Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age: The Eglantine Table
Ed. Michael Fleming and Christopher Page
The Boydel Press, Woodbridge, 2021
Hardback, 310 pages, 245x176x31mm, ISBN 978 1 78327 4212

 

Visitors to the National Trust’s Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire (architect Robert Smythson’s Renaissance masterpiece of “more glass than wall” fame) may have noticed a large highly decorated table in the bay window of the spectacular upper floor High Great Chamber. This is the Eglantine Table (or Aeglentyne), probably commissioned for the 1568 marriage of Bess of Hardwick to her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, followed the year after by the marriage of her two children to his two. The 3.0mx1.3m oak table includes detailed inlaid depictions of a lute, bowed instruments, recorders and other wind instruments, a gittern and cittern, together with sheet music, playing cards, backgammon and other gaming boards, and various armorial devices, including the aeglentyne/eglantine, a white briar rose.

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