Promoting the Bagpipe Revival since 1986
The Bagpipe Society
Review: A Convtroversey of Pipers
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A Note on Sussex Bagpipes
Here are some brief but interesting bagpipe references that I have come across recently by chance. They add to Roderick Cannon’s paper in CHANTER 5, and provide considerably later dates to bagpipes in Southern England than those suggested by him.
I quote in full from a recently published book on the village of Tarring, now a part of Worthing on the Sussex coast, “Tarring - A Walk Through its History”, by Roger Davies (1990).
“In the fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, the church was treated with much less reverence than today, and the nave acted as a sort of church hall. In particular, it was the scene of regular ‘church ales’, at which the churchwardens sold ale in the church to raise funds. By all accounts these were riotous occasions, and the churchwardens accounts make regular reference to them (Sussex Notes and Queries iv, p.230).
“The first record is one on Trinity Sunday, 1515, and they continued to be held regularly over the next 50 years. A problem arose in 1550, however, when a loss of 8s 6d was made - not at all the object of the exercise! The lesson was clearly learnt, and by 1561, the scale of the venture had been considerably increased. In that year, the churchwardens bought, among other things, a leg and half a carcase of mutton, two calfs’ heads, twelve loaves of bread, vinegar, saffron, and of course a considerable quantity of hops and malt. In addition, they paid wages to a cook, a bagpipe player and some minstrels, and bought bells for the morris dancers.”
The second reference is much more recent. The Rev. Giles Moore was rector at Horsted Keynes, and he wrote a diary between 1655 and his death in 1679. The contents of this diary are briefly described in a book published in 1882 “Glimpses of our Ancestors in Sussex”, by Charles Fleet. In Moore’s diary, and Fleet does not say when, the following brief entry appears:
[paid] “To a begging Welchman and a bagpipe player, 6d each.”
Thus we have bagpipes being played in Sussex as late as the second half of the seventeenth century, considerably later than 1636, the date set by Roderick Cannon after which “the southern counties disappear from the record entirely”, and considerably removed from the Cotswolds area where the “last” record was made.
Of course we have absolutely no record of the nature of those pipes, or the nature of the players. The Horsted Keynes piper being associated with a begging Welshman may be construed as being an itinerant musician. It is
Chanter 73
more likely that the Tarring piper was a local musician, as he was employed in a more organised capacity to raise funds for the churchwardens.
I wish I had the time to pursue these interesting references further and to look for more, but I will have to leave them as seeds which might fire the enthusiasm of others to visit their local record offices, and to search their own local literature for more bagpipe references.
Peter Burgess
above
A gentleman in an allegorical setting playing the bagpipes, an instrument that was in enjoyseveral fashionable recorteds. 16TH-C.
74 Chanter
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