To fle the fendis than hardely sing,
De terra plasmasti me.”[[10]]
[10]. Scottish Text Society’s version.
So the poet knew the sound of the “bag pipe,” and thought it an instrument fit to “fie the fendis.” Here some lowlanders would, no doubt, be willing to agree with him.
We have at least one instance, and that from the far north, of the pipes being used to call people to church. In that corner of Caithness in which John o’ Groat’s House is situated there lived, more than two hundred years ago, a parish minister named Rev. Andrew Houston, or Hogston. Mr. Houston somehow could not get his people to attend church, and at last he decided to invoke the aid of the pipes. Accordingly, each Sabbath morning, a short time previous to the hour of service, a piper began at one of the more outlying portions of the parish and played his way to the church. The plan worked well, for the people, attracted by the novelty, followed the music Sabbath after Sabbath, and thus the minister gathered together a good congregation. This Mr. Houston was the first Protestant minister of the parish, and there is a tradition to the effect that not only did he use the pipes for the purpose mentioned, but that after the close of the service he allowed his congregation to have a game at shinty before going home. There is a large headstone to his memory in the kirkyard of his parish. It bears a Latin inscription and the date 1620.
In our own day the most notable instance of the pipes in church was at the first commemoration service held in York Minster in memory of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The 1st Royal Scots were stationed in York at the time, and three pipers, under the leadership of Pipe-Major Matheson—a Golspie man—played selections of Highland music inside the Cathedral. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers relieved the Royal Scots, their pipers playing “The Flowers of the Forest.” Afterwards the pipers of the Black Watch played.
The late Rev. Dr. George Mackay, of the Free Church, Inverness, was a man of a humorous disposition, and after referring one Sunday in an adverse manner to a proposal to introduce instrumental music into the church, said that if they (the congregation) were obliged to fall back upon a “human instrument” to aid them in the service of praise, they would have nothing to do with the organ—it was an instrument of foreign manufacture—they would use the bagpipe. What was more appropriate than that Highland people should use a Highland instrument? Some time later, when the question of instrumental music was being discussed at Inverness Free Church Presbytery, the Doctor, with a twinkle in his eye, turned to an elder who was a member of Presbytery, and who in his younger days was known to play the pipes occasionally, and asked him, “Could you let us have ‘French’ on the bagpipe?” The elder, however, was an austere individual, and, with an attempt at a smile, he replied, “Yes, and ‘Balerma’ too, doctor; but when I want to sing God’s praises, I use my own pipe.”
This antipathy towards their national music, showed itself very frequently among the “unco guid” of the Highlands. Two ministers in the north of Scotland were going along a country road in a gig towards a town where the following day was to be Communion Sunday. While on their way they heard the sound of pipe music in a field near a roadside cottage. They stopped the gig, and after listening intently to the notes of a pibroch, one of the good men jumped out, walked up to the piper, told him he was quite wrong with the tune, and said that if he (the piper) would lend him his pipes he would show him how the pibroch should be played. The piper, with some astonishment, consented, when the minister struck up the tune, and went through it in such a masterly manner that the piper was fairly overcome with delight, and thanked his reverend tutor. During the time the performance was going on the other minister sat in the carriage, quite horrified to see and hear what his fellow-traveller was about. When the piper minister returned to proceed on the journey, the other began a sermon on the wickedness of his conduct. The former replied that on hearing the piper perform he thought it his duty to correct him, as otherwise the false notes would be running in his head during the sermon, but now that he had played the tune he would think no more about it, and be able to preach a good sermon on the morrow.
In this connection it is only fair to ministers to add that they were generally not nearly so prejudiced as their people, especially their elders, were. Elders nearly always professed more religious knowledge than ministers, and were always less tolerant of what did not agree with their own opinions. In one Highland parish not quite a hundred years ago, a few people set themselves up as judges of what was right and wrong, and let the exercise of their powers become such that a young man learning to play the pipes laid himself open to exclusion from church privileges. Happily we are long past that stage now.
There is no denying, however, that at one time the race fell into disrepute. In Cockilby’s Sow, a poem already referred to,[[11]] the bagpipe is mentioned as appropriated to swine herds, and in 1641 a sarcastic writer tells us, “The troopers rode from citie to court and from court to country with their trumpets before them, which made the people run out to see them, as fast as if it had been the bagge-pype playing before the Beares.”