ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on seventeenth-century harpsichords, and the four-foot stop on French double-manual instruments. It is often said that very few French harpsichords have survived, but in recent years many have emerged from obscurity. Some double-manual harpsichords have no coupler and the manuals are completely separate: one example is the double-manual spinet in St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh. Frank Hubbard, the doyen of harpsichord organologists, drew attention to the large number of small keyboard instruments from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries either surviving, or appearing in inventories, that are designed for high pitch, surmising that it was once much more common to play at high pitch. Many surviving seventeenth-century harpsichords have not only had their compass extended, but either at the same time, or subsequently, the keyboards have been rearranged to the eighteenth-century format. If a seventeenth-century harpsichord is modified in that way, the modification will almost certainly have entailed making new jacks, a feature that will obscure the original disposition.
