Annotation:Leather Lake House
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LEATHER LAKE HOUSE. English, Country Dance Tune (4/4 time). A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The melody and dance appears in London publisher Longman & Broderip's Six New Minuets and Twelve Country Dances...for the year 1788. The air and dance are quite popular with modern English Country Dancers, but both were the work of Henry Bishop, a late 18th century violinist and dancing master living at No. 45 Paddington St., London. Bishop participated in concerts at the New Musical Fund and was probably among the violinists performing at the Handel Memorial Concerts in 1784. He was nominated for the Royal Society of Musicians but was ultimately rejected for membership, the votes six to one against him for reason the he was "a professed Dancing Master."
Leatherlake House is in Runnymede, Surrey, England, on the Thames and was inherited in 1795 by Rev. James Allet Leigh (1770-1857) from Mrs. Mary Priscilla Allet. It is named for an expanse of water on the river formerly called Lodderslake. Graham Christian (2015) posits that it is unlikely that a bishop's house would be the subject of a country dance/tune, and suggests the title was a compositor's error for "Leather Lane House," a London street laid out in the Medieval period along property boundaries and old fields. It did not designate anything about the leatherworker's trade, however, and instead the name derived from a local merchant by the name of La Vrunelane, corrupted to Lovrelane, Liver Lane and then Leather Lane. It has long been the site of a market whose warrant, according to legend, stemmed from of Charles II. The monarch owed a sum of £500 for two horses but did not have the cash to pay the debt, the story goes, which he satisfied by the grant of a market and a penny per customer.
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Barnes (English Country Dance Tunes, vol. 2), 2005; p.75. Christian (The Playford Assembly), 2015; p. 58.
Recorded sources: Bare Necessities - "At the Ball".