The manuscript is particularly informative in that it contains tunes found in contemporary and later collections, but often in distinct variants. Curds and Whey, with 3 distinct strains here, appears in a similar version with more variations, in the George Skene manuscript, written in Aberdeenshire some 20 years later, there called Wat ye what I got late yestreen; in The Northern Minstrel's Budget a verse list of tunes from the early 19th century, the title of this appears as And I got yesternight curds and whey, suggesting that Atkinson's and Skene's titles are both fragments of the same lyric. Another tune in the book, The Reed House Rant, here with 8 strains, also appears elsewhere - Playford printed a different variant as "A Jig divided 12 ways", while it appeared again half a century later as an Old Lancashire Hornpipe in Walsh's Compleat Collection, and later still back in Newcastle, as a 2-strain version in the William Vickers manuscript. Another tune in the manuscript, a triple-time hornpipe called Uncle John seems to be connected, melodically, harmonically and structurally, with Madam Catbrin's Hornpipe, from Marsden's collection of 1705. The detailed relationships between many of the tunes in this manuscript and tunes in other roughly contemporary sources from both sides of the border remain to be explored more fully.
