Here is the fourth Minute Book, which contains the handwritten minutes of Company Court Meetings from 5th January 1831 until the middle of 1839.
This book contains 111 written pages. Digitised images of the pages have been separated into 9 years as follows:
This Minute Book is known by the Guildhall Library as 'MS3087/5', ie Book No.5. However, to establish a contiguous naming convention on this WCOM Archive website, it has been named as Minute Book 4. The original Book 4 contained duplicated records of years 1813 to 1832 and was subsequently identified as a rough note book used by the Clerk before the final transcribing and binding of the Minutes took place.
The final printed page in the book known by the Library as 5 and on this website as 4, is followed by 98 empty pages. There is no 'known' reason for this.
However, inside the front cover is a rectangular piece of leather, gold embossed with the words 'MINUTE BOOK' which has been glued in place on a blank page - it appears to have been taken from a book binding that would originally have matched Minute Books 1, 2 and 3. The actual written pages appear quite old and thick and of a similar quality to the earlier books, but the cover of the book is in a very good (possibly modern?) condition and has a date stamp on the back inside cover of '1959'.
Consequently, there seems to be some evidence here that the original binding has been lost and these pages have been re-bound into a new cover.
As mentioned in the introduction to the section on Court Minutes, the minutes covering 1839 to 1858 are missing (unrecovered from the Clerk of the time, after his death). Perhaps those missing years (or a synopsis thereof), were to be transcribed onto the 98 empty pages at some stage, but was never done. However, it seems equally (if not more) likely, that the pages were inserted simply to produce a book spine wide enough to accept the label: "MUSICIANS COMPANY" (gold blocked, on blue), together with associated date details.
Towards the end of 1838 and for most of 1839, the pages have a number of dates missing for Court and other important meetings - the reason for this is unknown. The dates of these meetings have been obtained from the Clerk's Rough Work Books and a note added alongside the button for each page affected.
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