WILLIAM CLEMENT'S 1747 CATALOGUEOF THE GOODSON BEQUEST:THE SIXTY ITEMS, LISTED BY ITEM-NUMBER John Milsom The following list of sixty items has been extracted from William Clement's 'A catalogue of Mr Goodsons Books contain'd in the Archives 1747' (Christ Church, Library Records 15, reversed). For reasons that are unknown, Clement's catalogue lists only part of the Goodson collection bequeathed to Christ Church; many other items securely or probably of Goodson provenance have also been identified within the Christ Church 'Mus.' sequence. To view a full list of items known or believed to have been bequeathed by Richard Goodson Jr, follow this link. All sixty of the items listed below can be stated with confidence to have reached Christ Church as part of the Goodson bequest. The majority are still extant within the Christ Church 'Mus.' sequence, and can be identified using a variety of methods, outlined below. One item, no. 19, had no right to be bequeathed to Christ Church, being correctly the property of the Oxford University Music School; Clement himself records its restoration to its rightful owner. Another item soon went missing; according to an 18th-century annotation to Clement's list, no. 32 (Handel's Otho) was 'wanting', and indeed no copy of this work survives at Christ Church. Two items, nos. 44 and 45, were borrowed by Dr Charles Burney in 1778, in the course of researching his A General History of Music (4 vols.; London, 1776-89). Surviving documentation about his borrowings (Christ Church, Library Records 12 (1)) reports that Burney returned both items in 1787, and item 45 can indeed be located in the Mus. sequence; but item 44 cannot, and it is unknown when and how the volume went astray. Matches between Clement's catalogue and surviving items at Christ Church can be made on a variety of grounds. Some of Clement's verbal decriptions are specific; those for no. 10, for instance, correspond to the contents of Mus. 609. Because his numbering system (1-60) was intended to link his catalogue entries to numbers written on to the items themselves (or, more often, on labels that were pasted to them), secure matches can be made when those numbers are still physically present on the items. Size and format, too, can help with identification: before making his catalogue, Clement arranging the sixty items by size and format, in broadly decreasing dimensions from largest to smallest, starting with items in upright format and ending with ones in oblong format. Size and format therefore prove useful in locating items that no longer bear their number-labels, and which are described only vagely within Clement's catalogue itself. (Glue-stains on covers occasionally point to the former presence of number-labels that are themselves now missing.) Since the majority of identifiable items listed by Clement do not bear early Christ Church bookplates - unlike items from the Aldrich bequest, which largely do - the absence of a bookplate sometimes strengthens the case for matching a surviving item with Clement's list. Finally, there is the evidence of items that either bear the signatures of one of the Goodsons, or were copied by one or both of them. Although at least some music copied by Richard Goodson Sr belonged to Henry Aldrich, and reached Christ Church by way of the Aldrich bequest, that seems not to have been the case with Goodson's numerous autograph composing sketches and scores, all of which probably arrived as part of the Goodson bequest. As for Goodson Jr, there is very little evidence - if any at all - of his having copied music for Aldrich, who died when he was aged c. 22. Almost certainly, then, all of the books copied or annotated by Goodson Jr reached Christ Church through his own benefaction. Between 1747 (the date of Clement's catalogue) and 1787 (the date of Malchair's catalogue), an attempt was made by librarians at Christ Church to protect some of the unbound manuscript music donated by Aldrich and Goodson Jr. They did so in a characteristic and semi-uniform style of binding: white parchment over boards, undecorated except for two parallel fillets at the edges, and with the spine in contrasting brown leather, the latter usually with a red leather inset, tooled in gold, that briefly identifies either the composers of the music or the nature of the repertory. Some of these newly-bound volumes contain only a single item, but others are tract volumes, abutting two or more items that were previously discrete. Evidently the aim was to protect items of approximately similar size and format, irrespective of their provenance, and in some of these tract volumes there is clear evidence that material variously from the Aldrich and Goodson bequests - and, conceivably, from elsewhere - has been brought together. Thus some of the Goodson items listed below now form layers of composite volumes, some of which contain only Goodson material - as is the case with items 15 and 16, the two constituent tracts of Mus. 3 - others a mixture of Aldrich and Goodson provenance - as is the case with Mus. 37, which contains Clement's items 26 and 27, together with three tracts that more probably derive from the Aldrich bequest. In the course of this 18th-century binding project, many items must have been stripped of their existing paper wrappers or other forms of protection, in the process destroying evidence of their provenance. Thus some of the items listed by Clement that remain unidentified must still be present (but not yet located, and probably now unlocatable) within the Mus. sequence. This is most likely true of Clement's items nos. 17 and 23. It might also be true of item 50, although no 'Oratorio Del Segr. Iacomo Charissimi / M.S. in Score' in the correct format obviously survives at Christ Church. One item remains a total mystery: there is no entry in Clement's catalogue for no. 50 - perhaps because he found its contents impossible to decribe - and no surviving item in the 'Mus.' sequence has the number '50' written on to it. When all else fails, recourse can be made to Malchair's 1787 catalogue. Malchair set out to distinguish Aldrich's bequest from the Goodson one; but by 1787, some cross-contamination between the two collections had occurred, and the rebinding project described above had also taken place. (It is in their newly bound state that Malchair describes those items affected.) Nevertheless, Malchair's catalogue entries sometimes confirm what other evidence might only suggest. His description for no. 13, for instance, securely identifies it as Mus. 21, one of the most important manuscripts at Christ Church. And it is partly on account of Malchair's description that Clement's no. 39 can tentatively be identified with another important book, Mus. 89. The list of the sixty items below differs from Clement's own in being organized by item-number, not alphabetically by the nature of the contents of the item. In Clement's catalogue itself, some items receive only a single alphabetical entry; nos. 1-7 are examples of that. Others, however receive two or more alphabetical entries - no. 10, for instance - and in the following list these entries have been gathered together. Malchair's 1787 catalogue entries, in as much as they can be correlated with Clement's, are also shown. When an item listed by Clement can be matched against surviving material in the Christ Church collection, it is cited by call-number only; for details of how the match has been made, follow the hypertext link. For entries that remain unmatched, or items that are no longer at Christ Church, the text below should be self-explanatory. In the transcriptions, material enclosed in <angle brackets> records modifications made to Clement's catalogue by later hands, almost certainly Christ Church librarians in the later 18th century. These include expansions and deletions of Clement's original text, and annotations to his entries. (To return to the full list of items bequeathed to Christ Church by Richard Goodson Jr, follow this link.)
No. 1
= Mus. 34-6; manuscript.
No. 2
= Mus. 600; printed.
No. 3
= Mus. 602; printed.
No. 4
= Mus. 603; printed.
No. 5
= Mus. 601; printed.
No. 6
= Mus. 604; printed.
No. 7
= Mus. 605; printed; six tracts.
No. 8
= Mus. 606; printed; 2 tracts.
No. 9
= Mus. 610; printed.
No. 10
= Mus. 609; printed, 11 tracts.
No. 11
= Mus. 622; manuscript.
No. 12
= Mus. 23; manuscript.
No. 13
= Mus. 21; manuscript.
No. 14
= Mus. 616; manuscript.
No. 15
= Mus. 3 (pp. [0]-38A); manuscript (the sonatas are more probably by Albinoni). Now bound with no. 16 below.
No. 16
= Mus. 3 (ff. 39-70); manuscript. Now bound with no. 15 above.
No. 17
Not yet identified.
No. 18
= Mus. 68-75, and Mus. 76; all manuscript. Mus. 68-75 originally formed part of No. 24 below (q.v.); Clement lists them at that position, together with the related score, Mus. 615. He later removed the partbooks and labelled them '18', but did not emend his catalogue to reflect that change.
No. 19
= Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus. Sch. D. 232 (Summary Catalogue no. 26512). Clement's number-label ('19') is still in place on the outside upper cover.
No. 20
= Mus. 623-6; manuscript. Evidently Clement's original entry was deleted because it inadequately described the musical contents, not because of any substitution of volumes.
No. 21
= Mus. 786; printed.
No. 22
= Mus. 617; manuscript; two tracts. Evidently the first of Clement's original entries ('Motets in Score') was deleted because it inadequately described the musical contents, not because of any substitution of volumes. The annotation to Clement's second entry is misleading. If 'Ormond & Malboroughs Glory' was at some stage merged with 'Goodson's Act Songs No. 27', it was subsequently reinstated at position No. 22. More probably, however, the annotation refers to the existence of another Blenheim-related ode at position No. 27.
No. 23
A collection of manuscripts, only some of which can be tentatively identified. Clement's unusually detailed listing of this item's contents implies that these manuscripts were physically separate, unbound, and perhaps loose within a protective wrapper. If so, and if the wrapper alone was annotated '23', then the contents themselves are unlikely to carry any trace of their earlier relationship. The absence of an entry for this item by Malchair implies that it had indeed been dismembered by 1787; at least some of its contents had presumably been distributed among the Portfolios. Most of Clement's descriptions are too vague to allow firm identification. The following, however, are possible matches:
No. 24
Clement's original entry for '8 Books' refers to Mus. 68-75; these were subsequently removed and relabelled as No. 18 (see the entry for No. 18 above). The entry for no. 24 was then adjusted to refer to Mus. 615; manuscript. Malchair's 1787 entry also refers to this item.
No. 25
= Mus. 680; printed.
No. 26
= Mus. 37 (pp. 99-138); manuscript. See also no. 27 below.
No. 27
= Mus. 37 (pp. 25-58); manuscript. When Clement drew up his catalogue in 1747, items A26 and A27 were separate; by 1787 and the making of Malchair's catalogue, they had been brought together in a tract volume, now Mus. 37, together with items apparently from the Aldrich bequest. For a full listing of the tracts, see the overview entry for Mus. 37.
No. 28
Manuscript. Clement's entry refers specifically to ff. 18-25 of Mus. 618, which still has Clement's number-label ('28') on its opening page (f. 18). It seems likely, however, that this piece was the uppermost in a bundle of unbound tracts. By Malchair's time, they had been bound into a pair of guardbooks, now Mus. 618 and its partner, Mus. 619. Both of these volumes contain music composed for the Oxford Act; the first has works Goodson Sr (in one case written in collaboration with Aldrich}, the second works by other composers.
No. 29
= Mus. 32; manuscript.
No. 30
= Mus. 792; printed.
No. 31
= Mus. 794; printed (three tracts), with manuscript additions.
No. 32
Clement's entry presumably refers to Walsh's edition of Handel's 'Otho' (RISM H 219). [NB part copied into Mus. 71 (p. 8).] Evidently the book soon went missing, hence the annotation 'wanting'. Recorded by Havergal in 1846 as being missing. The Goodson/Christ Church copy has not been located elsewhere. The replacement no. 32 is Mus. 22, which is also securely of Goodson provenance.
No. 33
= Mus. 869a-c; printed.
No. 34
= Mus. 77; manuscript.
No. 35
= Mus. 86; printed.
No. 36
= Mus. 1145. Not listed in Malchair 1787, by which date it may have been moved to the Portfolios (at position I.2.α).
No. 37
= Mus. 698-707; printed, with manuscript additions. Clement refers only to one of the two organ books (Mus. 702). So does the first of Malchair's two entries (f. 8); but his second entry (f. 10) cites all ten volumes, and presumably it was Malchair who reunited Mus. 702 with its nine partners.
No. 38
= Mus. 832; printed.
No. 39
Almost certainly Mus. 89; manuscript. The inside upper cover is annotated 'Richard Goodson [Sr]'. Ownership by the Goodsons is therefore not in doubt. A number-label has been removed from the volume's spine. In height, the book fits well into Clement's arrangement by size. Clement's catalogue entry, although vague, correctly specifies 'Organ', and perhaps uses 'Service' as Protestant terminology for the Mass music that the volume actually contains. Malchair's description more adequately describes the volume, although his use of the word 'imperfect' is puzzling for a book that is so substantial and largely intact. Perhaps he believed that an organ book would be useless without accompanying vocal partbooks.
No. 40
= Mus. 85; manuscript.
No. 41
= Mus. 817; printed.
No. 42
= Mus. 802; printed.
No. 43
= Mus. 807; printed.
No. 44
This refers to Matthew Locke's opera 'Psyche'; printed (RISM L2647), but now now missing; the Goodson/Christ Church copy has not been located. It was borrowed by Charles Burney in November 1778; his borrowing note gives both the title ('Psyche') and its format ('4o'). Burney returned this item in December 1787, too late for it to be listed in Malchair's 1787 shelf-list. Recorded by Havergal in 1846 as being missing.
No. 45
= Mus. 447; printed. Like the preceding item, this was borrowed by Burney in November 1778, and returned in December 1787, too late for it to be listed in Malchair 1787.
No. 46
= Mus. 998; manuscript.
No. 47
= Mus. 993; manuscript. Inexplicably, this item is not listed in Malchair 1787.
No. 48
= Mus. 992; manuscript.
No. 49
= Mus. 994; manuscript.
No. 50
Not identified, and almost certainly missing. To judge from its placement within Clement's sequence, this was a medium-sized oblong volume. No Christ Church manuscript in that format contains an oratorio by Carissimi, and the Carissimi cantata volumes in the Christ Church collection can all be matched against other catalogue entries.
No. 51
= Mus. 995; manuscript.
No. 52
= Mus. 1078; manuscript.
No. 53
= Mus. 999; manuscript.
No. 54
= Mus. 1005; manuscript.
No. 55
= Mus. 167-70; printed.
No. 56
No. 57
= Mus. 263; printed. Inexplicably, this item is not listed in Malchair 1787.
No. 58
= Mus. 974-8; printed; 7 tracts.
No. 59
= Mus. 357; manuscript.
No. 60
= Mus. 945; manuscript.
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