Besides the pipe and horn, the bagpipe was also a rustic instrument. There is a shepherd playing upon one in folio 112 of the same MS.; and again, in the early fourteenth-century MS. Royal 2 B vi., on the reverse of folio 8, is a group of shepherds, one of whom plays a small pipe, and another the bagpipes. Chaucer (3rd Book of the “House of Fame”) mentions—
“Pipes made of greené corne,
As have these little herd gromes,
That keepen beastés in the bromes.”
It is curious to find that even at so late a period as the time of Queen Mary, the shepherds still officiated at weddings and other merrymakings in their villages, so as to excite the jealousy of the professors of the joyous science.
The accompanying wood-cut, from a MS. in the French National library, may represent such a rustic merry-making.
Rustic Merry-making.
One might, perhaps, have been disposed to think that the good minstrels of Beverley were only endeavouring to revive usages which had fallen into desuetude; but we find that in the time of Elizabeth the profession of minstrelsy was sufficiently universal to call for the inquiry, in the Injunctions of 1559, “Whether any minstrells, or any other persons, do use to sing any songs or ditties that be vile or unclean.”
Ben Jonson gives us numerous allusions to them: e.g., in the “Tale of a Tub,” old Turve talks of “old Father Rosin, the chief minstrel here—chief minstrel, too, of Highgate; she has hired him, and all his two boys, for a day and a half.” They were to be dressed in bays, rosemary, and ribands, to precede the bridal party across the fields to church and back, and to play at dinner. And so in “Epicœne,” act iii. sc. 1:—
“Well, there be guests to meat now; how shall we do for music?” [for Morose’s wedding.]
Clerimont.—The smell of the venison going thro’ the street will invite one noise of fiddlers or other.