Page:The Early English Organ Builders and their work.djvu/55

don, who tuned the organ in the choir in York Minster, in 1531, for twenty pence. His name occurs at a later period, 1568, as tuning and repairing the organs of St. Mary-at-Hill, St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and Lambeth. Both these worthies were priests.

Sir John was succeeded as the royal organ builder by William Betun, or Beton. He was an artisan of some pretensions, if we may judge from the fact of his having been employed to build the organ for the old Cathedral of St. Paul's, destroyed in the great fire of 1666. The name of Richard Beynton, and that of the thoroughly English Thomas Browne, occur in old accounts as "mendyng," and otherwise restoring organs, about the middle of the sixteenth century.^[1]

1. In the old accounts of King's College, Cambridge, as early as 1508, we find Thomas Browne receiving xxxiij^s. iv^d.; "in partem solutionis viii. librarum pro factura magnorum organorum." This may be the builder mentioned in the text.