The largest collection of English dances surviving from all of Elizabethan England is Antony Holborne's printed anthology Pavans, Galliards and Almains (1599). It contains some 65 dances, in most of the standard Elizabethan genres, arranged as the composer himself says, "for viols, violins, or other Musicall Wind Instruments." That is, all of the pieces are for "consorts" of viols or other instruments, and were destined for courtly chamber music-making. Yet many of the pieces apparently assembled into this huge collection also survive in earlier manuscript and printed copies for solo instruments—the lute, the bandora, and the cittern. And for even some of these, such as those found in his other printed collection the Cittern School(1597), Holborne apologizes, claiming they represent the "untimely fruits of my youth, begotten in the cradle and infancy of my slender skill." Holborne's abject self-deprecation aside, this means that a piece such as his almain known as The night watch could be an early piece, surviving in later copies for a variety of performing forces.

As with many contemporaneous almains, Holborne's The night watch consists of three repeated strains, in a somewhat lively duple meter, with a rounded tonal plan of G-D-G. Also like many similar pieces, each strain derives some measure of unity from repeated melodic motives: here they include the very first two measures of melody, which repeats in sequence three times during the first strain, a similarly rhythmic motive in the second strain, and the triadic fall that concludes the third. Uncharacteristically, the composer departs frequently from the more common chordal textures and inserts these motives into other voices in compelling inner-voice counterpoint. Unfortunately, no sign remains of what inspired Holborne in the piece save the enigmatic title The night watch. Perhaps he was referring to the sixteenth century duties of some town bands, which included nighttime patrolling of the city for crimes and disasters, and to play short pieces marking the hours.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi