the Musical Society's Articles. In maintaining a core of resident performers attached to the Holywell the Musical Society ensured for its subscription series a stability which clearly could never have been achieved by reliance on outsiders alone. Recent research in various areas has brought to light new information about many of the Holywell performers. The qualities that sustained the Holywell concerts for long were subsequently channelled into an ever-widening range of concert enterprise in nineteenth-century Oxford.
