The oldest depiction of a bagpipe with shuttle drones?

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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

The Bagpipe Society

The oldest depiction of a bagpipe with shuttle drones?