ABSTRACT
Late in life, Charles Avison bemoaned the dying out of the old style patronage he had known; much of his career was governed by the new commercial and consumerist imperatives which were increasingly influential throughout the eighteenth century. However, he was wrong to suppose that patronage was moribund or even extinct. The development of Avison’s career and that of Edward Meredith, a singing man at Durham Cathedral, shows the interplay of patronage and commercial factors and allows a comparison of the relative importance of commercial considerations, and of patronage, both in its traditional form and in some new incarnations.
