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Welsh bagpipes 2 The Bagpipe in Wales in Recent Centuries
This edition is from our archives, so it is presented as scanned pages rather than text.
To summarise, there is only one way to establish the facts. This is to take some microscopic samples and check for the origins of the materials used to make the instrument. Modern carbon dating methods could be applied. Not enough has been done about this instrument, perhaps for fear of it not being Welsh. I do not know. Funding and time are, of course, always a problem, but it must be realised how important this sole relic is for musicology worldwide.
Theo Schuurmans
Welsh Bagpipes
(2) The bagpipes in Wales in recent centuries
This article first appeared in Taplas April/May 1987
Unlike Theo I am not a piper but I hope that my observations will complement what he has said by providing a brief historical account of the bagpipe in Wales during the post-Tudor centuries. Some of the questions raised by Theo must remain unanswered at this stage, I am afraid, but what follows should throw additional light in a few directions and, perhaps, lead us nearer to eventual solutions.
Let’s start with the illustrations themselves. The double-chanter (Fig. 1) — currently on public display at the Welsh Folk Museum — was acquired by the National Museum of Wales in 1937, from an elderly lady in Goodwick, near Fishguard. She was then the widow of Rev. John Morris, sometime vicar of Llanybydder, near Lampeter, and it was he who had, in 1913 or a little earlier, discovered the instrument “in a cottage in North Wales” and bought it for two shillings. Sadly, nothing at all is chronicled of the specimen’s history prior to this.
The chanter, which measures 42 cm in length, comprises:
a) a circular wooden stock, bevelled or slope-cut at one end and externally grooved around the other end, extending to form a semi-circular yoke with a flat upper face,
b) Two pipes of cane, with 6:6 finger-holes and accommodating two short and narrower cane pipes that link into the stock, all four pipes being wax-bedded, and tied with thread on to the yoke, and
c) two bells of cowhorn (each treble-pierced near the outer rim) fitted and secured with thread on to the main pipes.
30 Chanter
Both playing reeds, it should be confirmed, are missing.
Two features, when considered together, raise an intriguing issue. First of all, on the rounded under-side of the yoke is crudely incised the date 1701, which presumably indicates the instrument’s production or, perhaps, acquisition. Secondly, the groove around the stock has been taken by several researchers to indicate that this chanter once had a bag tied on at this point; in other words, what we have here is part of a bagpipe. But — were bagpipes actually being produced, or even used, in Wales as late as 1701? And were double-chantered bagpipes ever here anyway?
The answer to the second question might be affirmative. In the Central Library, Cardiff is housed a manuscript (formerly Havod MS 24 but today Cardiff MS 2.634) written during the period 1605-10 by Welshman John Jones of Gellilyfdy in the old Flintshire (now part of Clwyd). Along with crude drawings of harp and crwth, appear sketches of two bagpipe specimens (see Fig. 2). Both display a blowpipe, single drone and smallish bag; the most obvious difference between them is that the second example has a double, rather than single, chanter (with a surrealistic 9 left and 8 right fingerholes!).
FIGURE 2. Bagpipes sketched by
John Jones, Cardiff MS 2.634
(Reproduced by courtesy of County
of South Glamorgan Libraries)
To my knowledge, these sketches — which were, two centuries later, copied by another Welshman, Hugh Maurice, into what eventually became British Museum Additional Manuscript 15036 — constitute the only iconographical evidence that might indicate the earlier existence of the double-chanter bagpipe in Wales. Having warily acknowledged this, though, we yet cannot take it for granted that John Jones of Gellilyfdy was here depicting native Welsh forms of the instrument — for one thing, although his speciality was copying Welsh-language manuscripts, most of this labour of love was actually carried out while he was in prison in distant London.
The period of the bagpipe sketches is also nearly a full century earlier than the date cut on our double-chanter, so that we must still ask whether bagpipes had, indeed, any role, active or passive, within Welsh culture as late as 1701. Well, a conclusive answer to that question occurs in a lengthy Welsh-language poem, on the thirteen counties of Wales, which was produced around 1720 by Dafydd Thomas and includes a verse which can be translated as follows:
Fair are the buildings in Carmarthen town,
From Lammas Street to King Street;
And it’s the “Back-Pipes” that most often play [there]
For the largest weddings in Wales.
32 Chanter
Admittedly, when some three generations later, the harpist Edward Jones published his Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784, 1794) he gave the impression that indigenous bagpipes belonged to much earlier centuries and were a phenomenon that he himself had never literally observed. But in the very same period, in the 1795 issue of The Cambrian Register, an unnamed commentator, who was better informed than the London-based Jones, wrote of “The Bagpipe” that:
This has been out of use in North Wales for upwards of two centuries past; but it is to be met with in many parts of the South.
This final, brow-raising claim is, in fact, borne out by several other sources. In those we find that the bagpipe invariably performed one and the same ceremonial function — in parts of southern Wales it featured centrally in so-called “horseback weddings”. And this tradition was to last into the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In 1815, the Rev. Peter Roberts, in his volume The Cambrian Popular Antiquities, outlined the crucial role of the piper on such an occasion:
On the day of the ceremony . . . the signal to the friends of the bridegroom was given by the piper, who was always present on these occasions, and mounted on a horse trained for the purpose; and the cavalcade, being all mounted, set off full speed, with the piper playing in the midst of them, for the house of the bride.
Roberts’s volume also provides an illustration (see Fig. 3) of a related wedding-custom which actually shows a horse-rider bearing a mouth-blown and three-droned bagpipe. However, as possible organological evidence for Wales, this copper-plate engraving by I. Havell should most likely be treated with extreme caution.
Perhaps we can set greater store by the fascinating comment offered in The Cambrian Register (vol. 3, 1818) by the unnamed author of An Historical Essay on the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Celtic Tribes, particularly their Marriage Customs:
The bagpipes used in Wales, in general, are the large Highland bagpipes, but in Pembrokeshire and some of the adjoining counties, the Irish pipes are most in repute, as they are in other places, for a private room, or for a dance.
Some additional accounts of the horseback wedding give the related bagpiping ritual a more specific regional location. This applies, for example, to William Young’s Guide to the Beauties of Glyn Neath (1835), in which the author maintained that:
Until very recently weddings were accompanied by from fifty to a hundred persons on horseback, to the parish church, the piper playing the bagpipes.
Young’s comment was much later quoted in The History of the Vale of Neath (1925) by D. Rhys Phillips, who revealingly added:
Chanter 33
Fig. 3. The “quintain” wedding custom, The Cambrian Popular Antiquities (1815)
This narration is exceedingly interesting because it is authoritative. It gives a definite record of the use and vogue of the Bagpipes till circa 1815-20, and partly confirms a statement made to the writer c. 1885, by Benjamin Hay of Lleina, near Aberpergwym — a most intelligent old Welshman of Scottish descent: ‘Y tro diwetha y clywas i’r pipa cwd yng Nghwm Nedd o’dd ym mriodas ych mamgu. Evan Gethin o Flaen Cwm Tawa o’dd yn i wara nhw.’ (‘I last heard the bagpipes in the Vale of Neath at your grandmother’s wedding. The player was Evan Gethin of Blaen Cwm Tawe.’)
Though lost to Glamorgan about the period indicated above, the bagpipes still enjoy wide popularity in other Celtic lands, such as Brittany, Ireland and especially Scotland. The pipe of Nedd probably resembled closely the small pipe of Brittany.
Phillips went on to deduce that “Presumably this wedding took place at Aberpergwym Church, c. 1818-20”.
Less than fifteen miles to the north, within the next county, the ritual of the bagpipe in matrimonial context had also survived into roughly the same period. For the Defynnog area, Theophilus Jones in The History of Brecknockshire (vol. IV, 1930) gave a vivid portrayal of the tradition’s spectacular final flourish:
What is known as the horse wedding took place in 1852. There was the usual racing and chasing, the attempts to steal away the bride, and all the mirth and jollity of bygone days. But one feature was wanting — that appealed to the ear as well as the eye — where was old Edward of Gwern-y-Pebydd, who, mounted upon his white horse, and pouring forth the wild music of the bag-pipe, had headed many a wedding party in their half frantic gallop over hill and vale? Alas! the old man had been gathered to his fathers, and even the instrument upon which he played has disappeared.
All but one of the foregoing references apply, of course, to the southern half of the country — where, it would seem, the bagpipe might well have enjoyed uninterrupted usage from mediaeval times through into the nineteenth century. This situation can hardly have been paralleled in the north, but pipes were probably still heard there occasionally, as for instance in late June 1698 at Chirk Castle, where a two-shilling payment was made to a pair of visiting pipers. (Quite possibly one of these was the ethnically labelled Pat O’Connor, whose portrait, dated around 1679, hangs today in the castle’s servant-hall.)
From the north also — and the Vale of Conway, specifically — comes one of the latest relevant references from the nineteenth century. Robert Griffith, in his volume Llyfr Cerdd Dannau (The Book of String-craft, 1913), testified that when very young (which would have been around 1855) he had at least twice seen, at Llanrwst fair, a feeble old man — a Welshman, he thought — playing “math o bibgod” (“a kind of bagpipe”), one which featured a huge wind-bag held under the player’s left arm. This Llanrwst reference is, however, baffling: by my present records it is, as a North Walian item, an isolated one-off. (For the south, one might almost say the same, though, for the contemporaneous 1851 census entries for Patrick (56) and John (17) Leydon of Pedwran Fach, Merthyr Tudful, both of whom were vocationally listed as “Musician Bagpipes”.)
These verbal references, between them, provide next to no physical or organological data for the instruments, much to our frustration. But, allowing for the fact that most of them refer to southern Wales, while the double-chanter now at St. Fagans was found in the north, they do warn us against too unthinkingly rejecting a possible Welsh provenance for the chanter. As Theo Schuurmans has judiciously noted, however, and as we must also bear in mind, there are alternative possibilities that demand to be considered.
D. Roy Saer
Chanter 35
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