The burgh piper was a man of peace; the clan piper was a man of war. For many centuries he had to compete with the "clarsair," or harper, and the bard, and aroused feelings of acute hostility from the latter. In 1411 A.D. one bard, MacMhurich of Clan Ranald, wrote a poem of a most uncomplimentary nature about the bagpipes.
The recitation of the bard before battle was probably last heard at Harlaw in 1411, and the clan bards disappeared finally in 1726; the last clan harper died in 1739, and the "croistara"—the fiery cross—was sent round the clans for the last time in the '45. The last Scottish piper will pass when the Scottish race itself passes—which will certainly be the last of all.
The clan pipers were highly esteemed as musicians—from the musical point of view they, no doubt, left us far behind. The courses of training, lasting over years, at the old piping schools such as existed at Boreraig, turned a man into a piper. As Neil Munro has it: "To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before; at the end of his seven years one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and, leaning a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs."
One of the results of the Heritable Jurisdiction Act of 1747, which so completely altered the conditions of life in the Highlands, was the disappearance of the office of hereditary clan piper.
The tunes these men played were the old tunes we know so well; and so it has happened that in this war we find companies marching into and through machine-gun and artillery barrage and into broken French villages and through German trenches while the company piper plays the same melodies that inspired their forebears to fight their neighbours lang syne—melodies which have been heard, too, in the same part of the world in the days when Scottish troops fought for the Lilies of France against all comers.
The association of the bagpipe with military operations is probably very ancient in Scotland. Perhaps the tradition that the Menzies pipers played at Bannockburn rests on an insecure foundation, but if the Bruce had no pipers, his son David most certainly had, as witness the Exchequer Rolls. In 1549 a French writer states that "the wild Scots encouraged themselves to arms by the sound of their bagpipes"; and in 1598 Alexander Hume of Logie wrote:
"Caus michtilie the warlic nottes brake
On Heiland pipes, Scottes and Hyberniche.
Incidentally, this reference to three different kinds of pipes is interesting.