ABSTRACT
Walter J. Woodfill's study concentrated, sensibly enough, on the primary English urban centres, especially those for which extensive documentation of civic music survives, that is London, York, and Norwich. The region under the control of the Council in the Marches, based at Ludlow, Shropshire, is by definition provincial; its largest urban centre was Chester, though the archival material demonstrates that even relatively small cities and towns frequently supported civic musicians. Beyond available printed sources, Woodfill based his study primarily on the kinds of documents likely to contain explicit information on the hiring and regulation of civic musicians, that is, on municipal account books and order books. A series of letters preserved in a civic miscellany illuminates in some detail the professional life of the late sixteenth-century civic musician. All are letters from individuals to the civic administrators, the mayor and the three inquests; the first, from 1587, is from one of the waits, clearly the leader of the group.
