Keywords
five-course guitar, reentrant tuning, English Civil Wars, English gentry in exile, musical education, social history of the guitar, guitar repertoire, material culture
Abstract
The five-course guitar was a fundamental resource for the Verney family from 1643 to 1653 as they sheltered in France, avoiding their creditors and escaping the state of civil war at home in England. Their papers from that period, comprising many thousands of letters and financial accounts, show them hiring a guitar-master, ordering new guitars in Paris and debating the relative benefits of lessons for their eldest son on the guitar as opposed to the lute. This article reproduces the key documents and considers the music that the Verneys may have played. The papers particularly show how an instrument often played by women during the seventeenth century was also considered a means to train the first-born son, heir to the family estate, in habits of diligence and obedience. The Verneys considered the guitar an essential “exercise” for their offspring, and an important contributor to the “breeding” that young people of their social class, the higher gentry, needed to acquire. “Breeding” meant more than education; it encompassed each person's understanding of the role they were destined by their birth to perform, and their ability to sense the importance of family honor. Even when funds were tight—as they often were—the Verneys continued to value the guitar, for there is scarcely an allusion to guitars in the Verney papers that does not also name a sum of money or envisage a broader purpose of this sorely tried family of exiles.
Notes
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Recommended Citation
Page, Christopher. “The Verney Family and Their Guitars in France and England, 1643–53.” Soundboard Scholar 11 (2026). https://digitalcommons.du.edu/sbs/vol11/iss1/12/.
Full article (30 pp)