The keyed bugle was chiefly used in B flat, a crook for B flat being frequently added to the bugle in C; the soprano bugle in E flat was also much used in military bands.
The origin of the bugle, in common with that of the hunting horn, is of the highest antiquity. During the middle ages, the word "bugle" was applied to the ox and also to its horns, whether used as musical instruments or for drinking. The New English Dictionary quotes a definition of bugle dating from c. 1398: "The Bugle ... is lyke to an oxe and is a fyers
beest."[[7]] In 1300 a romance[[8]] contains the word used in both acceptations, "A thousand bugles of Ynde," and "tweye bugle-hornes and a bowe." F. Godefroy[[9]] gives quotations from early French which show that, as in England, the word bugle was frequently used as an adjective, and as a verb:—"IIII cors buglieres fist soner de randon" (Quatre fils Aymon, ed. P. Tarbé, p. 32), and "I grant cor buglerenc fit en sa tor soner" (Aiol, 7457, Société des anciens textes français). Tubas, horns, cornets and bugles have as common archetype the horn of ram, bull or other animal, whose form was copied and modified in bronze, wood, brass, ivory, silver, &c. Of all these instruments, the bugle has in the highest degree retained the acoustic properties and the characteristic scale of the prototype, and is still put to the original use for giving military signals. The shofar of the ancient Hebrews, used at the siege of Jericho, was a cow's horn (Josh. vi. 4, 5, 8, 13, &c.), translated in the Vulgate buccina, in the paraphrase of the Chaldee buccina ex cornu. The directions given for sounding the trumpets of beaten silver described in Numbers x. form the earliest code of signals yet known; the narrative shows that the Israelites had metal wind instruments; if, therefore, they retained the more primitive cow's horn and ram's horn (shofar), it was from choice, because they attached special significance to them in connexion with their ritual. The trumpet of silver mentioned above was the Khatsotsrah, probably the long straight trumpet or tuba which also occurs among the instruments in the musical scenes of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians. Gideon's use of a massed band of three hundred shofars to terrify and defeat the Midianites (Judges vii. 16), and Saul's call to arms (1 Sam. xiii. 3) show that the value of the shofar as a military instrument was well understood by the Jews. The cornu was used by the Roman infantry to sound the military calls, and Vegetius[[10]] states that the tuba and buccina were also used for the same purpose. Mahillon possesses a facsimile of an ancient Etruscan cornu, the length of which is 1.40 m.; he gives its scale,[[11]] pitched one tone below that of the bugle in E flat, as that of D flat, of which the harmonics
Fig. 2.—Terra Cotta Model of Roman Bugle, 4th cent. (British Museum).