David Munrow begins by introducing them one by one, with a spoken explanation followed by a demonstration. Then hear these instruments played together in three varied programs: Music at the Court of King Henry VIII, Elizabethan Popular Tunes, and a Suite of Renaissance Dances. Before his untimely death David Munrow pioneered and was to become the acknowledged master of medieval instruments, performing on television, film, and making further recordings.

"This recording is an attempt to illustrate the astonishing range and variety of woodwind instruments before 1600. To regard these instruments as primitive, as mere forerunners of their modern counterparts, is a vast delusion. The end of the sixteenth century represents a culmination of over 500 years of artistry and industry in making and developing musical instruments in Europe. All their families of instruments possessed remarkably individual timbres, and the professional musicians who played them were highly skilled; there is plenty of testimony to their accomplished technique, prodigious feats of improvisation and surprising versatility. After 1600, some of these exotic instruments disappeared. Others were transformed; the shawm was refined into the oboe, the dulcian into the bassoon". David Munrow

In these instruments and these tunes lie the foundations of the baroque.