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Assessments of musical life in London during the eighteenth century often focus on its individual components: concerts; musical instruments; publishing; the music trade. The risk of fire was pertinent to all venues, homes and businesses, and a significant number of concert promoters, musicians and musical instrument makers chose to insure their property with the Sun Fire Office, the first fully organized fire insurance company. The firm's own copies of the insurance policies - on deposit at the City of London Corporation, London Metropolitan Archives, from the Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Group (RSA)1 - provide the names, addresses and occupations of the policy holder, and, since property is mostly valued, we have a means of calculating the financial status of individuals and the possible size of production units. Moreover, the policies encompass some minority groups absent from more traditional sources, including women, foreigners and tenants; disenfranchised sections of eighteenth-century society largely absent from poll books and rate books. Our study, consisting of a transcription and initial analysis of all policies relating to music for the period 1710-79, the first 70 years of this insurance company, sheds new light on musical life in the capital, especially during the growth years of the 1760s and 1770s. Transcriptions of the policies themselves may be found on the Galpin Society website <http://galpinsociety.org>
It should come as no surprise that economic historians have been using insurance records for many years. As long ago as 1986, for example, T. V. Jackson argued that these documents 'provide the local historian, working on the 18th century, with a source of material which rivals the probate records,'2 while David Barnett compared Sun Fire Office policies from the 1770s with Sun, Royal Exchange, Hand-in-Hand, Globe and London Assurance policies from the 1820s to reassess the industrial structure and economic importance of London during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and first quarter of the nineteenth century.3 Our initial study published ten years ago4 highlighted the significance of insurance policies of the Sun Fire Office for our understanding of keyboard instrument building during the relatively narrow window 1775-87, while Joan Jeffery's study published in the same year concentrated on organ builders and insurance records of both the Hand-in-Hand and Sun Fire Office, with particular reference...