Walter Rainstorp was a musician in the London area in the late 1700s. Not much seems to be known about him. In 1747, he bought a blank book and started filling it with tunes and matching dance descriptions. Somehow the book ended up in an archive at Yale University. The people there put a photocopy online, where it was discovered by some dance instructors in 2019. They passed on the information to a few local musicians for use at upcoming dances. Conversion to ABC notation soon followed.
Most of the files here, the ones with names starting with a number, contain one tune and one dance. The WCCB (Walter Rainstorp Commonplace Book) files contain all the tunes/dances, in the same order as in the book. There's no special order. William obviously wrote them down as he needed them, which would have been determined by the dances that he played for..
The pages with music (with or without a dance) are numbered, but other pages aren't. Most pages have two tunes/dances. The file names are of the form PPN_Title-K-B-S.abc, where PP is the page number, N is the tune number (1 or 2), Title uses '_' for spaces, K is the key, B is the number of bars (for once through the tune), and S in the number of staffs needed at the moderate scale used here. The book has narrower pages, so most tunes take one staff less than in the book. Mostly they're formatted to have 4- or 8-bar staff lines. A few have oddities that give a different layout. The staff layout isn't musically meaningful, of course, and you should reformat the tunes to fit your needs.
Superscript notation is used for abbreviations, with a dot under the elevated part. These were typed all on one line as follows:
| 1.t | 1st, first |
| 2.d | 2nd, second |
| 3.d | 3rd, third |
| y.e | ye, the |
| y.r | your, their |
| Cu. | Couple |
| thro' | through |
| We. | Women |
| Wo. | Woman |