Little is known of the man himself, but something can be learned from the manuscript - he was obviously a keen musician, and many tunes are only playable on the fiddle.
He certainly had some education, and a sense of humour - the tunes are introduced by a poem: Musicks a Crotchet the Sober thinks it Vain The Fiddles a Wooding Projection Tunes are but Flights of a Whimsical Brain Which the Bottle brings best to Parfection Musisians are half witted mery and madd And Those are the same that admire Them Theyr fools if they Pley unless their Well Paid And the Others are Blockheads to Hire them.
Again, many of the tunes go back a century and more to sources such as Playford, while many others were contemporary, for instance 'Tristram Shandy' is named after the novel whose first volumes were published just a decade before.
Frustratingly, one of the 31 missing pages included the first known reference to 'The Morpeth Rant', a characteristic local dance tune.
A facsimile of all the tune pages of the manuscript is visible on FARNE, with some annotations by Matt Seattle.