guardian, a respected antiquary, etc., etc., and consequently gave much credence to the committee and its work. He was possibly an influence in the omission of slightly bawdy ballads from the final works. In 1857, after two years there was still no book, and the delays caused some embarrassment to members of the committee. The reasons given in the committee’s apologies included the fact that they did not want to credit any of the work as "Northumbrian" if it were not. As time went on, Kell (1862) and White (1870) died, and Fenwick moved his law practice to London. In the meantime, John Stokoe had been appointed to the Committee. He had for many years been transcribing and copying out, by hand, many songs, lyrics and/or music, and had collected a large number. The committee now had numerous other sources to choose from, including Joseph Ritson's Bishopric Garland and Northumberland Garland, John Bell's Rhymes of Northern Bards and Joseph Crawhall II's Tunes for the Northumbrian small Pipes. These then, together with the collected papers of its committee members, were the main sources of Northumbrian Minstrelsy, but works from other similar compilations were considered and used. There appears to have been relatively little collecting in the field. When John Stokoe joined the team on the committee, the work moved forward. The various sources and manuscripts were sifted, collated and ordered. A final selection was made, enabling publication too occur finally in 1882. The publication Northumbrian Minstrelsy is a book of Border ballads, Northumbrian folk songs and Northumbrian pipe music consisting of over 200 pages. It contains 132 song lyrics and over 100 pieces of music, and was published in 1882. It is divided into the two sections; the first song lyrics, the second pipe music where only a handful of pieces have lyrics. There is little in the way of biographies of the writers of the music or lyrics, but some information on the histories of the events and a considerable amount on the history of the music. The selection however has been made from the point of musical and prose quality rather than the popularity of the (sometimes slightly coarse) songs of the period. In addition several of the songs have been "modified" from the original versions for inclusion in this book. Contents Note – The page numbers refer to those in the 1965 reprinted edition, and may differ from