Pipers, apparently, were not rich then more than they are now.
It is difficult to understand why sculptors should have connected sacred architecture with animals in the way they did. Artists, like poets, have a license, but this hardly accounts for their associating the pig, which never was venerated in any way, with sacred things. The carvings, however, while hardly respectful to the instrument, associate it, if only in a sarcastic way, with ecclesiastical affairs, and show that the foolish prejudice which considers the pipes profane did not always exist. It is possible that the connection between the pipes and churches was confined to ecclesiastical carvings, but as to that we cannot now speak definitely. The early reformers in their reforming zeal practised vandalism, and in rooting out the religion they wished to supersede, they left us but fragments of an architecture we would now have been glad to preserve. The references to the bagpipe in churches are so fragmentary it is impossible to draw any very reliable inference.
The pipes have, however, been associated with religious services on a good many occasions. The Italian shepherds, when visiting Rome to celebrate the Nativity, carry their pipes with them, and play to images of the Virgin Mary and the infant Messiah, which are placed at the corners of the streets. The pipes were used in the services of the Catholic Church in Edinburgh in 1536. In 1556 there was a procession in Edinburgh in honour of St. Giles, the patron saint of the town. The procession was led by the Queen Regent and was attended by bagpipers. When James I. came to Scotland in 1617, he did not take the organ from Holyrood chapel, when he was clearing out every other symptom of idolatry, because “there is some affinity between it and the bagpipes.” “I know a priest,” says an old English writer, “who, when any of his friends should be marryed, would take his back-pype and so fetch them to church, playing sweetlye afore them, and then he would lay his instrument handsomely upon the aultare till he had marryed them, and sayd masse, which thyng being done, he would gentylle bring them home agayne with back-pype.”
Then we have Dunbar, in his Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, throwing some light on the manners and customs of the Carrick district of Ayrshire, when he makes a brother churchman, with whom he held poetic jousts, desire that no priest may sing over his grave:—
“Bot a bag pipe to play a spryng,
Et unum ail wosp ante me,
In stayd of baneris for to bring,
Quatuor lagenas ceruisie.
Within the graif to set sic thing,
In modum crucis juxta me,