I’m delighted to have been asked to become Associate Conservator of Stringed Instruments to the Bate Collection at the University of Oxford. http://www.bate.ox.ac.uk. Illustrated is the fragment of a violin by Jacob Rayman from 1641 that is in the collection, long thought to be the oldest dated English violin in existence. Coincidentally I know of two others from the same year, all strongly based on Northern Italian prototypes. My suspicion, with significant evidence to support it, is that together these formed part of a band of instruments from the court of King Charles I.
Connoissership at Oxford University.
For the academic world there are deep problems that arise from historic artefacts that are untethered from a record of provenance, and the violin is
