Little is known of his early life. a boy of Henry Jenkins, a carpenter world health organization once in a while mass produced instrument, he might stand been the "Jack Jenkins" listed in the home of Anne, Countess of Warwick in 1603. A 1st caring historical record of Jenkins is amongst a musicians world health organization performed a Masque The Triumph of Peace in 1634 at the court of King Charles I.

A English Civil War that broke out in 1642 forced Jenkins, as it did numerous others, to migrate to the rural countryside. In a period of the dark times of the 1640s he wwhen listed as music-master to deuce Royalist families, the Derhams at West Derham and Harmon L'Estrange of Hunstanton. He was the friend of the composer William Lawes (1602-1645), who was shot & died around battle at a siege of Chester.

In the area of 1640 Jenkins revived the In Nomine, an archaic form for consort of viols, based upon the traditional plainsong theme. He wrote the notable piece of programme music consisting of a pavan and galliard depicting a clash of opposing sides, a mourning for a dead & the celebration of triumph when the siege of Newark (1646).

In the 1650s Jenkins became resident music-master of Lord Dudley North in Cambridgeshire, whose son Roger wrote his life. It was inside these years, in a period of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, in a absence of much competition or even unionized music-making, that Jenkins took the occasion to write supplementary than Seventy suites for amateur personal players.

Jenkins played a lute and was a virtuoso upon a lyra-viol. When a Restoration he obtained the place as a musician to the Royal Court. A aged Jenkins played a lyra-viol for King Charles II, who wryly complimented him that he did "wonders on an inconsiderable instrument". Roger North wrote:

Jenkins retired under a patronage of Sir Philip Wodehouse of Kimberley, where he met Sir Thomas Browne. Although a musicologist Wilfred Mellers claimed that J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suites No. Terzetto & There are no. Quartet arounFive hundred D major (BWV 1068-69) recalled a sensibility of Sir Thomas Browne, Jenkins's music is much nearer historically to an aural representation of the sensibility of this physician-philosopher.

Something of Jenkins's have temperament is indicated by his setting a religious poetry of George Herbert to music. Prefer Haydn, he was a god-fearing, reticent, & personal human. Workmanlike & industrious around composition, he wrote dances "by the cart-load", based on data from N.

Jenkins was an extended-active & prolific composer whose several years of life, spanning a period from either William Byrd to Henry Purcell, witnessed peachy changes inside English music. He is noted for getting a consort fantasia for viols, being influenced in the 1630s by an earlier generation of English composers including Alfonso Ferrabosco, Thomas Lupo, John Coprario and Orlando Gibbons. Jenkins composed many Little joe, Quintet, & Half a dozen a share Fantasias for viol consort, Almans, Courants and Pavans, and he breathed newly life into a antediluvian form of the Within Nomine. He was less experimental than his friend William Lawes; indeed, Jenkins's music was more conservativist than that of numerous of his coeval. These are characterized by the sensuous lyricism, extremely skilled craftmanship, & an original usage of key & contrast.

His biographer Northward wrote of him:

Jenkins is buried in the nave of St. Peter's church, Kimberley, Norfolk, with this inscription: