Promoting the Bagpipe Revival since 1986
The Bagpipe Society
The four voiced Dudey or Dreibrümmelchen
This edition is from our archives, so it is presented as scanned pages rather than text.
upon the knee. Some pastoral pipes are said to be more in tune when played Irish-style. The foot joints on extant pastoral pipes seems to be half the length of the chanter without foot joint. An interesting observation to note is the morphology of the last two inches of many Irish pipe chanters. They have a noticeable bulge and a brass ferrule on the bottom.
This could well be the tenon of a new pastoral pipes preserved in the external features of the pipe known now as the Irish pipe, Uilleann pipe, organ pipe or union pipe. I prefer to call it the Irish or Uilleann pipes.
![An Irish warpiper with bagpipes]
An Irish warpiper
20 Chanter
The Irish Pipes
Bagpipes in Ireland have without doubt a long and varied history. Before what is now the Irish pipe there was an older bagpipe called the great pipe or Piob Mhor in Gaelic.
Some sources give the earliest documentary evidence of Piob Mhor as occurring in the Brehon laws of the fifth century. O’Curry mentions a reference to them in the Trinity College Library, Dublin. It contains a list of fines payable to lower grade professionals for insults or bodily injury and concludes:
“These are base, that is inferior professionals and entitled to the same level of fine as Pipairedha or pipers and Cuisleannach or pipe blowers.”
This makes the distinction between bagpipers and flute players. In the 11th century a poem about the fair of Carmen mentions the pipes in the sixty-third stanza. It was noted that the pipers were used from early times in many varied roles. They played for cattle raids, dances, weddings, fairs, battles and other social gatherings including funerals where they were used to great effect.
The Irish pipes were, much as with their cousins the Scottish pipes, a martial instrument with connotations of war for the players. Many had a brush with the clergy or the law.
One story told today talks about a chap playing on the pipes on a Sunday morning just before mass. The priest on his way to mass stops the piper and shouts at him saying “You should be ashamed of yourself playing instead of going inside to mass, don’t you know the Ten Commandments?” “I’m not sure” said the piper “Would you care to hum the first part, I’m no good at remembering the names of tunes?”.
The Statutes of Kilkenny were another time of persecution for the art of piping. A law in 1367, the work of Edward the Third, stated that there would be imprisonment for Irish pipers or minstrels or whosoever helps them.
In 1475 Irish mercenaries complete with their pipers accompanied the Kings Crown soldiers to Calais. Kerns and their pipers fought for whoever would pay them and throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth century there are many references. They fought in Belgium in 1513, Boulogne 1544, and were seen in London in 1544 and 1566. Derricks images of Ireland shows a piper playing in front of a group of kearns. The picture, while showing a piper with a bag, should not be taken too literally, but it does show the pipes in historical perspective.
Galilei in his ‘Dialogue’ published in 1581 offers a good description of the role of a piper in Ireland at the time:
“To its sound, this unconquered fierce and warlike people march their
armies and encourage one another to feats of valour with it. Also they accompany their dead to the grave, making such mourneful sounds as almost to force the bystander to weep."
The original pipes probably had a single drone of some description and by the 16th century development two. As described in “De Rebus in Hibernia Getis” there were two drones as well as the blowpipe and chanter (cf O’Neill, Musicians and Minstrels). There are numerous mentions of this pipe in the 15th century and there must have been much cross fertilisation of ideas between Scottish and Irish pipers for the McCrimmonds to travel between the two. Flood has suggested that there is a reference to Irish pipes in Shakespeares time but we will deal with that suggestion in the next section.
Slowly but surely the pipes began to decline in use and there was quite a downturn in their use after the Williamite wars of the 1680’s and 90’s. The playing of Irish war pipes was supressed largely due to their rousing influence on the Irish. By the mid 18th century they were little in evidence. The last recorded use of the Piob Mhor is at the Battle of Fontenoy where an Irish brigade fought with the French against the English on May 11th 1745. There are no extant remains of these pipes anywhere. There used to be an old set of pipes in the Musee De Cluny in Paris which have subsequently disappeared.
The decline of the large pipes was also due no doubt to the influence of dance music which began to become very popular. There is a good account of the rise in popularity in the Breathnach book “Folk Music and Dances of Ireland”:
“Arthur Young in his account of his travels in Ireland … 1776-1779 remarked that dancing was so universal through the country from cabin to cabin, with a piper or blind fiddler, and were paid by the cottiers for teaching their children dancing.”
The pipes mentioned above were not the Piob Mhor but quite another sort altogether. As western tonality and music requiring notes outside one or two confined scales developed in Ireland, so too did the need to change the instrument. The new one was bellows-blown with two to three drones and a similar number of regulators. The chanter had a range of over two octaves. This was the Union Irish or Uilleann pipes.
The Irish, Union, Organ or Uilleann Pipes
As the above title suggests there are many names for the newer form of pipes played in Ireland. The pipes were known as union pipes in a tutor published by O’Farrell c1800 which is the earliest known tutor for the instrument. Some suggest that the name union comes from the Act of Union (1800) but this is also not the case as it appears in a poem of 1796 where the playing of a musician is recorded thus:
“For he can play the union pipes and nobly squeeze his bags.” 22 Chanter
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