Going back a bit to Insane Beard's comments about the recorder as a folk instrument. There is something in that position, but it suffers from the problem that it was mainly the bourgeoisie that documented what they were doing with them. Here are a few data points outwith the world of the English diarist.

- The recorder is listed in a chronicle of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots as one of the instruments played by a drunken rabble outside her window; she detested the whole lot of them (and in her customary Red Queen style, subsequently created a law imposing the death penalty for street festivities). Somehow I doubt they were playing Sermisy and Binchois.

- The Georgian salamuri is a type of recorder, and as far as we know it has always been used as both a folk and art music instrument.

- One of the oldest recorders extant is from a time and place which has no known art music: Rhodes under the Knighta of St John, around 1500. I noticed this thing a few years ago in a museum there (nobody before me had spotted the octaving thumbhole). It's rather crudely made from an animal bone, about the same proportions as my Susato G sopranino. (I told Anthony Rowland-Jones about it and he wrote a note in a recorder magazine; I left it to others to argue with the rather unhelpful museum about getting it properly measured and photographed). The Knights' sphere of influence extended from Portugal to Scotland to Egypt to the Caucasus, so this instrument could have come from anywhere in Europe, but it sure doesn't *look* like an art music instrument (no decoration at all, no sign of lathe work) and we know of no art music it could have played. What does that leave?

- Several different sizes of recorder are mentioned in the adverts at the back of one of the Gows' Scottish music collections of the early 19th century; you could buy them from the Gow & Shepherd shop. As far as I know, this is the last mention of it in print in Britain before the revival nearly 100 years later. You couldn't buy printed music for them at that point, so what would people have played on them? Not much option but music like that in the Gows' books, surely.

- The Scottish recorder manuscripts of the early 18th century seem not to be the work of the leisured elite, but of working musicians. They were *really serious* about getting these tunes right, John Dow in particular. These manuscripts are much like those the Village Music Project has documented. Not the sort of thing an illiterate ploughman could have produced, but quite likely made by a player he danced to. (Probably the recorder was a second instrument, though. Thomson seems to have been a trumpeter, and Dow focuses on very complex versions of song tunes for listening rather than dances, the dances would probably have been played on the fiddle).