No. 123. The Double Flute.
Although this instrument is rather frequently represented in mediæval works of art, we have no account of or allusion to it in mediæval writers; and perhaps it was not held in very high estimation, and was used only by a low class of performers. As in many other things, the employment of particular musical instruments was guided, no doubt, by fashion, new ones coming in as old ones went out. Such was the case with the instrument which is named in one of the above extracts, and in some other mediæval writers, a chiffonie, and which has been supposed to be the dulcimer, that had fallen into discredit in the fourteenth century. This instrument is introduced in a story which is found in Cuvelier’s metrical history of the celebrated warrior Bertrand du Gueselin. In the course of the war for the expulsion of Pedro the Cruel from the throne of Castile, an English knight, Sir Matthew Gournay, was sent as a special ambassador to the court of Portugal. The Portuguese monarch had in his service two minstrels whose performances he vaunted greatly, and on whom he let great store, and he insisted on their performing in the presence of the new ambassador. It turned out that they played on the instrument just mentioned, and Sir Matthew Gournay could not refrain from laughing at the performance. When the king pressed him to give his opinion, he said, with more regard for truth than politeness, “in France and Normandy, the instruments your minstrels play upon are regarded with contempt, and are only in use among beggars and blind people, so that they are popularly called beggar’s instruments.” The king, we are told, took great offence at the bluntness of his English guest.
The fiddle itself appears at this time to have been gradually sinking in credit, and the poets complained that a degraded taste for more vulgar musical instruments was introducing itself. Among these we may mention especially the pipe and tabor. The French antiquary, M. Jubinal, in a very valuable collection of early popular poetry, published under the title of “Jongleurs et Trouvères,” has printed a curious poem of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, intended as a protest against the use of the tabor and the bagpipes, which he characterises as properly the musical instruments of the peasantry. Yet people then, he says, were becoming so besotted on such instruments, that they introduced them in places where better minstrelsy would be more suitable. The writer thinks that the introduction of so vulgar an instrument as the tabor into grand festivals could be looked upon in no other light than as one of the signs which might be expected to be the precursors of the coming of Antichrist. “If such people are to come to grand festivals as carry a bushel [i.e. a tabor made in the form of a bushel measure, on the end of which they beat], and make such a terrible noise, it would seem that Antichrist must now be being born; people ought to break the head of each of them with a staff.”
Déussent itiels genz venir à bele feste
Qui portent un boissel, qui mainent tel tempeste,
Il samble que Antecrist doie maintenant nestre;
L’en duroit d’un baston chascun brisier la teste.
This satirist adds, as a proof of the contempt in which the Virgin Mary held such instruments, that she never loved a tabor, or consented to hear one, and that no tabor was introduced among the minstrelsy at her espousals. “The gentle mother of God,” he says, “loved the sound of the fiddle,” and he goes on to prove her partiality for that instrument by citing some of her miracles.
Onques le mère Dieu, qui est virge honorée,
Et est avoec les angles hautement coronée,