In olden times the number of musical instruments was considerable, but their names were still more numerous, because they were derived from the form and character of instruments which varied according to the caprice of the maker or the musician. Each nation had its peculiar instruments of music, and as these were described in each language by names appropriate to their qualities, the same instrument was frequently known by many names, while the same names sometimes applied to several instruments. The Romans, after their conquests, were in the habit of carrying back with them the music and the instruments which they found among the conquered nations, and thus it happened that, at a certain epoch, all the musical instruments of the known world were collected in the capital of the empire. At the fall of Rome, many of these fell into disuse and were forgotten; they were no longer needed to celebrate the festivals of pagan deities, or to add gaiety to the ovations to the emperors in the capitol. A letter of St. Jerome to Dardanus (de diversis generibus musicorum instrumentorum) gives an account of those instruments which remained in existence in the fifth century. St. Jerome enumerates the organ, various kinds of trumpets, the cithara, in the form of a Greek delta ([Greek: D]), with twenty-four strings; the psalterium, a small harp of a square form, with ten strings; the tympanum, or hand-drum, and several others.
These seem to have been almost the only musical instruments in use in the fifth century. A nomenclature of a similar kind appears in the ninth century, in a manuscript life of Charles the Great, by Aymeric de Peyra,[1] from which we find the number of instruments to have been nearly doubled in the course of four centuries, and their forms during this period had continually varied.
The flute is the most ancient of all instruments of music, and in the Middle Ages was found in many varieties. Among these was the double flute of the classic form, having two stems. The stem held in the left hand (sinistra) was for the high notes, and that held in the right hand (dextra) for the low notes. The two stems were sometimes held together, sometimes separate.
About the year 951, there was made for the church at Winchester an organ which, in size and construction, surpassed any that had hitherto been seen. This organ was divided into two parts, each having its bellows, its key-board, and its player; twelve bellows above and fourteen below were set in motion by sixty-six strong men, and the wind was passed along forty valves into four hundred pipes, arranged in groups of ten, and to each of these groups corresponded one of the twenty-four keys of each key-board. In spite of the great size of this organ, we can hardly believe that its sound was heard over the whole town (undique per urbem), as we are told by a contemporary poet.
The syrinx, which was, in fact, the Pandean pipe, was composed usually of seven tubes of unequal length, forming a straight line at the top for the mouth of the player.
Trumpets were much in use among the English, and were employed in the chase and in the tourney, as well as in sounding the charge in battle. They were also used at feasts, public assemblies, and as signals by which one man could communicate with another at a distance beyond the reach of the voice.
The lyre, which was the principal stringed instrument of the Greeks and the Romans, preserved its primitive form until the tenth century. The number of cords varied from three to eight. The lyre of the North—which was unquestionably the origin of the violin, and which already presented the shape of that instrument—had a bridge in the middle of the sound-board.
ENGLISH GAME OF BOWLS. (From Royal MS., 20, D. 4.)
The psalterium, which must not be confounded with the psalterion of the thirteenth century, was a little portable harp, played either with one or both hands. After the fifth century its shape varied, and was sometimes square or triangular, and sometimes round. In the tenth century the psalterium gave place to the cithara, a name by which various stringed instruments had at first been vaguely described.