Printed Borders for Sixteenth-Century Music or Music Paper and the Early Career of Music Printer Thomas East

Images of printed books online makes it increasingly possible to trace the use of specific printing types and design features across a wide range of publications to reveal new information about the working practices of Elizabethan printers. This study concerns two of these: the fleuron and the blank printed music stave. In the second half of the sixteenth century, an increasing number of music copyists chose to write their manuscripts on to paper with printed music staves. A subset of these music papers contains decorative fleuron borders that might be used to attribute them to specific printers or time-frames through comparison with other printed materials. This paper traces the history of three varieties of bordered music paper and explores the potential functions of framing staves in this way with regard to both music paper and printed music collections.

Spenser, and a series of Spanish romances in translation. 2 Why East should sud denly have chosen to specialize in music printing has always been something of a mystery. Jeremy Smith suggested that he was simply attracted by the opportunities it provided in a competitive printing environment. 3 New evi dence now suggests that East may have had links to the music printing industry from much earlier in his career.
This new evidence arises studying the printing of blank music staves with decorative borders. Exemplifying Peter Stallybrass's concept of 'printing for manu script', such music paper blurs the boundaries of print and manuscript as the printed staves are intended to be completed with handwritten music notation. 4 Indeed, today such paper is commonly referred to as 'manuscript paper'. In the second half of the sixteenth century, an increasing number of music copyists chose to write their manuscripts on to paper with printed music staves, rather than ruling staves by hand either individually or (more com monly) with a five-nibbed rastrum. Approximately seven of the twentyfive partbooks (in which each part is contained in a separate book) copied before 1600 used printed staves, while specialist formats were also printed for lute tablature and keyboard music. 5 In their seminal article on these printed music papers Iain Fenlon and John Milsom identified thirty-six editions of printed music paper used in twenty-nine manuscripts copied c. 1560-1610. These paper types were categorized into four groups: (1) before the monopoly for printed music and music paper was granted to composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis in 1575; (2) music papers issued by Byrd and Tallis during the period of their twenty-one-year patent; (3) signed 'TE' and printed by Thomas East after 1587; (4) papers probably printed after 1575, but of unknown origin or legality. The majority of these papers had plain staves, but a few added ornamental borders. 6 There are three extant designs of printed borders on these music papers ( Fig. 1), two of which were collected by the late-seventeenth-century (a) ©British Library Board (MS Add. 30480, fol. 44bis r ). Border 1, example from BL MSS Add. 30480-83, the initial four books of what became a five-part set. Also found in BL MSS Add. 15166 and Royal Appendix 57, a keyboard book (Oxford,Christ Church,MS Mus. 371), and a number of fragments. 1 (b) ©British Library Board (Bagford Collection: BL MS Harley 5936) Border 2 as found on a fragment on fol.
(c) ©British Library Board (MS Add. 22597, fol. 31* r ). Border 3, figure-of-eight pattern as found in BL MS Add. 22597. collector John Bagford among his curiosities from the history of printing. 7 The third of the border designs is created by a series of small unit blocks that com bine to create a running figure-of-eight pattern. The first two designs, how ever, are made up of more complex patterns comprising multiple fleurons or printers' flowers. Border 1 contains two different kinds of fleurons, A and B (Meynell and Morison no. 25). Both ornaments are made from four units of two mirrored designs (Fig. 2). 8 Border 2 also uses Fleuron A at its centre, but frames it with Fleuron C (Meynell and Morison no. 8).
Combi nations of ornaments like these could be used to create myriad designs from small asterisk-like combinations to large space-filling ornaments and from simple borders to intricate, lace-like frames for title-pages. This sort of fleuron, in which a single design of type-ornament could be com bined in multiple ways, developed in the first half of the sixteenth century, and has been observed in these decorative arabesque combinations in works printed in Venice by Gabriele Giolito in the 1540s and 1550s. 9 Moreover, the fleurons used in these two designs were among the first of this combinable variety to be used by English printers in the 1560s. 10 These bordered papers are significant because they have an identifiable feature that might be linked to a specific printer, group of printers or timeframe, through comparison with other printed materials. Moreover these deco ra tive borders were not the norm, comprising just five of the thirty-six stave designs identified by Milsom and Fenlon and being included in just three of the c. forty polyphonic music books printed in Elizabethan England. 11 There is no obvious manuscript precedent that the printers might have been trying to emulate. Although decorative borders are common in elaborately ornamented manuscript choirbooks (with all four parts copied separately across each opening), they are rarely found in partbooks. The only parallel is the single partbook BL MS Add. 47844, but as this most likely dates from c. 1581 or later, it is more likely in this case that the manuscript is emulating the printed papers. 12 The next question is why these borders might have been used. As recent research into fleurons by literary scholar Juliet Fleming has shown, these should not be dismissed as merely decorative. 13 Certainly the scribes of the 'Hamond' partbooks (BL MSS Add. 30480-83) show little concern for preserving the aesthetic appearance of the border, as they regularly wrote into it, especially with their directs. Nor do they seem to be attempting to create a beautiful object that might have led them to select a more ornamented paper. The situation is similar with other books using this paper, none of which can be said to be especially smart or elegant. Indeed, the border restricts more elaborate decorative schemes, leaving no space for details such as decorative initials or titles. (It also restricts the length of staves such that more sheets of paper must be purchased, though it may be too cynical to suggest that this was the printer's intention). Rather, there were practical reasons for using these borders. Printers often used ornaments to support otherwise blank parts of the page such as the edges to ensure an even impression. Ornaments prevented the platen dipping into unsup ported areas causing over-inking, smudging, and excess wear on the type on the one side, and under-inking and even a failure to print on the other. 14 There were other ways of providing support by inserting a typehigh bearer made of blank blocks of wood or metal, spare lines of type or woodcuts into the forme, which was either not inked and/or masked out by the frisket. Nevertheless fleurons would certainly offer one solution to the problem.
Another problem faced by a printer of music paper was how to make a product that was essentially a simple arrangement of straight lines distinctive from variants produced by other presses. Fleurons again offer one potential solution to a printer wanting to distinguish his wares, especially as music paper contained no colophon or printer's device as a book or pamphlet might. Although Juliet Fleming has argued that in some cases specific fleurons or patterns may have been used to identify groups of publications as the work of an individual author or coterie, as pieces in a specific genre, or even the products of the same press, it would probably be going too far to suggest that these ornaments became a kind of branding. 15 Printers may have developed preferences for particular ornaments and patterns of arrange ment that can be read as a kind of 'house style', yet few buyers of music paper are likely to have had the in-depth knowledge to connect particu lar fleuron patterns to individual printers, especially given the widespread use of many fleurons and the variety of patterns individual printers often employed. If house styles were identifiable to anyone, it would have been to clients in the trade such as publishers and booksellers, who could choose to patronize printers whose designs they felt would be most attractive to their buyers. It is such ornamental preferences that the bibliographer can use to suggest the printers behind the otherwise unattributable music papers.
The most common design of bordered music paper Starting with the most common of the border designs (Border 1 of Fig. 1), I traced the circulation of these fleurons in the outputs of Elizabethan printers. In the 1980s Milsom and Fenlon identified uses of the Fleurons A and B of Border 1 in three printed books from 1565, 1566, and 1568, and there by suggested a probable date if the mid-1560s for the printing of this paper, though they were not able to link these to a specific printer. 16 The ready availability of images of printed books online has now enabled further develop ment of this chronology and the likely origins of this music paper based on the nearly 10,000 books available for this period via Early English Books Online. 17 The earliest appearance of ornaments A and B in Britain is in 1563 in two printed books by the Antwerp printer Aegidius Diest (otherwise known as Gillis Coppens van Diest). Both books, as well as another in 1564 and seven in 1565, were controversial catholic religious texts often by exiles and Jesuits for audiences in Scotland or England. 18 A handful of other controversial English books produced by printers on the continent also use one or both of these fleurons, including Egidius van der Evre (Emden) and John Fowler (Antwerp). 19 These serve as a reminder that these ornaments were being used by printers across Europe. No one, however, imported books with these fleurons into England over an extended period, and there are better English candidates for the printing of at least this design of music paper.
The first English printer to use these ornaments was Henry Denham. He set up his printing house in 1564, and in that same year became the first English printer to use Fleuron A, here employed to create mini ornaments com prising just two blocks. 20 Denham would go on to become a prominent printer, acquiring the privilege for psalters, primers, and prayer books in 1577, and that for dictionaries, histories, and chronicles in 1583. During the 1580s he would also do a little music publishing: a monophonic setting of the Lord's Prayer in Francis Segar's The Schoole of vertue (1582, STC 22136), William Hunnis's Seuen sobs of a sorrowfull soule for sinne (1583( , 1585( , 1587( , 1589 and an edition of The Whole booke of psalmes (1588, STC 2475.2). 21 In 1565 Denham began to create small borders from Fleuron A, and around the same year William How (who worked predominantly as a trade printer) also used it to create a title-page design. 22 This design became particularly popular in the late 1560s and has similarities with the music-paper border (minus Fleuron B), especially when Wykes and Denham added a frame of printer's rules in 1566 (Fig. 3). 23 It is only from 1566, however, that Fleuron B is found in the work of English printers: Denham again and the lesser-known printer Henry Wykes. 24 At this stage there were still only four English printers using these type-ornaments and Denham was by far the most frequent user, using one or both ornaments in eleven works. By 1567 this had increased to at least six printers: Denham remains the most prominent user (seven books) and Wykes too uses it for another two books, but they are now joined by Henry Bynneman (four), Thomas Purfoote (one), William Copland (one), and Thomas Colwell (one). Bynneman was a prominent printer and bookseller who acquired the privilege for printing dictionaries, histories and chronicles, would gain an interest in music patents, and held numerous of Byrd and Tallis's books in stock at his death. 25 Copland specialized in popular books, especially romances. Purfoote's output included an English-Latin dictionary, numerous religious works, a book of remedies for horses, and numerous broadsides, while for Colwell too a significant amount of his printing was of ballads. 26 Only one publication, however, uses an alternating pattern of both Fleurons A and B, and that was printed by Henry Wykes in 1566. This combines both fleurons in a nearly identical alternation to the music-paper border, the difference being that the Fleuron A figure has the upper and lower elements transposed (Fig. 4). Yet this appears to have been a one-off design and is not found in his other extant editions.
In the period 1568-70, these ornaments reached the peak of their popularity. For ease of display, the graph in Fig. 5 only includes printers who used these ornaments in at least five publications, but in the peak period these specific fleurons were being used in around twenty-five to thirty editions a year by fifteen different printers. 27 Their ubiquity was such that they were not being used only on finely printed editions, but also on broadside ballads and epitaphs from 1570. 28 Unlike other printer's ornaments, fleurons are cast metal types rather than engraved wood. They can therefore be easily repro duced by casting. 29 The rising number of printers using these ornaments sug gests that there were now several sets in circulation, in addition to the pos sibility of type and ornaments being loaned between printers. Indeed during the period 1560-80 at least twenty-two printers are known to have used both these ornaments in their publications. They continued in regular use throughout the 1570s and even beyond, but as growing numbers of 25 'Thomas Colwell: Elizabethan Printer', The Library, v, 19 (1964), 223-26. 27 This graph is based on books for which images are available via Early English Books Online and takes the attributions as supplied by the STC. For legibility this graph includes only those printers who used both types (omitting on this basis William Copland, John Fowler, Richard Watkins, William Williamson, and Hugh Jackson) and only those printers who produced more than five works using these types. This excludes Thomas Colwell (5), John Charlewood (4), Egidius van der Evre (1 English print), Antoine de Solemne (2), Richard Jones (2), Henry Kirkham (1), William Jones (2) variant borders circulated, the popularity of these particular designs waned to a typical usage of around six to twelve publications a year. Many of those printers who were most associated with these ornaments in the mid-1560s gradually moved onto other decorative fleurons-including Denham, Bynneman, and Wykes-and their use became more fragmented among multiple printers. 30 From these figures and trends it would seem impossible to further pin down the likely origins or period of production for this music paper. Yet among the myriad combinations of these fleurons that were possible, only a handful of extant publications contains examples of the same alternating pattern seen on the music paper. While the fleurons here were widely used, this particular arrangement seems to reflect the style or preference of a particu lar printing partnership (see Table 1).
Although used in a variety of ways and forms, this alternating pattern was predomi nantly used by two printers: Thomas East and Henry Middleton. These two were both newly setting up business in the printing industry, having been granted the freedom of the Stationers' Company in 1565 and 1567 respectively. Moreover, in the years 1567-72 East and Middleton were working in partnership. 31 Intriguingly, this coincides almost precisely with the years when the fleuron design of the music paper was being used in other printed work.
One significant difference between the pattern as it appears on the music paper shown in Fig. 1 and the examples found in other printed material by East and Middleton is the framing of the border between two vertical rules. A frag ment of printed music paper sold at Sotheby's in 2015, however, indicates that not all editions of the music paper used these printer's rules. 32 Further more, the staves of this example are significantly straighter and less  The picture is also somewhat complicated by the fact that John Walley had a tendency to use the phrase 'printed by' as the equivalent of 'printed for' (he is not known to have had a press of his own, except perhaps between 1555-57), meaning that two of these works are only ascribed to Henry Middleton by the Short Title Catalogue. 33 In the case at least of Rastell's A Table collected of the yeres of our Lord God, the involvement of the East-Middleton partnership printing either with or for Walley is also supported by the appearance of a distinctive initial 'T' flanked by two figures. This occurs in two editions printed jointly by East and Middleton in 1567 and 1571, but no other publications associated with Walley. 34 The 1569 edition by Griffith is the main anomaly, but the design is only found in the left and right borders of his title-page (not the top or bottom), so the context in which the pattern arises is slightly different from the other examples. With a press on Fleet Street and a shop in St Dunstan-in-the-West's churchyard, Griffith had worked close to East and Middleton when their business had initially also been located near to St Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street in 1566-70. 35 Moreover when Griffith died in April 1572 Middleton took over his press and married his widow, so it is likely that there was already a connection between these printers two years earlier. 36 There were a few other printers who came close to this design and these too were near neighbours of East and Middleton. In 1568 the prolific printer Thomas Marshe used a similar design in four publications, except that he used Fleuron A in pairs rather than fours (Fig. 6) church'. 38 Henry Wykes's similar design in 1566 has already been noted above, and he too worked in Fleet Street, at the sign of the black oliphant. It seems that these printers working in close proximity were being influenced by each other's designs; however, only the specific pattern unique to East and Middleton was maintained beyond a year. This design of fleurons can therefore be identified as a particular preference of East and Middleton. Looking more closely at the output of these two printers, Table 2 shows how many of their publications used the same fleurons as the music border, while the numbers in round brackets indicate how many employed that particular alternating pattern. In 1568-69 these were the only fleurons used by the printers. Initially the designs are varied but in 1569 they settled on the design used in the music paper. In later years they began to use a wider range of ornaments, but when they did use these specific fleurons they used them in the same pattern as the music paper (with the sole exception of the single edition in 1570). Although the first occurrence of the pattern is in a work by East alone, it seems to become closely identified with the printing partnership. After this partner ship dissolved both printers continued to use these type-ornaments, but neither repeated this design in their later works. In 1570 when there were no joint publications, there were no instances of this pattern in their works. More over, the only instance of Middleton using this pattern alone occurs in works where the circumstances of the printing are obscured by the imprecise imprint, so one wonders whether both men might actually have been involved in these jobs for Walley.
What is also noticeable from Table 2 is the small number of publications overall. In 1568-70 the pair are only known to have produced two to three books a year. (For comparison, Edward Allde printed an average of just over four books a year in his first seven years in the business working alone, while Thomas Morley and William Barley printed at least five books in their first year in partnership.) 39 In both cases some publications are likely to have been lost or remain unattributed; nevertheless, the low figures suggest that there may have been plenty of time available for the press to be used to print signifi cant quantities of music paper. Indeed, Peter Stallybrass has suggested that it was 'little jobs'-single-sheet publications and small booklets requiring little investment and offering quick returns-that provided the essential regular income for the printing houses and supported the production of larger works. 40 Printing sheets of music paper may therefore have played an important role in the economic viability of the East-Middleton press in its early years. The commercial potential is suggested by the later concerns of printers who cited Byrd and Tallis's monopoly on music paper when petitioning the Queen about the damaging effects of monopolies in 1577. Christopher Barker's subsequent report on the operation of such patents in December 1582 still saw the monopoly for printed music paper as 'somewhat beneficiall' (unlike that for polyphonic music books), though by 1598 it seems that Thomas Morley thought that hand-ruled paper had under mined the market. 41 To summarize, then, this music paper is highly unlikely to have been printed before 1566, the first year in which both these printed ornaments were in use by English printers. Border designs very similar to those used in the music paper (and using both fleurons) occur from 1566 and 1572, but the precise design was used almost solely by the Thomas East and Henry Middleton partnership between 1568 and 1572. What is less clear is whether Middleton and East were the publishers of this music paper (providing the paper and arranging the distribution) or were merely acting as trade printers for a third party. Most of the work that East and Middleton were undertaking was on behalf of others, but they were already producing their own publ ications. 42 Indeed, Table 1 shows that the border pattern was used for projects of both kinds of arrangement. In comparison to publishing a book, printing music paper would have been a simpler prospect with no rights to obtain, a single forme to compose and impose, and flexibility on the amount of paper and initial outlay that would need to be invested in the project. Given that the printers were managing to finance the publication of at least some of their own books, it is not implausible that they could have undertaken the publishing of music paper as their own venture.
Comparison of the paper types used for the music paper and in other materials printed by East and Middleton in 1567-72 yielded no further dating information as there are no shared watermarks. Trimming, positioning in the gutter and the subsequent printing and/or writing often obscure the finer details of the marks and hinder precise identification of these watermarks, and in any case there are often no directly comparable examples to be found in either Briquet or the Gravell Watermark Archive. 43 Nevertheless, the music papers tend to use paper with a watermark of a single-handled pot, with a crown and either a quatrefoil or a trefoil at its pin nacle, though the precise stocks differs with various initials placed in the belly of the pot. 44 The only exception is the paper used in BL MS Add. 15166, which has a watermark that is a crowned shield with the letter 'B' inside, above a banner with the name 'Nicholas Lebe' (Briquet 8079). 45 By contrast, other printed materials almost always use paper with a hand/glove leading to a star/flower. In some cases a '3' is visible in the palm with the initials that read 'RB'/'RP' or 'CM' in the cuff. 46 Another particularly visible example has nothing in the palm but the initial 'NM' in the cuff. 47 A couple have no visible watermark, but only The Booke of nurture (London: East, 1568) (STC 20956) has a mark of another type (used in addition to other paper of the 'hand and star' type). The watermark is heavily trimmed and impos sible to identify precisely, but may be some form of crowned shield (not comparable to that in Add. 15166). One sheet of this paper also made it into The Voiag [e] and trauayle, of Syr Iohn Maundeuile Knight (London: East, 1568) (STC 20956) along with another sheet of paper with a pot watermark with the initials 'NP' visible on sigs. Jiii and [Jvi]. These appear to be rogue sheets in what was otherwise paper of the 'hand and star' type; however, their presence reveals that pot-watermarked paper was in East's printing house in 1568.
What these contrasting watermarks indicate is that East and Middleton either bought or were provided with a specific type of paper to suit the require ments of music paper. Whereas paper for printing was usually only lightly sized, paper for writing needed to be more heavily sized so that the water-based inks typically used for writing did not bleed into the fibres and blur. Once heavily sized for writing, however, the paper would become less flexible and more resistant to the dampening required to take a good impression. 48 A more heavily sized paper would therefore be required for printing music staves that were designed for purchases to write musical notation on, even if this meant some loss of quality, particularly when printing fleurons like those found the East-Middleton borders.
From the surviving exemplars it appears that a significant number of 'editions' of this music paper were produced. 49 For a start there were designs with both four and five staves to a page, and designs with six-line staves for keyboard music as well as the more typical five. 50 As we have also seen, the Sotheby's fragment lacks the vertical printer's rules that contain the fleuron border in all the other examples. 51 Moreover, even among those papers that are superficially the same (BL MSS Add. 30480-83 and Add. 15166), variation in the alignment of the border with the staves and in the occurrence of errors in the border design indicates that each represents a new setting. 52 Although the typesetting is consistent among Add. 30480-83, none of the other single partbooks or fragments can be shown to have come from the same edition, suggesting that at least six different editions were produced. 48  The East-Middleton partnership dissolved in 1572, and by 1575 the privilege granted to William Byrd and Thomas Tallis gave these musicians the monopoly on printed music paper. East and Middleton would then have been unable to legally print their music paper without the permission of the monopoly holders. Byrd and Tallis had used Thomas Vautrollier as their assign for the 1575 Cantiones sacrae and he remains the most likely candidate for the particular designs of printed staves (without decorative borders) that occur in books dating from the late 1570s to the 1580s. 53 Following Vautrollier's death in 1587 and Tallis's in 1585, East acquired Vautrollier's two music fonts and became the assign of the remaining patent holder, William Byrd, and later his successors Thomas Morley and William Barley. 54 As well as printing music books, East also produced music paper in this later period with the staves simply framed on either side with vertical printer's rules, but using the monogram 'TE' to identify his productions. 55 Whereas arrangements of fleurons could distinguish a product but would only identify the printer to those with significant awareness of the trade, a monogram could serve a more explicit and readily attributable branding function.

Thomas East's later use of borders for musical staves
Thomas East did return to experimenting with borders for music staves later in his career. In 1593-94 he printed Thomas Morley's Canzonets or Little short songs to three voyces and Madrigalls to foure voyces with a fleuron border not only on the title-page, but also framing every page of music. 56 The impression is that a new look was being created to mark out these publications and to distinguish them from both Byrd's works and the previous madrigal anthologies (Musica Transalpina, 1588 and The First sett of Italian madrigalls Englished, 1590). 57 Yet the same format was also applied to John Mundy's Songs and Psalmes composed into 3, 4 and 5 parts (1594, STC 18284), before being dropped for future years. This was the first time East had used this particular fleuron (Meynell and Morison's no. 19 / Vervliet's no. 4 e-f with a variant i-j), but it was not new. The Flemish printer Christoffel Plantin is known to have used it from 1567, while in England it had already been used by printers including Ralph Newberry and Henry Bynneman from 1578, and was regularly used by James Roberts in his poetry editions during the 1590s. 58 It is not so much the border that is distinctive here, but the way it is deployed in the overall design, creating a look that was perhaps intended to appear Italianate.
East's experiences with fleurons for music paper may have been one influence on this format, but continental printing may also have offered some models. Ornamental borders were rare in continental printing, but there had been a few prior examples. Several early printed choirbooks by Andreas Antico and Valerio Dorico in Rome, and Jacques Moderne in Lyon used borders to distinguish just the first page of each mass (particularly useful to singers flicking through to find the beginning of a particular mass). 59 In the 1560s and 1570s a couple of lute books published in Strasbourg employed such borders throughout: Wolff Heckel's Lautten Bůch von mancherley schoenen und lieblichen stucken (Urban Weiss, 1556) comprised two partbooks for duetting lutes and was printed with a woodblock border, while Sixt Kargel's Nouae, elegantissimae, Gallicae, item et Italicae cantilenae … in Tablaturum (Strasbourg: Bernhard Jobin, 1574) used a narrow fleuron border (very similar to Meynell and Morison no. 12). Several small German hymn books also use woodcut borders similar to those used in some private prayer books, including Geystliche Lieder printed by Valentin Babst, in 1545 and Sethus Calvisius's Harmonia cantionum ecclesiasticarum produced by Franz Schnellboltz and Jakob II Apel in 1597. 60 Yet it was only in the 1580s that the first printed partbooks with bordered staves had appeared and these were used in special editions for important patrons. The first was Costanzo Porta's Liber quinquaginta duorum motectorum quatuor, qunque, sex, septem & octo vocum printed by Angelo Gardano, a prolific Venetian music printer, in 1580. Porta's grand collection contained over fifty songs for four to eight voices and marked his departure from Loreto. Its costs were supported by Vincenzo Casali, the Governor of Loreto, whose arms appear on the title-page. 61 In 1583 Vittorio Baldini used a thinner border design to frame the staves of Lodovico Agostini's In nuovo echo a cinque voci. Printed by the ducal printer on unusual thick, blue paper and dedicated to Alfonso II d'Este, Agostini's collection was described by Laurie Stras as 'a celebratory compendium of courtly music-making … a memento … of Ferrarese music-making, [or] a presentation volume'. 62 Both of these uses of ornamental borders appear to be unique in each printer's output (although Baldini did use similar borders to frame lyrics on the facing page to musical staves in his first music publication Il Lauro secco, 1582, and Il Lauro verde, 1583). 63 The borders seem designed to work alongside other orna mental elements to mark these collections as particularly grand and luxurious publications.
By the 1590s there was a more immediate Italian precedent that might have influenced East's design. The publications of another of Venice's leading music printers, Ricciardo Amadino, included at least three examples of musical staves framed by ornamental borders: • Vilanelle alla Romana a tre voci, di Oratio Scaletta da Crema. Libro Primo • Giovanni Matteo Asola, Vespertina omnium solemnitatum psalmodia (1590) • Il primo libro delle canzonette a tre voci, di Antonio Morsolino con alcune altre de diversi eccellenti musici (1594) These were still relatively uncommon in Amadino's output, but unlike Gardano's and Agostini's examples these (like East's) were not special grand or occasional publications. Although Asola's Vespertina was in choirbook format, the villanelle and canzonette were both sets of partbooks and here there is a strong resemblance between the page layout of Amadino's editions and East's. Although they use different fleurons (Amadino uses part of Meynell and Morison's no. 12 / a variant of Verliet's no. 5 a-b), they are used to create a similar width and style of border, which encompasses not only the staves but also a large initial or factotum (the height of two stave lines), and there is a similar arrangement of text above the stave (Fig. 7).
One wonders if Morley-who had access to a wide range of Italian printed music that influenced his compositions and collections 64 -had seen one of Amadino's editions in this style and requested that East imitate it. This would not be the only case of such influence, for Tessa Murray has suggested that the layout of his Canzonets or Litle short aers to fiue and sixe voices (printed by Peter Short in 1597, STC 18126) was modelled on Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi's Balletti a tre voci con la intavolata de liuto con la intavolata de liuto, which was printed by Amadino in 1594. 65 The problem with Morley's songs, however, is that they are too long for the framing effect of these borders. In the Amadino publications the border frames a full song as well as the page. The majority of Morley's canzonets and madrigals, however, runs on to a second page, over-spilling their frames. Ironically it is the shorter Songs and Psalmes of Mundy that are most visually pleasing in the framing borders because most fit within a single page, even though musically they show little influence of the Italian style. This uncomfortable fit with longer songs and the rather cluttered page layout that results may be one of the reasons why East did not continue with this design after 1594.
Other designs of bordered music paper There exist two other designs of music paper with printed borders, but the picture surrounding their border patterns is not as clear-cut. The second border from Fig. 1 shared a similar context to the first, not only because it shares the use of Fleuron A, but also because printers commonly used Fleuron C alongside Fleurons A and B in printed borders, ornaments, and title-pages. 66 Like the other two fleurons, this one was also first used by Henry Denham in 1564. 67 This paper design is also distinctive because it uses the decorative border only on the inside edge, using a narrower, singlerule border on the opposite side. It is similarly unique in indicating a space for the user to write a page number by including the word 'folio' in blackletter type above the staves on the inside edge on both the recto and verso. This fleuron pattern was also employed by Thomas East on a title-page in 1568, raising the intriguing possibility that he may have experimented with other designs. 68 A narrower, single-rule border of the same proportions as that found on the outer edge of the music paper is found on the internal pages of the same 1568 edition. Given that the first design only becomes associated with the Middleton-East partnership from 1569, could this even represent an early paper produced by East alone? Unfortunately the evidence is inconclusive as, although the fleuron design was not widely used, very similar designs do appear in the work of two other printers: firstly in a small border used by Henry Denham in 1566 (with the addition of an asterisk between each pair of Fleuron A units) and again in 1575 on a title-page by Thomas Purfoote (with an additionally edging in Fleuron B). 69 Unlike the other pattern, this less attractive arrangement does not seem to have become a favourite of any particular printer. This is not particularly surprising; although a systematic study of the uses of fleurons has yet to be undertaken, Fleming's assessment was that such a survey would 'resist generalization' with variation both between print shops and across the years. 70 The final design of border is even more of a mystery. This was not created from the flexibly combinable fleurons, but rather a series of small units that create a running figure-of-eight pattern. Fenlon and Milsom listed it among the papers presumed to date from c. 1575-1600, but admitted that its date   (Table 3). They appear mainly on titlepages and are generally used to frame more elaborate fleuron borders (as in Fig. 8, where the frame surrounds the more elegant fleurons cut by Robert Granjon, Vervliet's no. 5). This single-width, figure-of-eight border appears to have first been used in England by Arnold Hatfield and Ninian Newton, who had newly set up as printing partners. 72 The 1585 edition of A Booke of christian exercise (using the same border) was printed by Newton alone, after which nothing more is heard of him. From 1586, however, John Charlewood (a printer of ballads, religious tracts, poetry, and other popular literature) becomes the most prolific user of these ornaments, presumably having acquired them from Newton. The ornaments then passed to James Roberts (one of the holders of the lucrative privilege for almanacs and prognostications) who married Charlewood's widow and took over his press in 1593. 73 There is also a variant with a rounder shape and less variation in the thickness of the curves that was used by John Wolfe, Edward Allde, and John Windet, but this is less like that used in the music paper. This would initially seem to suggest that this bordered music paper is later than the other examples discussed, most likely from c. 1584-97 (see Fig. 9). It therefore postdates the 1575 Byrd and Tallis music patent and may have coincided with the new burst of English printed music books from c. 1588. If it were produced later in this timeframe it may have been printed within the gap between the ending of Byrd's music patent in 1596 and its subsequent transferral to Thomas Morley in 1598. The problem is that, despite the visual similarities, none of the ornaments used in these printed books could have been used to create the music-paper border. Recurrent gaps in the borders show that these books use a singlewidth figure-of-eight, grouped in loops of four, with an incorporated straight-line border. The music paper uses a double width of these groups of four loops, while the straight-line border is unbroken because it is provided separately by printer's rules. In short, this means that despite an extensive search of English printed books the precise ornaments required to produce the music-paper border have not been found in the output of any English printer. One wonders, therefore, if this might be an example of an imported continental music paper, an area that still awaits detailed study. 74 The patent granted to Thomas Morley in 1598 added a specific clause relating to the importation of music paper, which suggests that this had been taking place. 75

Conclusion
What has been learnt from this foray into the world of fleurons is their potential significance for unlocking further details about the early history of 74 My own survey of continental partbooks has so far failed to find a comparable border; however, the case of East and Middleton shows that such papers might not be the preserve of those known to be producing printed books of music. The only detailed study of continental ruled music papers is from a later period: Laurent Guillo, 'Les papiers à musique imprimés en France au XVIIe siècle: Un nouveau critère d'analyse des manuscrits musicaux', Revue de Musicologie, 87 (2001), 307-69. Brief references to ruled paper are also made Kate van Orden, Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 44-45. 75 Murray, Thomas Morley, p. 90. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article-abstract/19/2/174/5040813 by Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford user on 15 June 2020 music printing. We can now say with a fair degree of confidence that Thomas East had a history of printing ruled music paper before he later printed music as the assign of William Byrd in 1588. This early experience would have given him some knowledge of the musical marketplace, which helps to explain his interest in entering the business of printing music books in the late 1580s and how he was in a position to make this venture a success despite the limited use of this aspect of the printing privilege in the preceding decade. Having successfully marketed music paper he presumably had some idea of the kinds of music books that might be of interest to such customers and the best booksellers through which to distribute them.
In the case of the East-Middleton music paper, the narrow window in which it was produced also provides useful dating information. The books that use this paper are likely to date from after 1567 and this paper is unlikely to have been in production beyond 1572, though stocks might remain on booksellers' shelves or on purchasers' desks for a longer period. For BL MS Add. 15166 this indicates that the copying of around fifty psalms by John Sheppard was not begun before the publication of Matthew Parker's Psalter in 1567, whose nine tunes by Thomas Tallis follow those of Sheppard. For the 'Hamond' partbooks, nudging the date of creation forward from the mid to the late 1560s or even the 1570s (given the high degree of wear observable on the fleurons and the greater unevenness of the stave lines) further underlines the age of the repertory that was copied in the early layers, as many of the liturgical texts suggest that the musical settings were originally composed during the reigns of Edward VI or even the later years of Henry VIII. 76 Royal Appendix 57 is a key piece of evidence providing a date by which copyist and composer Derrick Gerarde is likely to have been England, while for the various notated fragments on this music paper the fleuron border is the primary evidence for dating, and we can now refine our interpretations in these cases. 77 As we have also seen, though, the functions of fleurons were by no means standar dized and therefore they do not always yield such clear information as to the origins of the music papers that they border. Nevertheless, the wide variety of functions that these fleurons might serve makes them worthy of greater attention. Although they could be aesthetic this was only one of a number of reasons for their deployment: they offered practical solutions to printing difficulties, provided a means of distinguishing and enhancing one's product compared to others, served as structural markers and finding aids, and could be used to style an individual print or group of publications. This styling might imitate foreign publications to create a fashionably elegant 76 Butler, 'History of the 'Hamond' Partbooks', forthcoming. 77 John Milsom, 'Gerarde, Derrick', in Grove Music Online.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article-abstract/19/2/174/5040813 by Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford user on 15 June 2020 look or a deliberate visual difference from previous music titles. Further work on the use of borders and fleurons therefore has significant potential to enhance our understanding of the history and practices of both early music printing and manuscript culture, not only in England, but across the continent too.

Oxford
Research for this article was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Grant No. AH/L006952/1. Thanks are also due to John Milsom, Magnus Williamson, Paul Nash and Juliet Fleming for their advice, comments and suggestions.