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I want to clarify a couple of things in Richard's remarks (how alliterative!). We have the same policy about inclusion in the records section for all volumes and it's laid out in the REED Handbook. There has to be some reason to suppose that the record concerns music, dance, or mimetic performance of some kind. Now there are individual grey areas in different volumes: knowing as little as we often do about many folk practices, it's often hard to be sure whether there is a mimetic element, but we try to err on the side on inclusion without being wildly speculative. What differs greatly from collection to collection is the inclusion in an appendix of information about named performers drawn from other classes of records, such as parish registers, rentals, or court books. In Lancashire, there was such an appendix but there isn't one in every volume. I think there are two principal reasons for that. If a district is very rich in records, there may be no opportunity to survey the kinds of documents which would inform such an appendix. Given the practical limitations of time and money, one can't always look at everything. When I went to the Leicester Record Office to complete a search that Alice Hamilton, our late Leicestershire collection editor was unable to finish, I found a tremendous number of surviving parish registers in our period had been catalogued. But there was no time for me to survey those for a possible musicians' appendix unless I neglected other classes of records that were much more likely to yield documents for the records text section. I wish I could have done it, but there it is. So in a way, the smaller the amount of the surviving records for a county or city, the more likely the editor(s) are to be able to survey things like parish registers and rentals for performers. The other reason is a matter of editorial procedure. Sometimes editors are able to look at a few registers that may be in print or are directed by some printed sources to small body of records of named musicians that are not suitable for the records text but could be used for an appendix. But the question is, is it right or useful to present such limited data when it was not possible to do a full, proper survey? It might misrepresent matters to do so. So editors who could only do a partial survey of this type of document have been unwilling to use the results to compose a musicians' appendix. Richard is right about one thing, if we had all the money, staff, and time available that we could wish for, then gathering those non-performance records for each city or county would be a wonderful and useful task and I'm sure it would improve the collections for which no survey could be done in the present circumstances. Abigail