Reading Steve Roud's book got me thinking... we have all been debating whether the singing communities of the past got their texts from broadsides, or whether the broadsides were taken down from singers, but I haven't seen much discussion of how the actual tunes were transmitted. Obviously in a great number of cases it must have been purely by ear, and this would account for the tendency of tunes to mutate, but was there any use of musical notation outside the 'educated classes'? And were there any other forms of notation that were used informally or locally?

John Clare certainly knew how to read and 'prick down' fiddle tunes, and I'm sure he was not alone.