Fred's qualifiers "reasonable" and "fairly refined" get to the crux. To my thinking ET is a very precise condition, not a spectrum, and any approximation therefore isn't ET. Like, you can't be a little bit pregnant; either you are or you aren't (well, not you, Fred). Referring way back in this discussion, I reiterate my opinion that ET is an ideal (like any other precise system) often compromised unintentionally or deliberately in practice, and I believe this has always been true. Whether or how much the deviations matter in music performance is something else again.
Inching forward a bit, I'd suggest that we tolerate hearing violin or voice and piano together, or piano and orchestra, even though they're not usually strictly in tune with one another, because either we pretty quickly disregard the dissonance or we don't perceive it--or, in some styles of music we even enjoy it. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for hearing Classical chamber music, at least, performed with pianos that sound less harsh in ensemble than most modern pianos do (to my ears), both because they're built that way and tuned that way.
Laurence
There were probably at least a few tuners capable of either a reasonable ET or a reasonable WT in London during this time. And the traveling virtuosi would probably have used them - speculation, but reasonable speculation. It seems unlikely they would have accepted playing on MT or extreme Ordinaire.
No doubt there were traditions that persisted, but we must note where those traditions were rooted. In Germany, they were thoroughly rooted in a century of circular temperaments, and knowledge about how to achieve a fairly refined ET was readily available.
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