A border Bagpipe Repertoire of 40 tunes.

From Matt Seattle's preamble to The Master Piper - Nine Notes That Shook the World......

"...It has been understood that there is an overlap between the repertoire of the Border pipes and those of the Highland pipes and Northumbrian smallpipes, but because it had been thought that no bagpipe music was written down before the waning of the Border piping tradition a lot of guesswork has had to be employed. This has been a useful exercise in itself, but a manuscript collection has now come to light which makes speculation redundant. Compiled by a man William Dixon in 1733 and the following years in the village of Fenwick near Morpeth, Northumberland, it is an astounding record in many ways. It answers many old questions and poses many new ones..."

" Beyond all reasonable doubt, this is oldest known manuscript of bagpipe music. Need I say more? It's one of the great discoveries of the century. It takes the history of Border piping back two or three generations and gives us a whole new way of playing the bagpipes. But don't just take my word for it: play the tunes, learn them, and see how well they 'lie under the fingers'. It's the real thing........."  Roderick D Cannon, Music Editor, The Piobaireachd Society, November 1965.

see also Out of the Flames  Studies on the William Dixon Manuscript 1733