_Pipes made of grene corne,_ _As han thise lytel herde gromes,_ _That kepen bestis in the bromes._
It is curious to find that even at so late a period as the reign of queen Mary, they still officiated at weddings and other merrymakings in their villages, and even sometimes excited the jealousy of the professors of the joyous science, as we have seen in the early French poem against the taborers.
[Illustration: _No. 130. A Group of Shepherds._]
[Illustration: _No. 132. The Lady and Tambourine._]
I give next (cut No. 132) a representation of a female minstrel playing the tambourine; it is also taken from a MS. of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 182).
The earliest instance yet met with of the modern-shaped drum is contained in the Coronation Book of Richard II., preserved in the Chapter-house. Westminster, and is represented in the annexed cut (No. 133). This mediæval drummer is clearly intended to be playing on two drums at once; and, in considering their forms and position, we must make some allowance for the mediæval neglect of perspective.
[Illustration: _No. 134. Blowing the Trumpet and Playing on the Cymbals._]
In the mediæval vocabularies we find several lists of musical instruments then best known. Thus John de Garlande, in the middle of the thirteenth century, enumerates, as the minstrels who were to be seen in the houses of the wealthy, individuals who performed on the instruments which he terms in Latin, _lyra_ (meaning the harp), _tibia_ (the flute), _cornu_ (the horn), _vidula_ (the fiddle), _sistrum_ (the drum), _giga_ (the gittern), _symphonia_ (a symphony), _psalterium_ (the psaltery), _chorus_, _citola_ (the cittern), _tympanum_ (the tabor), and _cymbala_ (cymbals). The English glossaries of the fifteenth century add to these the trumpet, the _ribibe_ (a sort of fiddle), organs, and the crowd. The forms of these instruments of various periods will be found in the illustrations which have been given in the course of the present chapter. It will be well perhaps to enumerate again the most common; they are the harp, fiddle, cittern or lute, hand-organ or dulcimer, the shalm or psaltery, the pipe and tabor, pipes of various sizes played like clarionets, but called flutes, the double pipe, hand-bells, trumpets and horns, bagpipes, tambourine, tabret, drum, and cymbals. We give two further groups of figures in illustration of these instruments, both taken from the Royal MS. so often quoted, 2 B. vii. In the first (No. 134) we have a boy (apparently) playing the cymbals; and in the second (No. 135) an example of the double flute, which we have already seen in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (see before, pp. 35 and 65), and which appears to have been one of the musical instruments borrowed immediately from the Romans. In conclusion of this subject we give a group of musical instruments (No. 136) from one of the illustrations of the celebrated book entitled “Der Weise König,” a work of the close of the fifteenth century.