York Minster: 900 years of music iconography. Part 2 of 2: The instruments of the magnificent pulpitum or Kings Screen, 1473–1500.

In the first article about York Minster, we spanned nearly 900 years of music iconography from circa 1030 to 1915, with an actual 11^th century oliphant in the crypt, and carvings of a pipe and tabor, harps, trumpets, gitterns, lutes, nakers, violin, timbrel, and portative organ.

This second article is dedicated to one outstanding feature of York Minster, the pulpitum or Kings Screen, with 56 carvings of instruments from 1473–1500: shawms, bagpipes, trumpets, transverse flute, recorder, double recorder, lutes, bray harps, gitterns, rotas, fiddles, symphonie, tromba marina, portative organs, positive organ, clavicimbalum, cymbals, fool’s percussion, triangle, nakers, and singers.

This article therefore acts as a survey of instruments played in England in the last quarter of the 15^th century, including some of the instruments lesser-known in the modern early music revival: the rota, the tromba marina, and the clavicimbalum.

Each carving of an instrument is photographed and described, accompanied by a video of each instrument playing music from the time.

Introduction

The pulpitum, also called a quire screen or organ screen, separates the nave from the quire. In York the pulpitum is also called the Kings’ Screen, due to its depiction of the 15 kings of England, seen in the photograph above, from William the Conqueror on the left, who ruled from 1066, to Henry VI on the right, monarch in 1422–61, then again in 1470–71.

It is a magnificent and detailed piece of art and architecture. Some of the finer features are impossible to discern with the unaided eye: most of the 56 musical carvings described in this article can only be seen in detail with binoculars, or with a camera and zoom lens, the latter necessary for the photographs in this article.

One can only imagine how the pulpitum originally looked with its stone painted. There is a model in the church to show viewers the style in which it may have been decorated with colour: the monument we see on the right and below, made by Nicholas Stone in 1615. Translated from Latin, the memorial reads: “Henry Belassis, knight & baronet, son of William Belassis, knight, by Margaret eldest daughter of Nicholas Fairfax of Gilling, knight. In remembrance this tomb was placed by Ursula herself his loving wife, eldest daughter of Thomas Fairfax of Denton, knight. They rest awaiting the glorious coming of Christ their Redeemer.”

The natural colour of the stone is preserved as a backdrop; the shields are painted in their heraldic colours; and the painting of the faces and clothes is subtle and lifelike.

This is not the original paint from 1615, but the work of restorers after a fire in the Minster in 1829. We therefore need evidence to show that the restorers’ work was sensitive to the manner in which the memorial – and by implication the pulpitum – would have been painted historically. That confirmation comes from the head of an angel from 1400–50 in a display case in Tewkesbury Abbey, shown below, on which there are significant remnants of the original paint. Not only do we see detail in the carving – a distinct chin, fully realised lips, a shaped nose with nostrils, eyeballs that shape the skin around them, eyebrows, lines of facial expression on the forehead, waves in the hair – we see finely painted realistic eyes, with blue irises and black pupils.

Preserved on the Kings Screen we have depictions of musical instruments from the last quarter of the 15^th century, belonging to all instrument groups: percussive, plucked, wind, bowed, and keyboard. The musical iconography of the pulpitum will be examined under the following headings, their positions on the screen marked on the photograph below.

A. Angel musicians gallery
B. Crockets 
C. Columns
D. Additional row of musicians

The instruments of rows A, B and C were carved 1473–1500, the additional row D in 1803–05. Before examining the iconography, an explanation of the evidence for dating the carvings and, at the end of the article, an account of their significance in early music research.

Dating the pulpitum

Trying to find evidence to date the pulpitum reveals contradictions and errors in secondary sources. The book supplied to the Minster’s guides states that the pulpitum was complete by 1450, a date probably taken from Sarah Brown (2003 – see bibliography). Sarah Brown states that the “eastern face [of the pulpitum] may have been installed in the 1420s” (p. 232), but her historical reference for this speculation makes no mention of the pulpitum. She goes on to claim that “the sculptural programme can have been executed only in the late 1430s or early 1440s at the earliest”, giving no evidence. Finally, she asserts: “References to the cleaning and gilding of the screen show it to have been in place by 1450.” For this claim, she refers to James Raine (1859 – see bibliography), a book reproducing the fabric rolls of York Minster, detailing in Latin the work of the masons in the 14^th and 15^th century, with the author’s commentary in English. Her references in Raine are p. 56n, p. 65 and p. 70, which reproduces records dated 1442, 1465 and 1458 respectively. Only one of these dates is before 1450, and none of these records make any reference to cleaning and gilding the pulpitum, or indeed any reference to the pulpitum at all.

If Jeremy and Gwen Montagu (1998) are to be believed, the pulpitum wasn’t even started in 1450, but was made between 1475 and 1506. Like the information book for the Minster guides and Sarah Brown (2003), the Montagus do not cite primary sources to substantiate the dates. We can dismiss completion by 1450, which is without verification and is definitively ruled out by the evidence, as we will now see.

An MA dissertation on the York Minster screen by Dr. Tom Nickson (2020) shows that the fabric roll entries do not explicitly mention work on the pulpitum, and that the earliest probable mention of it is in the records for 1479. William Hyndeley, the master mason who worked on the tower (described in the first article), Jacobus Dam, and 11 other craftsmen received 14s 7d “pro intailying clxxv crockettes”, for work on 175 crockets. Though the 1479 record does not mention the pulpitum, the screen does have crockets. William Hyndeley carved decorations on the adjacent tower and Jacobus Dam is described as a carver, so it is likely that the crockets on the screen were part of the 1479 payment. This conjecture may be confirmed by the fact that master masons had personal motifs or emblems to signify their work, William Hyndeley’s was a hind, and there is a hind on the King’s Screen, indicating that he was involved in designing the pulpitum as well carrying out the carving.

If we interpret payment for carving crockets in 1479 as work on the screen, this gives no indication when the screen was finished, nor when it was begun, but we could suggest 1473 as the date of commencement. The fabric rolls state that in 1473 Richard Andrew, Dean of York Minster, donated money to fund the “completion of the choir”. By this time, the battlements (indented parapets) and pinnacles (slender spires) of the choir were complete, so his donation may have been to begin work on the pulpitum. This date makes sense of the last of the statues of England’s kings, if we assume that only deceased monarchs were depicted. The last monarch on the screen is Henry VI, who died in 1471. A suggested start date of 1473 was in the second reign of the subsequent monarch, King Edward IV.

Some of the instruments depicted on the screen give firm evidence of an earliest date and probable evidence of a latest date for the top row of angel musicians. They include a 6 course lute, not evidenced in iconography until 1475. This may mean the screen was begun before 1475, perhaps in 1473 when the Dean of York Minster made his donation, and it may have taken 2 or more years of work on the screen before the 6 course lute was carved in or after 1475. Next to the 6 course lute is a gittern, which had a final flourish in iconography in c. 1500 before disappearing from view. It is possible that work continued on the screen after the gittern fell out of use, but if we accept 1473 as a start date it is more likely the screen was finished before the demise of the gittern. Thus we have credible speculation for a date range for the construction of the pulpitum: 1473 to 1500.

A. Angel musicians gallery, 1473–1500

There are a total of 42 angel musicians in a row, running the full width of the top of the screen, 20 on the left and 22 on the right. Those on the left row are shown in the first 4 photographs below, followed by the right row in the following 4 photographs. The instruments are catalogued from left to right under each photograph. Numbers in brackets after the name of an instrument indicate how many representations there are of that instrument type on the pulpitum (not just in the angel musicians gallery) and where it is in the sequence, so (1/2) is the 1^st of 2, (2/3) is the 2^nd of 3, (4/5) is the 4^th of 5, and so on. Click the picture to open it in a new window; click in the new window to enlarge and view details by scrolling left and right.

Each instrument will now be described from left to right along the row, except when an instrument appears more than once, in which case all the instruments of that type in the row will be examined together.

01. fool’s percussion (1/2)
06. fool’s percussion (2/2)

The instrument that begins the row of musicians, above, is clearly a replacement for a missing figure, as the stone is noticeably more mustard-coloured than the rest, it is in a better condition than the others, and it is copied directly from the sixth figure, below. There does not appear to be a record of when that work was undertaken.

There is a question over the identification of the instrument. There are two possibilities, both of which lead to me calling it by the name, fool’s percussion. The reason for doing so is explained by a detour through Dutch and German art.

On the carving is a flat surface with a wide rim held in the left hand, and two sticks or a double-pronged implement held in the right hand, making contact with the surface. If behind the rim and flat surface is a pot, and we do indeed see sticks, then we are viewing a rommelpot.

The rommelpot (Dutch) or romelpot (French) was a ceramic pot or jug, the open top covered with a stretched animal bladder, securely tied on, and a stick piercing the bladder. When the hand rubs briskly up and down the stick, the friction causes noises akin to a fulsome fart. This works best when the hand is moist or wet.

Below is an engraving by Dutch painter and engraver Cornelis Bloemaert (1603–92), after a painting by his father, Abraham Bloemaert (1565–1658), showing a boy playing a rommelpot: the whole is on the left and the detail of the pot is on the right, where we clearly see the constituent parts of jug, the bladder membrane tied securely on, and the hand on the stick that pierces the membrane.

The verse under the image describes the boy as the fool in the carnival of Mardi Gras. In the medieval and renaissance periods, there was a common understanding of three types of fool: natural, ungodly, and artificial. The natural fool was a person who today we would describe as having learning difficulties, someone who congenitally or through a head injury is mentally incapable of independent living. The ungodly fool was the immoral sinner, the breaker of divine law, bound for God’s everlasting judgement in hell. The artificial fool was a comedian, someone who made entertaining others with foolery a pastime or a profession. In this latter sense, the fool or clown was a stock figure in the Elizabethan theatre and in morris dancing, morris being a high status professional display dance in European courts from the mid–15^th century, which moved down the social scale and was performed as an amateur pastime in English parishes by the mid–17^th century.

The boy in Bloemaert’s print is a pastime artificial fool for the carnival. His playing of the vulgar rommelpot and his attire illustrate this point in the well-established visual symbolism of the period. In his hat is a feather for style and decadence, playing cards for ungodly entertainment, and a spoon for food and gluttony. Over his left shoulder and around his body is a huge sausage, and hanging from his hip is a tankard, representing gluttony and drunkenness. Hanging down his back is a fox tail and a bell.

The fox tail has a long history of being symbolically associated with deceivers. Medieval bestiaries, encyclopaedic compendiums of beasts, written of not naturalistically but to describe God’s message to humanity through the behaviour of animals, described the fox as deceitful and crafty, lying still as if dead so that birds would come down to perch on it, so then the fox could devour the birds. The idea of the fox as a trickster carried through to the renaissance symbolism of fox tails attached to people, symbolising the deception of ungodly fools, artificial fools and beggars.

The bell was a symbol of the artificial fool since the 14^th century when, in France, Germany and the Low Countries, the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools on Holy Innocents Day, 28^th December, had high-ranking clergy change places with junior clergy, and a fool bishop or boy bishop was elected to preside over worship until the Feast of the Circumcision on the 1^st of January. The Feast of Fools gave rise to the amateur Sociétés Joyeuses (Happy Societies) who, at Christmas time, took part in fools’ plays and processions. It was these societies, which flourished from the 14^th to the 17^th century, which introduced fools’ hoods with stylised asses’ ears, sometimes tipped with bells, and the fashion for artificial fools’ garments and bells spread from there.

In a painting by Dutch artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, we see in a single piece of art the symbolism of the fox tail, the bells, the ass-eared hood and the rommelpot. The whole of the painting is below and can be viewed in detail by clicking on the picture, then by clicking again in the new window for detail, or use your browser to magnify further.

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent is characterised by the Mardi Gras carnival revellers on the left, whose building is the inn and whose behaviour is foolish excess and drunkenness, and the Lenten worshippers on the right, whose building is the church and whose behaviour is charity and abstinence.

On the right, in the Lent half of the painting, the beggars who are genuinely in need receive alms from faithful Christians. On the left, we see the deceitful beggars who are ungodly fools (detail below), shown by the cloth central to the group which has fox tails attached for deceit, and by the bells on the calf of the beggar to the right of the group to show they are ungodly fools. (In art, for visual recognition, the attire of the artificial fool was transposed to the ungodly fool.) The false beggars are overlooked by the surrounding carnival revellers, as we see from the isolation of the group, from the shocked expressions on their faces at being ignored, and from the beggar looking into the empty begging bowl. To their left are two huge beer barrels, with a reveller who has drunk to excess leaning on one of them. To the right of the ungodly foolish beggars, we see two of the faithful from the Lenten half of the painting being led into ungodly foolishness, shown by the figure in pied fools’ clothing with an ass-eared hood, leading the couple with a smoking torch that has almost gone out.

At the bottom of the painting (detail below) we see a symbolic satirical jousting match between Mardi Gras and Lent. The Mardi Gras jouster is a fat man on a beer barrel with a bird pie on his head, whose jousting lance is a cooking skewer holding multiple types of meat. The Lent jouster is a gaunt woman on a modest three-legged chair with a bee hive on her head, whose jousting lance is a baker’s paddle with but two small fish, eaten on Fridays during Lent. In Christian iconography, bees symbolise the church for their work and societal order, and the bee hive represents a unified church community with a common goal.

Marching alongside the fat Mardi Gras jouster is a line of revellers in various costumes, led by a young man or woman – see the hands – dressed as an old woman. The face appears to be a mask – see the eyes – and the hose are stuffed with false and exaggeratedly knobbly knees. The hooded cloak is really a large blanket – notice the shape and how it trails behind – tied on at the neck by a cloth of scarf. To emphasise the foolishness, excess and vulgarity of Mardi Gras, the figure plays a rommelpot.

We see, then, from the context and surrounding symbolism that the rommelpot was firmly established as an instrument of the artificial fool and symbolically of the ungodly fool. The carving on the York Minster pulpitum has two sticks rather than one, which could be a variation on the theme, though I have not observed a rommelpot with two sticks in other art. The sticks are almost flat against the skin rather than arising directly from it, and this angle can easily be explained by the artistic need for the viewer to see the instrument – perspective distortion was a regular feature in medieval and early renaissance art – and the need on a stone carving not to have delicate and vulnerable protrusions that can easily erode and break off.

There is a second possibility, that the angle of the two lines playing the instrument are correct because this is not a rommelpot, but another fool’s instrument: kitchen tongues or scissors beating a lidded pot.

This identification comes from a comparison with an image in a print series of circa 1575 by Swiss artist, Tobias Stimmer. Each of the 10 prints depicts a musician – shawm, transverse flute, slide trumpet, cornett, guitar, lute, viol, psaltery, organ – and a jug player (right). We can interpret the York Minster carving and the Stimmer print as alike, the jug lid played on the carving by kitchen tongues or scissors and in the print by a wooden spoon. Like the rommelpot, this is a fool’s instrument, as the verse underneath the illustration explains. The verse translation is by Jürgen Steiner, to whom thanks.

Before the verse, an explanation of a key reference. “Midas heads” are people with ass ears like King Midas. As we have seen, stylised ass ears on a hood signify that the wearer is a fool. The reference to King Midas adds an extra musical dimension. In Greek mythology, there was a musical competition between Pan, the lascivious goat god, who played pipes made with reeds joined together with wax, and Apollo, refined god of music, who played a lyre. The competition took place because Pan dared to say that his music was better than Apollo’s. The judge was Tmolus, god of the mountain. Having heard them both play, Tmolus judged that Pan’s rough playing was no match for Apollo’s sweet and noble music. All the observers agreed with Tmolus, except Midas, who alone disputed the outcome. Apollo turned Midas’ ears into those of an ass, to show that he had the ears, i.e. the musical discernment, of a foolish, stubborn and undiscerning animal.

The verse at the foot of Tobias Stimmer’s print reads:

No festival [feast, entertainment] goes by without fools /
That’s why I have to scratch the jug:
So that the Midas heads
Can also enjoy it:

Because nowadays you can find people at big feasts
Who value my jug [a simple, rough and foolish instrument]:
More than when nine lutes [refined instruments] play together /
I want to join these people.

There I find a good place as a jug player
I am their muse, their highest treasure /
Especially when they howl [shout, bawl] to me /
And scream over many miles.

In his Musica getutsch und außgezogen, 1511, German composer and musicologist Sebastian Virdung included a woodcut illustrating a variety of musically limited instruments, right to left below: jaw harp, cow bell, clapper, two horns, and a jingle bell next to the same jug and spoon as in the Stimmer print.

In the second part of his Syntagma Musicum, 1618, German musician Michael Praetorius stated that he “included several drawings of ancient instruments found in an old book written in German by Sebastian Virdung, a priest at Amburg, and printed in Basel in the year 1511.” He explained that “since I could find no other information as to how these obsolete instruments were used, I have included here word for word the description of them found in this book.” Praetorius also included a copy of Virdung’s woodcut of the pot and spoon on Plate XXXIII in the third part of his Syntagma Musicum, called Theatrum Instrumentorum, 1620. Virdung and therefore Praetorius give no description of how the jug is played. Having stated that the musical jug and other instruments are obsolete, Praetorius explains further: “It is unnecessary to write anything about the various other kinds of instruments … Some of these could justly be called vulgar and crude instruments, or as Sebastian Virdung calls them, ridiculous instruments, since they are known to all and do not actually have anything to do with music.”

Unsurprisingly, it is impossible to find a video of a jug being played with a spoon, tongues or scissors. Instead, on the right is a video of Laszlo Kartali playing a milk jug with his hands, no doubt with far more skill than is suggested by the descriptions of Tobias Stimmer, Sebastian Virdung and Michael Praetorius.

02. lute (1/7)
37. lute (2/7)

The second instrument is a lute, figure 02 above. Sometimes in stone carvings we see the exact and correct number of strings for an instrument when the number of strings was small. When the number of strings was greater, such as on a harp, we typically see the number reduced, as a multiplicity of strings cannot easily be carved in stone due to the nature of the material. The lute was strung in double courses – a course is a string, or 2 strings, or sometimes 3 strings, which are placed close together and are played as one, which sound the same pitch or an octave apart. On this lute we see 6 strings. This is a rationalisation of 6 courses, 5 doubled strings and the top course either single or double. The 6 course lute is not evidenced in iconography until 1475, it previously being a 4 then 5 course instrument, so this row of angel musicians must have been carved during or after 1475.

The use of the plectrum also helps date the carving. Since its appearance in western iconography in the early 14^th century, the lute was played with a plectrum made of quill, or occasionally a gut string. From the 1470s we see that lutes begun to be played with fingertips, and this became the common playing technique by 1500, but not universal until the 1530s. The 6 course plectrum lute on the pulpitum fits neatly into this timeline: 6 courses, so 1475 or later; played with a quill, so most likely before 1500.

Figure 37 is also a lutenist, shown above. Reflecting the variety of lute shapes and sizes in the period, this second lute is smaller, indicating a higher pitch, and with a rounder body shape. The face of the lute has eroded, so the number of strings or courses cannot be seen, but 4, 5 or 6 course lutes were played in the last quarter of the 15^th century.

Above we see corroborating evidence of the realistic shapes of lute bodies carved by the pulpitum mason(s), contemporaneous with the carving. Above left, a detail from Albrecht Dürer, Angel playing a lute, 1497, corresponding to the oval lute of figure 02; above right, a detail from Lorenzo Costa, A Concert, c. 1485–95, corresponding to the almost round lute of figure 37. On the right we see a further variation of lute body outline from the period, a teardrop-shape lute in a detail from Israhel Van Meckenem, Lute player and harpist, c. 1495–1503.

Below is a video of Crawford Young, playing La bonne et belle sans per (from the MS Torino, Bibl. Naz. J.II.9), c. 1420, on a 6 course lute with a quill plectrum. He plays in the interim style that involved both quill plucking and finger plucking, before finger plucking became the norm. To learn more about this transitional way of playing, see Medieval plectrums: the written, iconographical and material evidence. Part 2/2: Medieval and early renaissance plectrum technique.

To read more about the lute, click here.

03. gittern (1/2)
12. gittern (2/2)

The gittern – figure 03 above, figure 12 below – is first attested in the 13^th century, the lute in the 14^th. The gittern was generally smaller and therefore of a higher pitch than the lute. The gittern and lute look similar, both with bowl backs, sometimes similar-shape bodies (the lute had a range of body shapes, as we have seen), and fretted necks. The frets are not visible on these carvings: since the figures were originally painted, it is likely that the frets were painted on.

There follows a description of the ways the gittern and lute are distinguishable, with commentary on the York carvings of the instruments.

• The backs of lutes were made of several ribs glued together, with a separately-carved neck attached; whereas the bowl of the whole gittern, including the neck, was carved from solid wood.

• In almost all cases, strings on a lute were attached to the bridge, whereas gittern strings passed across the bridge and were attached to hitch pins on the tail of the instrument. There were rare exceptions to this general distinction, i.e. gitterns with strings attached to the bridge – as we see on pulpitum figure 03 – and lutes with hitch pins.

• The peg box of a lute was straight, bent back from the neck at an obtuse angle, whereas the gittern peg box was a curved sickle shape with a decorative carving on the head. On the pulpitum gittern figure 03, we see one of the compromises or alterations to reality a stone carver has to make. If the peg box of the gittern were to be carved accurate to life, as we see in the picture below, it would overhang the rest of the carving and be prone to damage, vulnerable to decay due to its protrusion from the solid whole. The peg box is therefore modified in the sculpture to be straighter than a real gittern, but still with its decorative carving on the head of the peg box. The gittern, figure 12, illustrates the problem: it was carved with a more realistic curve on the sickle-shape peg box, but due to its protruding and therefore vulnerable position, the end of the peg box has fallen off, as well as the entirety of the tail.

• Lutes had 4, 5 or, from 1475, 6 double courses, often except for the first course, which was frequently single. Gitterns had 3, 4 or, in the second half of the 15^th century, sometimes 5 courses, usually double all through, occasionally single all through. The pulpitum gittern figure 03 is shown with 6 visible strings, below left. This can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either, in the variable economy of carved strings being the actual number on the instrument or a reduced number, or numbers of carved strings representing double courses, we could see this as 3 double courses; or the carver simply and erroneously copied the number of courses on the lute for the gittern. The second gittern, figure 12, below right, has 8 strings, being 4 double courses, which perhaps makes it more likely that the first gittern is indeed 3 double courses. On the second gittern there is a slight lack of distinction in the courses, which is unsurprising, given the scale: the first course is double at the bridge, then merges to appear like one string; the second course is double thickness all the way along, so we can assume this is meant to be a double course, particularly as no gittern had a double top course and a single second course; and the third and fourth courses are clearly double all along their length.

Below is a video with music from the heyday of the gittern: La tierche Estampie Roial (The third Royal Estampie) from Manuscrit du roi, France, c. 1300 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 844). It is played by Ian Pittaway on a copy of the gittern painted in a fresco by Simone Martini in 1312–18 in Cappella di San Martino (Saint Martin’s Chapel), San Francesco, Assisi, Italy, which is seen in the video.

To learn more about the gittern, click here.

04. bray harp (1/3)
22. bray harp (2/3)
25. bray harp (3/3)

By comparing figure 04, above, with figure 25, below, we see that they are likely to be the same design of harp, but eroded and damaged in different ways. The figure 04 harp is played resting on the floor and figure 25 possibly on the lap.

Since the pulpitum harps were carved in England in 1473–1500, we can be sure that they are bray harps. In the latter part of the 14^th century, the round string-holders which keep the strings in place in the harp soundboard began to be replaced by pins made in an L shape, turned so that the strings vibrate against them, as seen in the details below from Han Memling, Madonna and Child with angels, after 1479. The vibration of the strings against the pins creates a buzzing distortion of sound which made the harps not only louder, but gave the impression of a donkey’s bray, hence the terms bray pins and bray harp.

The earliest evidence of bray pins is on a harp painted in 1367–85 in Cathédrale Saint Julien du Mans, France (below left), two to four decades before bray pins on harps became ubiquitous at the turn of the 15^th century.

In western Europe from the early 15^th century (with the exception of Spain, which developed the double harp with two rows of strings, and Ireland, which favoured wire-strung harps), changes were made in the shape and the sound of the gut-strung harp. The forepillar became straighter, with a horn-like curve on the front, sweeping it upward, as we see in the Memling detail above. This made the harp taller, enabling longer bass strings and thus a deeper pitch. This form is described today as the Gothic harp.

Bray harps are usually Gothic harps and Gothic harps are usually bray harps, but since the change in shape and the addition of bray pins didn’t happen simultaneously, the two don’t always coincide. We see this with the Cathédrale Saint Julien du Mans bray harp, below left, and again below right, another bray harp in the pre-Gothic shape, painted by Jaume Cabrer from an altarpiece of unknown provenance, c. 1400, now in the Museu Episcopal de Vic, Catalonia.

What was to become the standard shape of the Gothic bray harp after c. 1400 is seen in details from two paintings below: on the left, from Flemish painter Gerard David’s Virgin and Child with four angels, c. 1510–15; and on the right from a portrait of the Swiss humanist, Johannes Zimmermann, by German-Swiss painter Hans Holbein the Younger, 1520.

Perspective distortion was a common feature of medieval art, to favour the viewer by unrealistically altering angles to display features that would be hidden from the vantage point in reality. At the top of this section we see figures 04 and 25, the harps seen straight on in a realistic fashion, with the effect that some features of the harp are hidden from view. Figure 22, below, is also a harper, but this time with the playing position of the harp unrealistically turned to favour the viewer to make the instrument more visible.

In the video below, we hear two songs played on the bray harp: The Salutation, a carol about the annunciation, and Bryng us in good ale, a drinking song. They were written in a manuscript originating in the monastery of Bury Saint Edmunds, dated c. 1460–90, contemporaneous with the pulpitum. For more information on these songs to the same tune, see One song to the tune of another: early music common practice, 800 years before Humph.

The distinctive sound of the bray harp had a long life in Europe, beginning in 1367–85, the standard harp from circa 1400 through the 15^th and 16^th centuries. In his Syntagma Musicum, 1618, German musician Michael Praetorius still described the bray harp as “the common harp”. In his Harmonie universelle, 1636, French polymath Marin Mersenne stated that brays were out of fashion in France, but in c. 1680–1700, when opera houses were gaining popularity in the German-speaking world, a two row chromatic Davidsharffe or David’s harp was developed, with brays on all strings, and some 18^th century harps had a slider next to the bass strings which, when engaged, pushed bray pins into the path of the lower strings so they fizzed as a bray harp does (as you can see and hear in this video from 2.05), so the life of this type of harp continued in some form into the 18^th century.

To learn more about the bray harp, click here.

05. bagpipe (1/2)
09. bagpipe (2/2)

A bagpipe is a reed wind instrument on which the air is supplied by the player’s mouth blowing into a pipe and filling an airbag, or the air is supplied by bellows operated under the arm. The airbag functions to enable the sound to be continuous. Modern bagpipes have between one and five drone pipes to make a continuous drone note or notes while the melody is played on the chanter. Bagpipes before the second half of the 13^th century did not have separate drone pipes or drone stocks, so they only played the tune, or they had a chanter with two rows of finger holes instead of one, making them capable of playing a drone with the tune, as with a drone pipe, or of playing two voice polyphony. Such bagpipes continued to be made and played well past the middle ages.

Above we see the first pulpitum bagpipe, figure 05. It is damaged, with no visible evidence that it had a drone pipe when whole. Instead, there are two separate chanters so that two voice polyphony can be played on a single bagpipe. This is an alternative to the usual arrangement of two sets of finger holes side by side on the same split chanter, clearly indicated by the hand positions on a bagpipe carved 1330–90s in the arcade of Beverley Minster, a church in the East Riding of Yorkshire, below.

On figure 05, there appears to be no sign of a remaining mouthpiece to show that this was a blown bagpipe, but speculation that this could have been a pipe with air supplied by elbow-operated bellows is soon dispelled by the dates. There were elbow-bellows pipes native to England, Scotland and Ireland, but there is no evidence of their appearance in any country until Theseo Ambrogio Albonesi’s Introductio in Chaldaicam Linguam, printed in Cremona, Italy, in 1539, in which he describes a bellows bagpipe called a phagotum; and no evidence of them in England until John Geoghegan’s 32 page pamphlet, published in London in 1743, The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe, meaning the bellows pipe, and note the word New.

The next bagpipe on the pulpitum, figure 09 below, has a single chanter and a drone pipe, illustrating that different forms of the same instrument were played contemporaneously. 

On the two York Minster bagpipes, there is no indication of the materials used to make the instruments. Modern bagpipes are made from synthetic materials, but in the past they were made from the entire pelt of a goat, sheep, cow or dog, and sometimes the physical features of the animal would be preserved in the final instrument, as with the bagpipe made from a pig pelt, shown above, situated next to the Percy tomb in Beverley Minster, carved in 1330–90. This is a characteristically 14^th century piper, his bagpipe with a single drone, like the York pulpitum bagpipe figure 09, and with a flat-faced chanter, unlike the pulpitum’s round chanter.

The video on the right shows Paul Martin playing a bagpipe with a single drone pipe and a round chanter, like figure 09. The tune is Los Set Goyts from the Libre Vermel de Montserrat (Red Book of Montserrat), 1396–99.

In the video below, Raúl Lacilla plays Danse from the Manuscrit du roi, most of the manuscript written c. 1254–70, this tune and others added to the collection c. 1300. It is played on a musa (medieval bagpipe) with a single chanter that has two sets of finger holes, without a drone pipe, similar to the York Minster bagpipe figure 05 and the bagpipe in the arcade of Beverley Minster.

07. cymbals (1/2)
14. cymbals (2/2)

The next musicians, figure 07, above, and figure 14, below, play pairs of hand cymbals. The cymbals of figure 07 have flattened sides at the top of the curve and flattened lips on which the two cymbals make contact, whereas in figure 14 the cymbals are semi-spherical, without a lip around the edge.

Cymbals in various shapes have a long history. Below left is a Greek bronze cymbal dated 500–480 BC (National Archaeological Museum of Athens). The shape of the cymbals in the hands of the woman in the next image is hemispherical. This dancing woman is shown above a musically noted “Alleluia” in Tropaire de Saint-Martial, an illustrated devotional music manuscript, dated 1027–28 or before, from the Abbey of Saint-Martial de Limoges, France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 1118, folio 114r).

In general, we see that cymbals in the shape of a dome or cup were played with surfaces meeting horizontally, as we see with the cymbal-playing hare in the English Rutland Psalter (British Library Add MS 62925, folio 54r), c. 1260, above right, and the hemispherical cymbals below on folio 107r of the Canterbury Psalter (also the Great Canterbury Psalter or the Anglo-Catalan Psalter, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 8846), 1176–1200 and 1285–1348. In the Canterbury Psalter, we see King David in the centre playing a psaltery, accompanied left to right by bagpipe, vielle (fiddle), lute, gittern, portative organ, and cup cymbals. All of these instruments are represented in the late 15^th century carvings of the York Minster pulpitum. 

Flatter cymbals, those with a large contact area, were usually played with surfaces meeting vertically, as we see in York Minster figure 07, and above left from the Iberian Cantigas de Santa Maria (Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Códice de los músicos, RBME Cat b-I-2, folio 176v), 1257–83, and above right from a Parisian Book of Hours (The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MS M.1004, folio 160r), c. 1420–25.

There are no known records to show how hand cymbals would have been played in the 15^th century or previously. However, the video on the right by C Sharp Studio Prathap demonstrates that cymbal playing need not be simple, like the rommelpot or fool’s jug, and that skill is required to play well. Click the picture to play the video. 

08. symphonie (1/1)

This instrument was known by various related names in the medieval period since its invention in circa 1100: symphonie in Anglo-Norman, Old French and Middle High German; organistrum, simfonia or symphonia in Latin; simfonia in Castilian; sinfonye in Middle English; chiphonie or chifonie in Old French; symfenyge in Middle Low German; and ciunfonie or sampogna in Italian.

The earliest form of the instrument was so large it had to be played by two people. In early music circles today there has grown a myth that the two-person instrument was called an organistrum and the later, smaller one person instrument was called a symphonie. This is an error: the names were interchangeable, as we see in the anonymous Summa Musice, c. 1200, a manual for young learners of Gregorian chant. In a passage listing stringed instruments, the author refers to “the symphonia or organistrum”, and in a passage about how “the inexperienced singer” may learn to sing “in a more accomplished fashion”, one of his recommendations is to “play musical instruments, especially those like the … symphonia which is called organistrum.”

In the renaissance, other names developed, derived from the earlier forms, such as fonfonia in France and cymphan or cyphan in England. In the baroque period, during the sovereignty of the French King Louis XIV, who reigned 1642–1715, it became known as the vielle à roue, literally fiddle with wheel, due to its manner of producing notes (explained below), sometimes shortened to just vielle, which is potentially confusing (and has confused modern writers on the subject of historical instruments) as that just means fiddle. Later in England, it was called a hurdy gurdy – from 1749, according to the Oxford English Dictionary – a name sometimes used anachronistically for all forms of the instrument, even medieval forms, which were very different to those in the 18^th century.

In the modern era, it is still known by a variety of names. As well the persistence of the terms hurdy gurdy in the English-speaking world and vielle à roue or vielle for French speakers, it is sanfona in Portuguese (very close to the old simfonia in Latin and sampogna in Italian), Drehleier in German (from drehen, to turn, and Leier, lyre), and the closely related drejelire in Danish, draailier in Dutch, and dreielire in Norwegian, and it is ghironda or gironda in Italian (of unknown etymology, literally turn wave).

An example of one of the earliest forms of the instrument is below, carved in stone in the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor in Toro, Zamora province, Spain, in the late 12^th to mid 13^th century. Until the 14^th century, sometimes the keys were on top, as we see in Santa María la Mayor, and sometimes on the bottom. By the 15^th century, the keys were nearly always on the bottom, as we see in York Minster.

The Santa María la Mayor instrument has three strings, with one player to turn the crank while the other activates keys to make contact with one or more of the strings, changing the vibrating string length and therefore raising the pitch to create different notes at various points along the string. No surviving medieval account states whether, in this early form, three strings were played in unison, or if they were tuned in octaves, or if there was one chanterelle (singing string or melody string) with two drones or vice versa. The testimonies of medieval writers confirm that later versions of the instrument were a melody over a drone.

The instrument makes sound by having a crank attached to a wheel which is turned, making continuous contact with the strings. The wheel was rubbed with rosin, a plant resin added to bows. In this way, the wheel acts like a wooden bow. That, and the drone strings being like the drone strings of the fiddle, gave rise to its later name from the reign of King Louis XIV, vielle à roue, meaning fiddle with wheel.

We see on the York symphonie carving that it is missing the player’s right hand and the instrument’s crank, but the wheel, 5 strings, and what appear to be 7 keys are visible. At this point in history, we don’t have firm evidence for the tuning, but assuming all strings were always engaged, 2 chanterelles (singing strings, melody strings) over 3 drones (perhaps in unison, perhaps at 2 or 3 different pitches: root, fifth, octave) are most likely. It is also possible, and indeed more practical, if not all 5 strings were engaged at once, as the 3 drone strings may be at 3 different pitches, suitable for music in different modes by engaging the appropriate drone and disengaging the others.

It is notable that on the York carving we do not see features of the instrument now associated with it, that were developments later than 1473, the possible date of commencing the screen; later than 1475, the earliest possible date for carving the 6 course lute; and later than 1479, when the payment for carving crockets was made (see the section above on dating the pulpitum). The first evidence of these later features is in the hell panel of Netherlandish artist Jheronimus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted 1495–1505. Below is the York Minster symphonie above that detail from the triptych, the latter turned 90 degrees anti-clockwise for comparison.

The features that became the norm, first shown in the Bosch painting, are the trompette, the tirant string, the chien, and the extra low bourdon. The trompette is the highest drone string, which we see pulled down at an angle by a thread called the tirant string (but without the tirant peg needed to control the string tension). The trompette passes over a chien, a loose and therefore buzzing bridge, not visible in Bosch’s painting (it may be hidden under the wheel cover). The trompette and chien together, when given a rhythmic push by the turning of the crank, sound like a raspy trumpet or a barking dog, hence their names. Bosch also painted a visually lower and lower-pitched drone string, called a bourdon, below the trompette and apart from the strings that are played by the keys and hidden under the keybox cover. Over time, the number of bourdons increased. There are some proportional inaccuracies in Bosch’s depiction of the symphonie – the positions of the trompette and bourdon imply too small a wheel for the size of the instrument – but he did have the general idea, it is indeed a remarkable depiction for a painter who so hated music (for confirmation, see here and here), it is the first evidence of the trompette, tirant string, chien and separate bourdon, and it is a circumstantial indication that the carvings of instruments on the Kings Screen were probably complete by the time Bosch painted in 1495–1505.

There are other cosmetic differences, illustrating that the symphonie was made in a variety of shapes and sizes. Comparing the two, we see that the body shapes are different, the sound holes are in a different place, the number of keys and shape of keys is different, and the Bosch instrument has a wheel cover whereas the York instrument does not. More critically, for the style of music that can be played, both instruments are diatonic (having only natural notes), with one row of keys: later instruments would feature increasing numbers of musica ficta or accidentals (sharps and flats), eventually becoming completely chromatic.

Since this instrument was on the cusp of change, there are 2 videos to demonstrate. First, an anonymous French tune, Mult s’asprisme li termines, found on a scrap of parchment used as a flyleaf, dated to c. 1225. The source is MS Rawl. G. 22, which includes a fragment of another French song and the first surviving secular song in English, Mirie it is while sumer ilast. It is played by Ian Pittaway on a symphonie with 4 strings and top-mounted keys that would have sounded similar to the York instrument.

The second video illustrates what the instrument would become soon after the York carving. Diabolus in Musica play 3 English renaissance tunes: The Earl of Essex his Measures, Grimstock, and Sellenger’s Round. For the first tune, the symphonia plays melody and drones; at the beginning of the second tune, at 1.55, we hear the trompette and chien make an entrance.

A dedicated article on the medieval symphonie will follow in 2026.

10. shawm (1/7)
11. shawm (2/7)
26. shawm (3/7)
27. shawm (4/7)
33. shawm (5/7)
34. shawm (6/7)
42. shawm (7/7)

The next two figures, 10 and 11 above, are very similar but not quite identical, both playing a shawm. The shawm was a conical bore, double reed instrument made of wood. A small section of the shawm’s double reed protrudes past the pirouette, the circular wooden reed protector which may have been used for the player to place his lips against, clearly seen on the two shawms above.

The shawm emerged in Europe in the early 12^th century, developed from the wilder and less controllable Eurasian zurna. The shawm, the trumpet (see figures 15 and 38 below) and nakers (see figure 44 below) were part of the ceremonial loud outdoor Arabian band, adopted in France in the 13^th century and England in the 14^th. The shawm was the predecessor of the much more polite oboe, developed in the mid 17^th century.

The two smallest shawms, sopranino and soprano, had straight bodies until the flare of the bell, as we see above. The alto shawm, the next size down, was identified by the decorated barrel towards the bell called a fontanelle, which functions to hide the working of the metal key which is necessary to reach the lowest note on these larger instruments. Due to their size, the tenor, bass and great bass had extended crooked metal mouthpieces instead of the pirouette and exposed reeds. We see these extended mouthpieces on figures 26 and 27 below, both damaged, with the lower parts of the body broken off, and the right shawm looking as if the end has melted. These larger bass members of the shawm family were called bombards in Germany and England in the 14^th century, not to be confused with the modern bombard of Breton, which conversely is a very small shawm.

Figures 33 and 34, above, are another pair of shawms, both possibly with extended mouthpieces, though this is ambiguous, and figure 42, below, is a singular shawm, probably a soprano, and the last instrument in the row of angel musicians.

This collection raises two questions. Why are 6 of the 7 shawms in pairs? Why are there so many shawms, more than double the amount of any other instrument in the row of angel musicians?

There doesn’t appear to be an overall plan in the arrangement of instruments on the row, no schematic reason why one is placed next to another, with a few exceptions: figures 02 and 03, the lute and gittern, are regularly shown duetting in 14^th and 15^th century iconography; figures 23 and 24, 2 types of fiddle, logically belong together; the odd pairing of figures 31 and 32, a bow and arrow, is described below; and there are 3 pairs of shawms.

At the end of the 13^th century, a wait (waite, wayt, wayte) could mean a double-reed instrument of the shawm family; a player of this instrument; or a domestic or municipal watchman. By the 15^th century, wait could also mean a town or city wait, a member of the band of minstrels employed to play at civic occasions. The local municipalities of medieval and renaissance Europe organised public displays of pomp and power to welcome their sovereign and royal representatives. These civic processions were elaborate pageants through the major thoroughfares, in the public square and the market place. All the local officials took part – bishops, priors, clerics, officers of administration, magistrates, guilds – all with standard-bearers and minstrels. The multiple meanings of wait – a shawm, a shawm player, a municipal minstrel – meant that the shawm was an instrument particularly associated with the town or city waits.

It may be, then, that the pulpitum’s pairs of shawms, 3 times over plus a single player, 7 shawms in all, was meant to remind the viewer of the municipal minstrels, playing in ensemble. This idea is given further credence by the evidence of a waits band employed by the city of York until their abolition in 1836, their lineage uninterrupted for 500 years, back to records in the 14^th century.

In the video below, the present-day York Waits, revived in 1977 and still performing, lead a procession through the streets for the gathering of the sheriffs of England and Wales in 2016. The music is Battle Pavan by Tielman (Tylman) Susato (c. 1510/15–after 1570). The instruments are 3 shawms, 2 sackbuts (early trombones) and a military drum.

To hear shawms alone, in the video below the renaissance wind ensemble Forgotten Clefs (Sarah and Kelsey Schilling) play soprano and alto shawms. The piece is by Eustachio Romano (fl. 1600–25), Duo ‘G’ Tenor cum basso from Musica Duorum (Rome, 1521).

13. portative organ (1/2)
41. portative organ (2/2)

The next instrument is a portative organ, figure 13 above, figure 41 below. It is so-called because it is portable, being a small organ hung by a strap over the shoulder, played by a standing or sitting musician. The first evidence of portative organs is from the 13^th century, a development of the much larger positive organ, which required two people: one to play the instrument, another to work the bellows that supplied the instrument with air for the pipes. (There is a positive organ carved on one of the crockets, figure 46 below.) On the smaller portative organ, a single player presses the wooden buttons – which became keys in the renaissance – and works the bellows. Since on figures 13 and 41 the portative organ is facing different ways, in combining the two images we can see all the external constituent parts: copper pipes; a wooden box or case; the buttons or keys; and the bellows to pump air to sound the pipes.

Originally, the notes on a portative organ were diatonic, like having only the natural white notes on a piano, with the addition of B^b and F^#, as they were the musica ficta notes needed for playing 13^th century music. As musica ficta increased – what today we would call accidentals, or sharps and flats – those notes were added to the organ until it became completely chromatic (including all sharps and flats within an octave). There are 2, 3 or 4 drone pipes, one of which can be chosen, according to the mode, to play a continuous note under the melody.

In the video below, Corina Marti and Fiona Kizzie Lee play two portative organs: Ja falla, anonymous, from the 14^th century manuscript in Prague University Library, MS XI E 9, folio 258v.

To read more about the portative organ, click here.

15. trumpet (1/2)
38. trumpet (2/2)

The first of two trumpets on the pulpitum is figure 15, above, which is broken: the complete shape it would have been is shown below.   

The second trumpet is figure 38, below. 

Trumpets of metal, horn or wood are common in western medieval iconography, usually straight, sometimes folded, as we see above. Figure 15 is the same or similar shape to a trumpet in The Hours of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre, c. 1404 (Cleveland Museum of Art, 64.40), folio 272r, below left, with another variation of the shape on folio 316r, below right.

The medieval and renaissance trumpet requires only the embouchure, the shape and tension of the lips and the muscles around the mouth, to produce notes at different pitches. It could often be played with only one hand to support it, as we see below in a detail from folio 179 of The Queen Mary Psalter (British Library Royal 2 B VII), England, 1310–20, showing players of trumpet and cymbals.

We see the same one-hand playing posture by trumpeters below in Gloucester Cathedral. In the choir vault above the high altar there are 17 musicians carved between 1331 and 1357, among whom are 4 trumpeters, 2 holding their instruments and 2 playing. Below we see 3 of them: on the left, a player of a short trumpet playing with one hand; on the right at the back is another one-handed trumpeter, and one of the non-players in the foreground.

Valves were added to trumpets in the early 19^th century, since when the earlier and much more long-lived valveless instrument has been known as the natural trumpet to differentiate the two. The modern term for the older instrument, natural trumpet, is so-called because it plays the notes of the natural harmonic series, i.e. those notes available by changing the shape of the embouchure without valves to change the length of tubing. With the use of valves, a trumpet can play all chromatic notes within an octave and, by the tightening or loosening of the embouchure, those same notes within the chromatic scale can be played at higher or lower octaves.

In the video below, Michael Laird and Graham Whiting play wooden trumpets: Gloria in the manner of a trumpet by Guillaume Dufay (1400–74).

16. unknown (1/5)
17. triangle (1/1)

Figure 16, above left, is too damaged to discern what instrument may once have been present. Next to it, above right, is a carving of an angel playing a triangle, an untuned percussion instrument of indefinite pitch which first appeared in Italy in the 14^th century. It is made from a metal rod that is bent into a triangular shape. For playing, to allow maximum free vibration, it is suspended from the left hand by a length of cord or gut, as we see above. A metal rod used as a beater is held in the right hand. On the lowest side of the triangle there are metal rings or jingles to make extra sound when played. Simple single beats are played by striking either the inside or outside of the triangle; more complex and faster rhythms are played by striking the inside surfaces in turn. Staccato rhythms can be achieved by using the fingers and/or palm of the suspending hand to selectively mute the vibration. In the video below, Kalani demonstrates these techniques

18. tromba marina (1/1)

Tromba marina literally means marine trumpet, partly for reasons that are described in detail below: though it is a bowed instrument, it has the raspy sound of a vigorously-played trumpet. But why a marine or sea trumpet? That is a mystery.

The earliest potential evidence for the tromba marina is in the crypt of Beauvais Cathedral, France. A ceiling painted in the early 14^th century shows four mermaids playing a bagpipe, a vielle (medieval fiddle), a pipe and tabor, and the instrument shown on the right. If this was meant to be a tromba marina, the artist was very confused, but the details appear to rule that out: the fin-shape peg box is odd; it is held like a plucked rather than a bowed instrument, not as a tromba marina would be held; and not only is there no bow in the mermaid’s hand, the right arm disappears behind the instrument completely, unless the indistinct shape near the bridge is the remains of an originally painted hand, in which case this must be a plucked instrument. One could argue that being played by a mermaid makes sense of it being a marine or sea trumpet, but this suggestion falls apart under the slightest analysis. For reasons just described, its details do not match the features of a tromba marina; and, if the mermaid explains the name of the instrument, we must also explain the connection between mermaids and bagpipes, vielles, and pipe and tabors.

We are on safe ground with 15^th century evidence, as there are both clear depictions and written descriptions of the instrument. One 15^th century source is Liber viginti artium (Book of twenty arts), an encyclopaedia written by Pavel Žídek of Prague (also known as Pavel Pražský, Paulus de Praga, Paulus, Paulerinus, or Paulirinus) in c. 1459–61 (Jagiellonian Library, Kraków, Poland, classified BJ 257). He wrote in a combination of Latin and Old Czech, and sometimes used terms for musical instruments that are rare in other sources or unique to himself. In the chapter, Musica instrumentalis, he called the tromba marina a tubalcana, and referred to the monochord, a medieval music teaching device, consisting of a single string stretched across a wooden sound-box, with a moveable bridge placed at intervals along the length of the string to teach about the relationship between vibrating string length ratios and pitch. He described the tromba marina or tubalcana as “an instrument made of wood, hollow like a monochord and with three sides, on the surface of which runs a large string of gut … [By bowing it the player] makes absolutely the sound of the trumpet as he wishes.”

To learn how the tromba marina makes “the sound of the trumpet”, we turn to a later witness, the German composer and musicologist Michael Praetorius. In his Syntagma Musicum. Volume II: De Organographia, 1618, he described the tromba marina as having a “buzzing and snarling sound” before describing how the sound is produced. “This buzzing and snarling is caused by a small bent piece of wood set under the string down toward its lower end [i.e. the bridge], much like the bridge of a violin. The thick little tab or foot of this piece of wood [the bridge] is set loosely against the instrument such that the other little tab [the other foot of the bridge], which has a surface of ivory or other such hard material, vibrates against the surface of the sounding-board when the string is stroked by the bow; and this causes a shaking and snarling sound.”

This suggests that the string is positioned on one side of the bridge, rather than centrally, to allow maximum free vibration, and this is exactly what we see, for example, in the detail of the tromba marina on the right from the Santa María la Real de Nájera altarpiece by Hans Memling, commissioned in 1487.

“Occasionally”, Praetorius continued, “the players also set a tiny nail into the bottom of the loose tab, so that the shaking and snarling against the body can be heard all the more strongly. And this is just as on the harp, for the strings of the harp also rattle and crackle if they come into contact with the pegs with which they are fastened into the frame of the instrument, at the bottom. This rattling is usually referred to as harping or a harp-like sound.” To hear how this sounds, click on the picture to hear Oliver Brookes playing an improvised fanfare on tromba marina, before moving into the motet, Quant je le voi / Bon vin doit / Cis chans vault boire from the Roman de Fauvel, completed in 1316, joined by James Tyler on lute and David Munro on flute.

There are key details here that make sense of the 15^th century being the period of the tromba marina’s origin: Pavel Žídek likened the raspy tromba marina to “the sound of the trumpet” and Michael Praetorius described the “rattle and crackle” of harp strings and the use of the term “harping” to describe that sound. This is not how we would describe a harp in the modern era, but this was the period of the bray harp, and the 15^th and 16^th centuries were the era of the musically vibrating rasp or buzz, present in:

• the bray harp, evident from c. 1385, ubiquitous from c. 1400, so-called because the frisson of the L-shape holding pins in the soundboard, turned to make contact with the strings, made the harp sound like a donkey’s bray;
• the bray lute, evident from c. 1400, with its low action and triple frets to make it sound like a bray harp (bray lute is a modern term to distinguish it from the now more familiar clean sound of the instrument: in the 15^th century, they were just called lutes);
• the tromba marina, first evident (as we will see below) in 1430–40, with its raspy buzzing bridge so it sounds like a trumpet;
• the crumhorn, the J shaped wind cap instrument of the 15^th–17^th centuries, first evident in 1488–90, with its distinctive sound like a buzzing bee;
• the symphonie (organistrum, simfonia, symphonia, etc.), evidenced from c. 1100, which in c. 1500 had added to it a trompette, a high drone string, which sounds like a trumpet as its name suggests, because it rides over a chien, a loose and buzzing bridge, as on the tromba marina, which vibrates and, as its name suggests, sounds like a barking dog;
• the arpichordo, which German composer and music theorist Sebastian Virdung described as a new keyboard in his Musica getutscht, 1511, “just like the virginals, except that it has different strings [made with gut rather than the usual wire] and nails which make it harp”, which means the strings buzzed like a bray harp. This is likely to be the arpichordo mentioned by Italian writers of the 16^th and early 17^th century, a cross between a harpsichord and a bray harp. The Flemish and northern European renaissance keyboard, the muselar or muselaar, was often equipped with a moveable baton, called a harpichordium or arpichordium, which had the same effect. The baton was fitted with brass hooks which made contact with the bass strings. You can hear the effect in the video here, and judge whether Dutch music theorist Quirinus van Blankenburg was right when he commented in 1739 that muselars “grunt in the bass like young pigs”.

In the 15^th and 16^th century, then, instruments were popular which sounded like a donkey’s bray, a trumpet’s rasp, a bee’s buzz, a dog’s bark and, in the 18^th century, a pig’s grunt. What these sounds have in common are that they are bracing, so they give vigour and vibrancy to the music.

Pavel Žídek suggested in c. 1459–61 that the tromba marina had one string, like the monochord. This was not universal practice. The York carving is shown with 2 strings of equal length in 1473–1500; in his painting, The Fountain of Grace, 1430–40, Belgian artist Jan van Eyck showed it with 3 strings of equal length, as we see below (left to right: vielle, portative organ, tromba marina, psaltery, bray harp, lute); …

… a manuscript of the Chroniques sire Jehan Froissart (Chronicles of Lord Jehan Froissart, 1337?–1410?), this copy 1470–75 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 2643, folio 97v), shows 2 strings of equal length, below left; a detail from the Santa María la Real de Nájera altarpiece, or Christ Surrounded by Singing and Music-making Angels, a triptych by the Flemish painter of German origin, Hans Memling, commissioned in 1487, shows 2 strings, 1 full length and the other half length, below right; …

… and in the Heidelberger Totentanz, 1488, an anonymous German book of 38 prints from woodcuts on the theme of the dance of death, with every harbinger of death holding a musical instrument, there are 3 tromba marinas, with respectively 2, 3, and 2 full length strings, as we see below.

Michael Praetorius explained the function of the strings, that some tromba marinas have a single string, and “Some persons use another string, half as long, on the instrument so that the first string, together with its octave, will produce an even stronger sound”, i.e. the half-length string is pitched an octave above the full-length string, as we see above in Hans Memling’s triptych. He went on to describe another way of stringing. “I am in possession of one … It is spanned with four strings, such that the principle and longest string is tuned to C, the second to c, the third to g and the fourth to c’. The upper three strings are used as drones, always sounding c g c’; the actual melody is produced on the lowest string by contact of the thumb. And when this instrument is heard from a distance it sounds no other than as if four trumpets were blowing together in lovely concord.” The implications of this principle is that on all tromba marinas with more than one string, the additional strings act as drones.

As we see below, the York Minster pulpitum representation shows the standard playing technique for a bowed instrument: the stopping hand (which stops the strings, i.e. places fingers down on the fingerboard to change the vibrating string length, thus making different pitches of note) is nearest the tuning pegs, and the bow is played nearer the bridge. This is just as we would expect on any other bowed instrument.

On a tromba marina, however, these positions are reversed, as we have seen in the rest of the iconography above, but which the York Minster designer or carver of 1473–1500 had not noticed. On a tromba marina, the bow is played nearest the tuning peg(s) and the stopping hand is the other side of the bow. The reason is the method of producing notes, which are not made in the usual way by the stopping hand placing fingers on the fingerboard, as there is no fingerboard. Instead, a thumb is placed lightly on the surface of the string to produce a harmonic, a note with a different frequency and therefore pitch to that of a string pressed down to the fingerboard.

Michael Praetorius explained it this way, describing a tromba marina that was made larger by the time he wrote in 1618: “Minstrels play the marine trumpet in the streets, setting its top end, called the neck (into which the pegs are placed) against their chests, and extending its triangular base outward. They support the instrument in the left hand, pressing easily and lightly on the strings at the various nodal points and sections along its body [where harmonics can be played]; and they draw the bow back and forth across the strings with the right hand. The lower end of the largest string is fastened near the bottom of the instrument and extends up to the end set against the player’s chest. The string is pressed on here and there along its length by the thumb of the left hand, and melodies are produced by this means. The bow, drawn over the strings by the right hand, is held very high – between the left hand and the very top of the instrument”, just as we see in the iconography (other than York). Praetorius commented that “The marine trumpet sounds much more pleasant from a distance than when one listens to it close by”!

This unique way of playing also brings limitations: pressing the string to the fingerboard in the usual way means that every chromatic note is accessible; but playing harmonics limits the notes available, as there is not a node – the point on the string at which a harmonic can be played – for every note. There are more harmonics available the higher on the string one plays. Praetorius explained the limitations: “Players are able to play in both the ionian and hypoionian modes very easily on this instrument, just as on trumpets, bagpipes and other such instruments, but cannot play the other modes so well. And though, to be sure, those who are inexperienced in music can only play the thirds, fourths and fifths of the open strings and are not able to find tones and semitones well, still anyone who applies himself with diligence will be able to play them also, even though semitones cannot very clearly be discerned on the instrument because of the buzzing and snarling sound produced by the string.”

In the 17^th century, the instrument was made larger than those we have seen above, and was known in German by other names: Trumscheit, meaning wood-trumpet; Nonnetrompete, nun’s trumpet; or Nonnengeige, nun’s fiddle. The first term is self-explanatory; the second and third are connected to the fact that some surviving tromba marinas were discovered in convents: since nuns were not allowed to play wind instruments, the tromba marina served as an alternative.

The video below has The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments (Clare Salaman, Sam Stadlen, Jean Kelly, Reiko Ichise) playing four tromba marinas made in the 17^th century style. The music is Le Merliton, Marche and Rondeau by Jean-Baptiste Prin (c. 1669–1742), a virtuoso on the instrument.

19. unknown (2/5) – probable psaltery

Figure 19 plays an instrument that cannot be identified due to its angle to the viewer, but there are two clear possibilities.   

The first is that this instrument is some type of keyboard but, as we will see below with figures 28 and 35, other keyboards in the row are turned 90 degrees to face the viewer so that details can be seen. It would therefore be odd if in this case the carver obscured the identity of a keyboard.

The second possibility is a psaltery. The psaltery first appeared in Europe in the 11^th century. It consists of a wooden resonating box with a varied number of wire strings – brass or silver – stretched across it. Iconography shows a variety of psaltery stringing practices, strung singly or in double or triple courses, and a variety of body shapes.

Players almost always positioned psalteries on their lap vertically, facing out, so the sound was directed toward the listener, as we see in the images below: left, from the Iberian Cantigas de Santa María, Códice de los músicos, 1257–83 (Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, RBMECat b-I-2, folio 89r); right, from the Anglo-Catalan Great Canterbury Psalter, decorated in the first half of the 14^th century (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 8846, folio 107r).

There were exceptions to this norm that are relevant to the York Minster mystery instrument. In the English Hunterian Psalter, c. 1170 (Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 229, folio 21v), below left, a psaltery player has his instrument on a stand in front of him. The player in the English Rutland Psalter, c. 1260, below right (British Library Add MS 62925, folio 73v) has the psaltery on his lap, facing up, …

… as does King David in the English Luttrell Psalter, 1325–40, below left (British Library Add MS 42130, folio 149r). Below right is a detail from the anonymous German panel painting, Paradiesgärtlein (Garden of Paradise), c. 1410, in which we see the Christ child playing a psaltery flat on the ground in front of him, held in place by Saint Cecilia.

In the Rutland Psalter (above right) and the Luttrell Psalter (below left), we see the typical perspective distortion of medieval art (for an explanation, see How reliable is medieval music iconography? Part 1/3: Understanding medieval art). In the image of King David’s psaltery, below left, the strings furthest away from him are unreachable as the instrument is placed against his lower legs, so taken literally it would be only partially playable and would inevitably fall to the floor. In the common perspective distortion of medieval art, which has the purpose of giving the viewer details not visible in reality, the artist has given us both the viewer’s perspective, King David sitting and playing a psaltery, and the player’s perspective, able to see the psaltery on his lap, in the same manner we will see below with the pulpitum keyboards, figures 28 and 35.

In Belgian artist Jan van Eyck’s painting, The Fountain of Grace, 1430–40, below left, the psaltery is again on the player’s lap, facing up, and, below right, in the Sforza Hours (British Library, Add MS 34294), illustrated by Italian miniaturist Giovan Pietro Birago and Flemish illuminator Gerard Horenbout, c. 1490 and 1517–20, it is on a table face up.

While certainty is impossible, figure 19 is most likely a psaltery, since the pulpitum keyboards are turned to face the viewer, and there was a history of a minority of psaltery players who placed the instrument face up on their lap.

The medieval psaltery has no relationship to the modern bowed psaltery, first patented in 1925 as the violin zither by the Clemens Neuber Company in Germany. This simple instrument was popularised as a musical learning aid for children by Walter Mittman, a primary school teacher in Westphalia, after World War II. Despite its borrowed name, it is unrelated to the historical psaltery.

In the video below, we see the psaltery played on the lap in the face up position. The song is There comes a ship a sailing, a traditional German nativity carol which accumulated verses through the late medieval, renaissance and early baroque periods. The first two verses are from a manuscript dated 1470–80, now in the Royal Library, Berlin; the remaining verses are from Jan Suderman, Gesange (Song), 1626; and the melody is that given for it in Andernach Gesangbuch (Andernach Songbook), Köln, 1608. The English verses from the original German are by Ian Pittaway. The performers are Andy Casserley on psaltery, Ian Pittaway on voice and gittern, playing together as The Night Watch.

20. obscured (1/2)
21. obscured (2/2)

As we see above and below, the final musician on the left row and the first on the right row are mostly hidden from view, such that their instruments are not visible. As we see above, these figures continue the even spacing of angels, clearly the reason for their inclusion, but arguably it would not look amiss if these angels were not there, obscured as they are.

This raises the question whether the mason who worked on these angels knew that two of his creations would be essentially unseen. This in turn raises the related paradox I have observed innumerable times when visiting medieval and renaissance churches to take photographs. Medieval and renaissance masons were paid to skilfully craft beautiful and intricate decorative creations on internal roofs, or high in arcades, or in galleries, triforia and the capitals of columns, but often medieval and renaissance congregants could not possibly have seen the work in any detail with their own unaided eyes. For a modern visitor it is often only truly visible with a zoom lens. Surely an artist wants their work to be seen. Or would such a desire have been considered hubris, so all that mattered was that God could see the expense, the effort, and the beauty?

23. fiddle (1/5)
24. fiddle (2/5)

Next we see 2 instruments that look very different, but which very likely went by the same name or the same group of names, known in English as fithele, fidel, and eventually fiddle, in German as fidula and videle, in French as vielle, viella and viole, in Italian as viola, and in Spanish as viguela and vihuela. The words in the viola and vihuela group of names applied to both plucked and bowed instruments, which is why some writers distinguished them further by the appellation de pénola, with a plectrum; de arco (or d’arco), with a bow; da braccio, with or from the arm, i.e. played on the arm while bowing; da gamba, with or from the leg, i.e. played vertically, resting on or between the legs while bowing.

In the modern era, we are used to knowing that precisely this instrument has that name, but it was not always so for all instrument families. The author of the anonymous The praise of musicke, published in 1586 in Oxford, expressed the view that instruments had become so diverse in their features that they were easier to make than to name! This is particularly so with bowed instruments of the medieval and renaissance periods. It would be wise not to call these instruments viols or violas: though historically, those names were used generally for bowed instruments, in the renaissance the words referred to a specific group of fretted 6 string bowed instruments in a variety of sizes, sometimes played in consort (a variety of sizes of the same instrument played together), and we would certainly not call them violins, as that name refers to a specific instrument, still played today, first evidenced in the 1530s in Italy. While recognising that these 2 pulpitum instruments are quite different, it is prudent to give them both the general name, fiddle, then describe their differences.

From the 12^th century on, the fiddle or vielle/viella referred to a range of bowed instruments, strung with gut, with diverse features: different numbers of strings, being 3, 4, 5 or 6; different tunings, 3 of them for 5 string fiddles described by Jerome of Moravia in his Tractatus de Musica, written in Paris in c. 1280; with or without a bourdon, a string off the fingerboard at an angle, which can therefore only be bowed open or plucked; different bridge types, flat and arced; the neck usually unfretted, but occasionally fretted; different sizes; and different body shapes – oval, with and without a curved waist, some like a figure of 8, or rectangular with rounded corners, or with inwardly curving corners, or with outwardly curving corners, and some pear or teardrop shape.

The fiddle played by figure 23 is rectangular with rounded corners and it has 6 strings. The lira (or lyra) da braccio – meaning bowed instrument on the arm – was a short-lived instrument that appeared in mostly Italian paintings from c. 1490 to the early 17^th century, which also had 6 strings, so this carving is potentially within the right time period. But this is not a lira da braccio, which had a body shape with a sharp-cornered waist, and 2 of its strings were a bourdon. Given the evidence of Jerome of Moravia’s fiddle tunings and the tuning of the lira da braccio, both of which had some strings paired into double courses, it is likely that this fiddle also had some strings played as singles and some as doubles.

The small fiddle on the right, figure 24, is a figure of 8 shape with, unusually but not uniquely, a trefoil on the tail. Due to its erosion, it has an indeterminate number of strings.

The fiddle was associated in literature with both amateur and professional players; as an instrument to play dance music; to accompany others’ secular songs; to self-accompany secular singing; and as an accompaniment to religious song. The pulpitum figure above left, figure 23, has an open mouth, indicating that he is singing while playing.

In the video below, Kathryn Wheeler plays the third Salterello from the Tuscan manuscript, British Library Add 29987, c. 1400, on fiddle.

28. clavicimbalum (1/2)
35. clavicimbalum (2/2)

Until the early 14^th century, all keyboards were organs that worked by the flow of pressurised air, either the positive organ, which was large and required one person to play and another to work the bellows (see figure 46 below) or, from the 13^th century on, the portative organ, played by a single person (as seen in figures 13 and 41 above).

This exclusivity of air-based keyboards changed in the 1320s, with the invention of a keyboard instrument on which the sound was not made by air, but by plucking a string. One of the earliest references is in a work by French music theorist, mathematician and astronomer, Johannes de Muris, in his Musica speculativa secundum Boetium (Speculative music according to Boethius), 1323. He described a monochordium, the name borrowed from the monochord, a medieval music device with one string and a moveable bridge, to teach about the relationship between vibrating string length ratios and pitch. Johannes de Muris stated that the monochordium was an instrument “with a keyboard of two octaves, of triangular form, with one of the three sides curved.” This is the shape of figure 28, above, and figure 35, below.

Johannes de Muris’ Musica speculativa is one of the first indications of the existence of a lever action keyboard being applied to strings, seen in writing in the 14^th century, in writing and iconography in the 15^th century, and popular through the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries. With strings made of wire, meaning brass and iron, these keyboards are, in effect, mechanised psalteries. Two mechanisms became established (each of which is different to the modern piano, which produces notes by striking strings with hammers).

The first type was the clavichord, its name derived from the Latin clavis, key, and chorda, string. The strings inside the clavichord run from side to side in front of the player. The extensions of the keys inside the instrument were known as key tails, on which were metal blades known as tangents. Depressing the key raises the key tail and brings the tangent into contact with the string. This makes the string vibrate while shortening the vibrating string length, setting the vibrating distance between the tangent and the bridge, thus determining the pitch of the note. When this happens, the rest of string is dampened by strips of felt, known as listing, which also dampens the entire string when the tangent is not engaged. An unusual feature of the clavichord is that one string produces several notes, depending on where the tangent makes contact with the string, so it has to be made so that the notes produced on the same string would not be played together. Since the strings run from side to side, the clavichord case is rectangular, so we see that the pulpitum instruments are not clavichords.

The first indisputable reference to the second type of plucked keyboard is in a letter of 1397. Hermann Poll travelled from his home country of Germany to the University of Pavia, Italy, to study medicine. On his way he met Lodovico Lambertacci, who wrote to his son-in-law that Hermann Poll was “a very ingenious man and inventor of an instrument that he calls the clavicembalum” (also spelled clavicimbalum, clavisimbalum, clavicymbalum, clavisymbalum). The instrument was first described and drawn in detail in c. 1440 in a treatise on the design and construction of musical instruments written by Henri Arnaut de Zwolle, organist, physician, astronomer, and astrologer to Philip III the Good, Duke of Burgundy. From Henri Arnaut’s description, the monochordium described by Johannes de Muris in 1323 appears to have been an early clavicimbalum, since the strings run away from the player and it was, as de Muris described, “of triangular form, with one of the three sides curved.”

Henri Arnaut’s text on the clavicimbalum’s striking mechanism is open to interpretation. The simplest solution that complies with his description is free tangents (not glued on), shaped as slim rectangles of wood, positioned on the key tails so that when a key is depressed, the tangent rises vertically to strike the string above it. This is the first description of a keyboard action that is of the harpsichord type, as we will see.

Henri Arnaut gives measurements for the instrument without defining the units, interpreted by Pierre Verbeek (2019), through an understanding of historical units of measurement, as 93–93.7 cm for the length, including the keyboard, and 53.2–53.6 cm for the width, not including the case walls, which is therefore also the width of the keyboard.

As discussed above in relation to the fool’s percussion (figures 01 and 06), bray harp (figures 04, 22 and 25) and the probable psaltery (figure 19), perspective distortion is a common feature of medieval and early renaissance art, present here in that both instruments are reduced in size and turned 90 degrees to face the viewer so that details can be seen. Figure 28 (shown again below left) is a clavicimbalum, so while its scale was reduced by the carver, it was not to such an extreme degree as may at first seem. Figure 35 (below right) is also a clavicimbalum and larger by comparison, which or may not have been by deliberate design. Plucked keyboards in the period of the pulpitum were all considerably smaller than their later counterparts, what we may call true harpsichords. Going by Henri Arnaut’s measurements, figure 28 has been reduced in size overall, more in its length than its width, and figure 35 is reduced by half in its length but only slightly reduced in its width.

In the video below, we see and hear Nicolas Aubin play a clavicimbalum, based on the description of Henri Arnaud de Zwolle. The music is Mit ganczem Willen wünsch ich dir, anonymous, from the Lochamer Liederbuch, a manuscript collection of German songs, c. 1450.

The name for the harpsichord, the later development of the clavicimbalum, is from the Italian arpicordo, being arpa, harp, and cordo, string – that is to say, it was conceived as a harp with a keyboard. The innovation of the harpsichord from the clavicimbalum was the addition of a quill to pluck the string, mounted on a wooden jack, activated by pressing a key. In the video on the right, Erin Helyard, Artistic Director of Pinchgut Opera, demonstrates the harpsichord mechanism.

Several subcategories of harpsichord were developed – what follows is not an exhaustive list.

A first subcategory is the 15^th century clavicytherium, an upright harpsichord, i.e. the strings rise vertically in front of the player rather than horizontally away from the player. In the video below, Vania Dal Maso plays Adieu mes amours by Franco-Flemish composer Josquin Desprez (or des Prez, circa 1450/55–1521) on a clavicytherium made by Paolo Zerbinatti, based on a German instrument of circa 1480 in the Royal College of Music Museum, London.

A second subcategory is the virginal, a compact harpsichord which has strings running from side to side in front of the player, as on the clavichord. Due to this stringing arrangement, it was made in a variety of shapes based on the oblong – rectangular, polygonal, pentagonal. In the video below, Jean Rondeau plays a 16^th century polygonal virginal, a Florentine arpicordo, made c. 1575, possibly by Francesco Poggi. The music is Melancholy Pavan by English composer John Bull (1562/63–1628).

A third subcategory is the spinet, like a virginal but with strings running at an angle of 30 degrees away from the keyboard, off to the right. Spinets were made in a variety of sizes and therefore pitches. In the video below, Ryan Layne Whitney plays a replica of an octave spinet made by Jack Peters in 1999, modelled on an instrument made by Italian maker Girolamo Zenti in 1637. The music is three movements – Courante, Sarabande en Canon, and Canaries – from harpsichord Suite IX by Louis Couperin (1626–61).

When discussing the fiddles, figures 23 and 24 above, I noted the difficulty for the modern reader of the inconsistency in historical sources of nomenclature for instruments. So while I have neatly categorised types of plucked keyboard here, historical records do not always do so in the same way. One historical source makes this very point. In the second part of his Syntagma Musicum, 1618, Michael Praetorius stated that “The Spinet (Italian, spinetto) is a small quadrangular instrument which is tuned an octave or a fifth higher than the ordinary pitch. In Italy, however, the large as well as the small quadrangular instruments are named spinets without distinction. In England all such instruments, be they small or large, are termed Virginals. In France, Espinettes. In the Netherlands, Calvicymbels and also Virginals. In Germany they are called Instruments, like all other keyboard instruments.”

29. transverse flute (1/1)
30. recorder (1/1)

Continuing the theme of diverse and contradictory nomenclature, the instrument on the left, most of which is missing, would today be called a flute, and the instrument on the right a recorder, and these would have been the correct terms when they were carved in 1473–1500. Previously, in the medieval period, wind instruments of various kinds (not including those with reeds or made of horn) were historically known by the Latin fistula, meaning a pipe or flute, a word that could then have applied to both of these instruments.

The instrument held across the mouth, above left, is a transverse flute, most of which is missing. The transverse flute is evidenced in manuscript art from the 10^th century in the eastern Byzantine Empire, and first appeared in western Europe in German iconography at the beginning of the 12^th century. In the 14^th century, it spread through Europe because of its use by travelling Swiss mercenaries, for whom it was an instrument for signalling and marching. When it spread to other western nations, it was known as the German flute to distinguish it from flutes or pipes held vertically.

These early transverse flutes were made of wood. The first unambiguous evidence for a silver flute is in a work by Adenet le Roi. Adenet le Roi – literally Little Adam the King – was chief minstrel from 1269 in the household of Guy de Dampierre, later Count of Flanders. In 1285, under the patronage of Marie de Brabant, Queen of France, Adenet wrote a narrative poem in Old French, Cleomadés, in which one minstrel plays “flahutes d’argent traversaines” – “silver transverse flutes”.

As was the norm for any type of instrument, flutes were made in different sizes and therefore at different pitches. Diverse sizes playing together were a consort, and the first evidence for the flute consort is dated after the pulpitum was completed. A drawing by Urs Graf, Swiss mercenary, painter, printmaker and goldsmith, shows a quartet of flutes played by Swiss soldiers, penned in 1523. Over the following decades, the flute consort became popular as a civilian pastime across western Europe.

The pulpitum instrument above, figure 30, is a recorder, with the bottom half missing. The recorder is part of the family of duct flutes, also including the tabor pipe, flageolet, and penny whistle. A duct flute works by a duct or windway directing air across an aperture or window near the mouthpiece, causing the internal air to vibrate at the pitch of the length of the air column, which is determined by how many finger-holes are open or closed by the player. The recorder is a more complex type of duct flute than existed previously, with an internal duct or enclosed passage, a fixed windway formed by a wooden plug or block (hence its German name, Blockflöte), and a fingering system using 7 finger holes on top and a single hole at the back for the thumb of the upper hand.

The first instruments we can identify as unambiguous recorders, rather than earlier and simpler duct pipes or flutes, appeared in iconography in the second decade of the 14^th century. The earliest of these may be a player in a fresco by court artists Michael Astrapas and Eutychios, painted after 1315 in the Church of Saint George in Staro Nagoričane, a village in Macedonia. The scene is the mocking of Jesus, shown below. On our left is a crowd, including a cymbal player, a drummer, and a player of a cylindrical duct flute which has the necessary features of a recorder: beak (mouthpiece), window (aperture near the mouthpiece), and apparently 7 finger holes (with some artistic license in the spacing, as we see below).

This dating is corroborated by finds of recorders in excavations, confirming that there were recorders in this period, including the Dordrecht Recorder, 1335–1418, excavated from a well near Dordrecht, Holland; the Göttingen Recorder, 14^th century, found in a latrine in Göttingen, Germany; and the Tartu Recorder, 14^th century, dug from a latrine in Tartu, Estonia.

The earliest evidence of the word recorder is in the household accounts for 1388 of Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, later to be King Henry IV, where it states that there has been bought for him “j fistula in nomine Recordo^ur empta London pro domino iiij s iij d” – “one flute by name of Recordour bought in London for my lord, four shillings and three pence.” The wording signifies that “Recordour” was a new term at the time, used to distinguish the instrument from fistula (flute or pipe) as a general term for a wind instrument.

As with other instruments, the recorder was played in consort, evidenced by the set of 4 recorders ordered by Philip the Good of Burgundy to be sent to the Marquis of Ferrara in 1426; by the recorder quartet paid to play at Philip’s extravagant Feast of the Pheasant in 1454; and by the recorder consort of 4 which played at the marriage of Philip’s son, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, to Margaret of York in 1468. The earliest visual evidence of the recorder consort is in Mary, Queen of Heaven, painted circa 1485–1500 by the Flemish artist known as the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy, shown below. 

There is not yet evidence of a bass recorder by the latest date for the painting above, which is also the latest date for the pulpitum, c. 1500. Evidence for the bass recorder first appears in Musica getutsch und außgezogen, a book of musicology by German composer and writer Sebastian Virdung, printed in 1511. As we see below, he described and illustrated the bass in f, the tenor in c’, and the discant (descant) in g’, with 4 part music for recorder consort requiring 1 bass, 2 tenors and 1 discant.

In his Musica instrumentalis deutsch, 1529, German composer and music theorist Martin Agricola built on and expanded Virdung’s work. Together, Virdung and Agricola show that the recorder was of central importance for the amateur wind musician, not only as an instrument in its own right, but as a learning tool to transfer learning to other woodwind instruments.

In the last 2 decades of the 16^th and into the 17^th century, the transverse flute and tenor recorder were alternatives in the English mixed consort, a fixed ensemble consisting of wind, bowed and plucked instruments. We see the English consort illustrated in a detail below from the memorial painting, The Life of Sir Henry Unton, painted after the death of the Elizabethan English diplomat, who died in 1596. Clockwise from the left, the instruments are: tenor flute, the alternative for which was the tenor recorder; lute; cittern; bass viol; bandora; and treble violin, the alternative for which was the treble viol.

For the flute and recorder, there are 3 illustrative videos.

The first is the Loreley Traverso Consort, a renaissance flute consort, playing La Mora by Netherlandish composer Heinrich Isaac (1450–1517) from Liederbuch des Johannes Heer von Glarus (Codex 462 der Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen).

The second video is the Aventure Ensemble playing music from the Gruuthuse Manuscript, which originated in Bruges c. 1400, on renaissance recorders.

The third video illustrates the part of the recorder in the English consort. The Lachrimae Consort play Batchelar’s Delight by Richard Allison, c. 1565–c. 1608.

31. bow (1/1)
32. arrow (1/1)

What could explain figures 31 and 32, an angel holding a bow as if it was a wind instrument being blown, and another holding an arrow as it was another wind instrument being blown? This is a mystery, but there are the following historically-attested possibilities.

a. This is a visual musical joke, pun, or saying, the meaning now lost.

The 14^th century stone-carved musicians of Saint Mary’s Church, Cogges, Oxfordshire, bring together two elements of medieval culture: poetic alliteration and animals playing musical instruments. In 1330–40, eight alliterative animals were carved. In Middle English, the viewer sees:

1. a shẹ̄p playing a citōle (a sheep playing a citole)
2. a simia playing a cithara (an ape playing a harp)
3. a shẹ̄p playing a sautrīe (a sheep playing a psaltery)
4. a hunter blowing a horn
5. a bōr playing a bagge-pīpe or a pigge playing a pīpe
6. a pleiere (player, entertainer, minstrel) playing pīpes and belles
7. a pestis (pest, a mouse or rat) playing pīpe and tā̆bǒur
8. a bukke (buck, adult male sheep, i.e. a ram) with a boue (bow playing a fiddle)

Another example of this kind of visual/literary game is a misericord (carved and decorated wooden choir seat) in Beverley Minster, made in 1520. As we see below, in the centre of the misericord a pig plays a bagpipe for her piglets; on the right, a pig plays a harp; and, on the left, another pig wears a saddle. These scenes invite alliterative word-play: a boar plays a bagpipe or a pig plays a pipe, a hog plays a harp and a sow wears a saddle. This may imply common sayings or a reference to a particular piece of literature; or perhaps it is simply a visual/literary game.

If the York musical bow and arrow are in the same vein, the meaning is now lost.

b. The second theory about the meaning of the musical now and arrow is based on the origins of instruments.

Cithara is the Latin for the Greek kithára (κιθάρα) and Assyrian chetarah, a lyre for which there is evidence dating back to the 9^th or 8^th century BC. In ancient usage, the word was used for lyres in their various forms, but also for any plucked stringed instrument. Wishing to tie their music theory to ancient sources, medieval and renaissance writers used cithara as the root word for a host of instruments – citole, cittern, gittern, guitar, etc. – or used the actual word indiscriminately to mean lyres, citoles, harps, psalteries, gitterns, citterns, guitars, vihuelas, and indeed any instrument with plucked strings. For example, in his Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) described psalteria, lyrae and other stringed instruments as different types of cithara (3:22).

Similarly, in medieval literature, lira or lyra sometimes meant a lyre, but on other occasions it meant any plucked or bowed instrument – a harp, a gittern, a fiddle, and so on. A marginal gloss in a Flemish copy of Alanus de Insulis, de Planctu Naturae (On Nature’s Lamentation), c. 1390 (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, ms 21069, folio 39r) explains that the “lira” in the main text “is a certain type of cithara or is a sitola”. Taken literally, this can either mean ‘a lyre is a type of lyre or the lyre is a citole’, or ‘a plucked instrument is a type of plucked instrument or the plucked instrument is a citole’, or ‘one general word for a plucked instrument can be used in place of another general word for a plucked instrument, or in this case it can be called its specific name, citole’. This shows how convoluted and tangled up in terminology some medieval texts were, for the purpose of making current instruments out to be versions of the ancient Greek and Roman lyre.

In a related way, was there some theory current in the late 15^th century that the musical bow had its origin in the archer’s bow? Are these figures some way of expressing a theory of origin in a literalistic or comical way?

c. A third interpretation is that, like figures 01 and 06 playing fool’s percussion, the angels blowing a bow and arrow represent fools, attempting to play music on impossible ‘instruments’. This is the richest interpretation, as it potentially draws from three themes in medieval and renaissance art and theology: fools attempting to make music from non-musical instruments; the moral foolishness of an ungodly life; and the eternal fate of the ungodly fool.

The first theme is that of animals or people foolishly attempting to make music from non-musical ‘instruments’ such as, on the pulpitum, a bow and arrow, and, as we see below, a fiddle played with a rake instead of a bow, and bellows being ‘played’ like a lute.

The second theme follows from the first, a commentary on the character of ungodly and therefore immoral fools. On this theme are 16^th century prints by Netherlandish publisher Hieronymus Cock, who traded on the name of the painter Jheronimus Bosch to sell prints, 46 of which were new works attempting Bosch’s style with the false attribution, “Heronimus bos inue[ntor]”. One such is Merrymakers in a Mussel Shell (below), 1562, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden.

We see a hollow vessel, a mussel shell, in which ungodly fools behave in immoral ways and make impossible, ridiculous attempts at music. In the established visual symbolism of the day, an owl, representation of evil, sits in a tree which grows in the shell. The kissing couple on the left and the food centre left portray the sins of lust and gluttony. The greedy bagpiper is too drunk to play, vomiting into the water while holding bagpipes that are a phallic reminder of male lust. The open book of music displays notation that is meaningless. Akin to the pulpitum’s ‘musical’ bow and arrow, the bald, spectacled singer plays a metal hearth grate in place of a harp and, to his right, bellows and a pig’s trotter stand in for a cittern and quill plectrum.

This leads to the third possible theme of the foolish bow and arrow ‘players’, connecting the music of foolish and immoral minstrels to their eternal fate. Nowhere is this seen more starkly than in the work of the Netherlandish painter, Jheronimus Bosch, whom Hieronymus Cock sought to imitate. Just as the bow and arrow on the pulpitum, incapable of music, played by fools, are marked by silence rather than music, so the music of sinners is typically silenced in Bosch’s stark imagery of their eternal fate in hell.

In the detail above from the hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1495–1505, a lutenist is tied by a gut fret to a giant lute, tormented by a hellish serpent above and a demon below, his music silenced in hell; a bray harper is crucified on the strings of his harp, the strings threaded through his body at the neck, spine and anus, his music silenced in hell; two sinners are trapped between the tail of the giant lute and a book of meaningless music, one of those sinners with more meaningless music painted on his backside, their music silenced in hell; atop a giant symphonie (hurdy gurdy, viella à rue), a blind beggar who would usually play the instrument is reduced to only turning the crank, only able to play a continuous drone, his music silenced in hell; inside the symphonie a nun is trapped, her hand holding a triangle, but she is not sounding it, as the striking hand is that of a demon, her music silenced in hell; a man is trapped inside a large drum being beaten by a demon, his pleasure of music turned to torture; a sinner stands on a slide trumpet with a damaged/flattened bell, its music silenced, with a recorder, fife or transverse flute inserted in his rectum, its music silenced, straining under the weight of a giant shawm on his back, smoke emitting from the bell, within which is a trapped sinner, the shawm’s music silenced; and behind him a man plays a trumpet so loudly that it pains the ears of the sinners in front and behind him, their pleasure of music turned to torture.

Could the ‘musical’ bow and arrow angels, then, be signifiers of ungodly fools, playing foolish and silent ‘instruments’, pointing to the fate of sinners who reap the rewards of their foolishness in hell rather than go to the angels’ dwelling in heaven?

36. rota (1/2)

Figure 36 is a rota, and to find one represented at so late a date as 1473–1500 is a surprise.

Rota (also rendered rote, rothe or rotta) is Latin for wheel. In musical terms, rota had three meanings in the medieval period:

i. Several voices singing the same melody with a staggered entry, what today we would call a canon. The manuscript page for the English song of c. 1250–65, Sumer is icumen in, for example (British Library Harley 978, folio 11v), gives the instruction that the song is a “rotam”, a wheel, which beautifully describes how Sumer works: 4 melody voices sing the same but start at different times, while 2 voices sing the pes, the foot, a repeating short phrase, both singing the same but starting at different times, with the effect that the melody rotates like a wheel between different singers.

ii. In a pair of melodies, one played after the other, when the second piece takes the melody of the first, the notes rearranged at a different pace and with different phrasing, the second piece is La rotta, the wheel that turns again. This is the case in two pairings in a Tuscan manuscript, British Library Add 29987, in a section of music dated c. 1400. On folio 64r, we have Lamento di tristano paired with its La rotta, followed by La manfredina paired with La rotta della manfredina.

iii. The instrument on the pulpitum, with two bands of vertical gut strings, like a two row harp, but with a soundboard between the two rows of strings. There is no record explaining why this was called a rota. It may have been named due to having two independent string bands, which allows for a greater degree of independence between plucked voices. On a harp, with one string per note, unisons cannot be played, and the playing of a rota in the first definition would be impossible in the same octave, but on the rota with two string bands, both unisons and rotas are possible.  

The rota instrument is not defined in surviving medieval music treatises as a harp type, so it seems not to have been thought of as a class of harp. This is apparently confirmed by a manuscript of Georgius Fendulus’ 12^th century treatise, Liber astrologiae. Below we see a copy dated to the 14^th century (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 7330, view 16, no folio given). We see a labelled “viola” (fiddle) and its bow, a “rota” and a “Giga” (harp). The presence of both the rota and the harp together, separately labelled, suggests they were considered different instrument types.

Gascon troubadour, Giraut (Guiraut) de Calanso (Calanson), stated in his work of 1210, Conseils aux Jongler (Advice to Jongleurs – jongleurs, known in England as minstrels, were professional entertainers), that a jongleur must know how to play a 17 string rote, presumably meaning 2 rows of 17 strings, since Petro (Petrus) de Abano, in his Expositio problematum Aristotelis (The explanation of Aristotle’s problems), 1310, described the rota as having 2 rows of 22 strings either side of a sound-box. Clearly, there was variety.

As described above in discussing the lutes (figures 02 and 37), when there was a large number of strings on an instrument, we typically see the number of strings reduced when represented in stone, due to the nature of the material not allowing for such small detail; and we typically observe the same reduction in string numbers in tiny representations of an instrument in a manuscript margin.

Below, for example, is a corbel (wall projection used to support a cornice or arch) in the shape of a rota played by an ape, on the outside of the 12^th century church, Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, Surgères, France. We see only 5 very thick strings on each side of the rota.

On the right is another corbel showing a rota being played, this time by a man, on the outside of the Church of San Martín de Elines, Valderredible, Cantabria, Spain, early 12^th century. We see 8 strings and 4 tuning pegs on either side. These stone rotas were clearly approximations of the instrument, giving the viewer the idea of a rota. It is also notable that the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption and San Martín de Elines rotas are unrealistically broad from side to side, especially the latter, the width grossly exaggerated to be more easily visible to viewers on ground level, whereas the dimensions of the York rota are realistic, the distance between viewer and object being not so great.

Below is a rota carved in stone in the abbey church of Sainte-Foy at Conques-en-Rouergue, France, circa 1130, shown with 7 strings on either side. This man’s soul is eternally condemned for being a sinful minstrel, his rota taken from him so he cannot play, a noose around his neck so he cannot breathe; his tongue torn out so he cannot sing. (For more on the relationship between minstrels and the church, click here.)

There is one exception that proves the rule, a stone representation of a rota notable for its unusual detail. On a capital (the load-bearing top of a column) in the cloister of the Abbey Church of Saint Pierre, Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, France, c. 1100, is a rota showing 22 strings on the visible side – the number stated by Petro de Abano in 1310 – each meticulously and separately carved, as we see below.

In the video below, Alba Asensi plays the melody of E no pouco e no muito, from the Iberian Cantigas de Santa María, 1257–83, on rota.

Since the rota is such a rarely heard instrument in modern early music circles, below is a second video of Alba Asensi playing another of the Cantigas de Santa María on another rota: Déus te salve, grorïosa. 

39. double recorder (1/1)
40. unknown (3/5)

Figure 39, above left, is missing his hands and most of his instrument. All that remains, as we see on the right, is the mouthpiece. To identify the instrument, we have to interpret the 2 dots. We don’t see the mouthpiece and window of a recorder or tabor pipe, nor the reed of a shawm. Those 2 dots are presumably holes, in which case, all other options being closed, this is the mouthpiece of a double pipe, i.e. the dots represent 2 windows (a window is the aperture near the mouthpiece of a duct flute or recorder).

The practice of 2 wind instruments being played together goes back to the aulos, the double reed pipe of classical Greece. Double wind instruments, known as geminate instruments from the Latin geminatus, meaning twinned or equal, are a regular feature of medieval musical iconography, either playing a melody over a drone or two moving polyphonic parts.

Below we see examples of geminate instruments from medieval art: double duct flutes from Saint Martin is knighted, a fresco by Simone Martini, Italy, 1312–18, and from folio 87v of The Luttrell Psalter (British Library Add MS 42130), England, c. 1325–40; …

… double shawms from folio 174r of The Luttrell Psalter; and double trumpets from folio 126r of The Queen Mary Psalter (British Library Royal 2 B VII), England, 1310–20.

Geminate instruments could be 2 separate instruments played together, or an instrument that is created double. Only one of the latter has survived, but it is instructive: a double recorder found in Oxford, near All Souls College, dated to the 15^th or 16^th century, is carved from a single piece of wood, the two pipes tuned a fifth apart.

In the first video below, Sarah Jeffery discusses reconstructing the music of the medieval and renaissance double duct flute or recorder, with musical examples. In the second video, Pierre Hamon plays Puis que ma dolour by Guillaume de Machaut, 1300–77, on a double recorder.

The arms of the remaining musician, figure 40 (below), are in an almost identical position to the double recorder player, figure 39, so it may be another geminate recorder; but on figure 40 there are no identifiable remains of a mouthpiece on the lips. Since secure identification is not possible, I have classified figure 40 as unknown.

That completes the description of the 42 figures on the row of angel musicians near the top of the pulpitum. There are 14 more musicians to identify from 1473–1500, figures 43–56 on the crockets above the kings and on the columns in the niches. Where instrument types are repeated that have been described above, they will simply be identified below. This applies to all but 2 figures, a player of nakers and players of the positive organ, which will be fully described.

Finally, the row of faux medieval musicians added in 1803–05 will be described; and the significance of the York Minster iconography discussed.

B. Crockets, 1473–1500

Above each king on the Kings Screen is 2 crockets, their positions indicated by line B above. A crocket is a small decoration in Gothic architecture, used to embellish pinnacles, the edges of spires and, in this case, the pulpitum. There being 15 kings, there are 15 pairs of crockets. The first is shown below, depicting 2 grotesques on the left and 2 seated human figures on the right.

Of the remaining crockets, the following have musical depictions.

43. lute (3/7)

Working from left to right along the pulpitum, the first musical crocket is above the seventh king: the crocket on the left depicts an angel playing a treble lute …

… shown in detail from 3 angles below.

44. nakers (1/1)

Above the eighth king is a crocket showing an angel playing nakers …

… shown in detail below. 

The appearance of the angel is notable: he has a feathered body as well as feathered wings, a common feature in medieval and renaissance devotional art; he is wearing a dagged (cut) hood, dagged clothes being popular from the 13^th to the 16^th century; and the carving is so detailed that the belt from which his nakers are suspended, and the belt attachments used to secure the drums, are clearly visible.

Nakers were small kettledrums made of metal, wood or clay. In Arabic, these drums were naqqāra, part of the loud outdoor ceremonial band of Arabia. The shawm (figures 10, 11, 26, 27, 33, 34 and 42 above), trumpet (figures 15 and 38 above) and nakers were new to Europe in the early 12^th century, and the Arabian ceremonial band was itself adopted in Europe, reaching France by the 13^th century and England by the 14^th century, by which time naqqāra had been transformed linguistically to nakers. Generally played in pairs suspended from a belt around the waist, it is easy to see how a pair of nakers could become a colloquial term for a part of the male anatomy (though I have failed to find this in any etymological dictionary). The animal skin heads of nakers measured between 6 and 12 inches (15 to 30 centimetres), always played with a pair of beaters, and one or both heads often had a snare, a string on the surface of the drum that fizzes when the drum is struck. Nakers were always of the same size, and evidence is lacking for whether the skins were equally tensioned and thus played the same note, or unequally tensioned, playing different notes. The latter seems more likely, as there is no musical advantage in having two drums at the same pitch. When they are shown in ensemble, rather than a single player, they are illustrated in various contexts: in the military, with trumpets; in sacred processional ensembles; or in a secular group.

To see and hear naqqāra (nagara or nagada) played in the eastern style, click here. To see a western player of nakers, click here.

45. singers (1/1)

Above the eleventh king, on the left, is a crocket with the resurrected Christ flanked by 2 angels, opposite a crocket of singers on the right, …

… shown in detail below. 

An adult angel stands behind 2 boys, both of whom have their mouths open, the iconographic indication of singing. They stand behind a reading desk, the front of which is carved with an angel holding a laurel wreath, symbol of victory, referring to the crocket of the resurrection opposite, and on the reading desk is an open book, presumably representing the Gospels which tell of Christ’s resurrection.

To illustrate 15^th century polyphonic singing, the ground-breaking English composer John Dunstaple (or Dunstable, c. 1390–1453) is the obvious choice. His music inspired composers all over western Europe, particularly the Burgundian School, which credited him as their inspiration. In his poem of 1442, Le Champion des Dames (The Champion of Women), the Norman poet Martin le Franc praised Dunstaple for “la contenance angloise” – the English countenance – a new sound in music characterised by full triads, the regular use of harmonic thirds, and writing parts for polyphonic voices that were wide apart in pitch, the beginning of SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). The Flemish music theorist, Johannes Tinctoris, declared in his Ars Contrapuncti (Art of Counterpoint, 1477) that the music of the previous 40 years by such writers as John Dunstable, Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem (both the latter of the Burgundian School) was superior to all preceding music.

In the video above right, Pro Cantione Antiqua sing John Dunstaple’s Crux fidelis for 3 voices.

Crux fidelis inter omnes arbor una nobilis:
nulla silva talem profert fronde, flore, germine.
Dulce lignum, dulces clavos, dulcia ferens ponedta.
Assis nobis custodia contra inimici iabula.

The faithful cross is one noble tree among all:
No forest produces such a one with its foliage, flower, or bud.
Sweet wood, sweet nails, bearing sweet things laid.
May it be our guard against the enemy’s darts.

46. positive organ (1/1)

Above the twelfth king is a crocket of 2 men playing a positive organ, …

… shown in detail below. We see that the angel on our left is playing the organ, while the angel on the right is operating the bellows.

The positive organ is, in principle, the same as the portative organ described above (figures 13 and 41), except that the notes on a medieval portative organ were produced by pressing buttons, then keys in the renaissance, whereas on the earlier positive organ it was progressively played with slides (Theophilus, De diversis artibus, 1122, describes wooden slides to create different notes, perforated to correspond with pipes), then buttons, then keys, depending on the period; and a portative organ was played by one person, one hand to work the bellows, the other hand to play the buttons or keys whereas, due to the size of the positive organ, it required one person to work the bellows and another to play the instrument.

Positive organs in, above, the Gorleston Psalter (British Library Add MS 49622, folio 126r), 1310–24, below left, the Peterborough Psalter (KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, Ms. 9961-62, folio 66r), 1300–25, and below right, the Luttrell Psalter (British Library Add MS 42130, folio 55r), 1325–40. The drone pipe can be clearly seen in the images below, and the organist in the Luttrell Psalter is shown singing. 

In the video below, Tomas Flegr plays Esclave puist by Franco-Flemish composer Gilles Binchois (or Binchoys, c. 1400–60) on a positive organ.

47. rota (2/2)

Above the thirteenth king is a crocket of an angel playing what we might automatically assume, given the period, is another bray harp …

… but, as we see in detail from 3 angles below, the profile is completely wrong for the shape of the tall Gothic bray harp of the 15^th and 16^th century, with its forepillar topped by a sweeping upward horn-like curve. Given the overall shape of the instrument, this is clearly another rota. A description of the rota is given above for figure 36.

48. lute (4/7)

Above the penultimate fourteenth king is a crocket of a lute player, …

… shown in detail below, much larger than the lute on the first crocket, and therefore tuned at a lower pitch.

C. Columns, 1473–1500

As we see above, each king on the screen is mounted on a column, designated line C, and the final instruments from 1473–1500 are carved on these columns.

49. fiddle (3/5)

Working along the columns from left to right, the first instrument is on the second column, ringed below left. Below right we see the figure close up. The remains of the angel’s wings are at the top of the figure. On the bottom half, right side, we see what remains of an oval fiddle, the string band running down the body and, across the strings, what remains of the bow, which was held in what remains of the arm held horizontally across the body of the player.

50. fiddle (4/5)

On the fifth column is another fiddle, this one much better preserved. It’s place on the column is shown below left, a close-up below right, …

… and 2 more close-ups below. A comparison of the photographs below with the very damaged previous figure 49 shows how alike the carvings are.

51. lute (5/7)
52. unknown (4/5)

On the sixth column are 2 more eroded figures, ringed above. Both have had their missing heads replaced at some point, perhaps during the additional work followed by the post-arson restoration work of 1803–35, described in the first article. 

The instrument on the left (close up below left) is a lute: we can make out a string band that finishes at the bridge, as on a lute, and does not extend to the tail, as it does on a gittern, and a shape over where the bridge would be, which is what remains of the player’s plucking hand.

The instrument on the right (close up below right) is not possible to identify with certainty. The downward position of the instrument, tilted with the neck lower than the tail, is well-attested in iconography as a playing position for gitterns, lutes and fiddles. Since the details on the front of the instrument are smoothed away, we cannot be sure whether the player’s right hand originally held a plectrum or a bow, though the position of the hand suggests a plectrum is more likely.

53. unknown (5/5) – harp or rota
54. lute (6/7)

The seventh column is shown above, with 2 musical figures ringed, an indeterminate instrument on the left and a lute on the right.

The figure on the left is very badly damaged, as we see below: the whole figure shown on the left, a close-up of the instrument on the right. On the close-up, we see what appears to be 10 visible strings. This could not be a 5 course lute or gittern, as the holding position would be almost vertical and it leaves no room for the neck. Given the almost vertical playing position of the strings, this could be a harp but, with so much detail missing, we cannot be sure this is not a third rota.

The instrument on the right is much easier to identify. The figure has a replacement head and is playing a 4 course lute. By the date range of the pulpitum, 6 course lutes were being played, but there is clear iconographical evidence that 4 and 5 course lutes continued into the early 16^th century, so the number of courses may not necessarily be a reduction due to the small size of the carving.

55. lute (7/7)

On the tenth column are 2 figures, ringed in the photograph above.

As we see below from 3 angles, the figure on the left has had his head replaced and is playing an eroded lute. Still visible below centre and right is the remains of the player’s plucking hand and, in all the photographs below, 3 lines on the neck that were probably the frets, as they are too wide apart to be the fingers of the player’s fretting hand.

Underneath the photographs of the lute are pictures from 2 angles of the figure on the right of the column, also with a replacement head. It is possible to imagine, from the smoothed contours of what remains, that this figure played a lute, a gittern or a fiddle, but the erosion is too advanced to be sure that this was a musical instrument at all, so this figure is not included in the total of the pulpitum’s musicians.

56. fiddle (5/5)

The final instrument on the pulpitum columns is a fiddle on the thirteenth column, ringed below left, shown in detail below right.

There are 3 fiddlers on the columns, compared below, from left to right, from columns 2, 5 and 13. Seeing them side by side in this way allows the viewer to see that originally all 3 carvings were the same or similar, to observe the different stages of erosion, and confirm that all 3 figures are indeed fiddlers.

D. Additional row of musicians, 1803–05

Francis Bernasconi (1762–1841), an ornamental carver and plasterer of Italian descent, who also worked in Westminster Abbey, created an extra row of faux medieval or renaissance musicians for the pulpitum in 1803–05, according to the handbook for York Minster guides. Jeremy and Gwen Montagu (1998) state that the additional row of musicians was added in 1814–18. Since the Montagus give no evidence and the York Minster guide handbook has a name attached to the dates, the latter is more likely to be reliable. Some of the carvings bear only a passing resemblance to the instruments they intend to portray, so these carvings are included for completion and as a curiosity in observing what passed for historicity in the mind of Bernasconi and those who approved his design. These figures, line D below, are therefore not included in the total number of historical instruments portrayed on the pulpitum.

Below we see Bernasconi’s row of musicians on the left side followed by the right side of the pulpitum. As with all pictures, click to see larger in a new window, then click in the new window to further enlarge.

The row of 1803–05 portrays:

• 34 identical pairs of singers, 68 singers in all, 2 pairs shown on the right.
• 7 plucked instruments that are vague approximations of lutes. As we see in the photographs below, instead of roses (ornate sound holes decorated with intricate carvings) the instruments have either C holes (4), a dog-leg hole (1), or a complete double circle (2 – it is a mystery how this is supposed to function as a sound hole). They are in the general shape of a lute, but on the tails they have string-holders, which citoles and fiddles had, but lutes and gitterns never had. All of them lack peg boxes and pegs, but instead they fold back at the end of the neck.

• One angel has an archer’s bow in his mouth, an idea clearly taken from figure 31, discussed above. This is shown below left, next to figures 31 and 32, holding a bow and arrow as if they were wind instruments.

• 3 harps are passable simplifications of medieval harp design, albeit with the same error shown in some genuine medieval art: strings wrongly attached to the forepillar instead of the soundboard.

• 2 shawms, with exaggeratedly large finger-holes.

• 1 player of cymbals, below left, …

… and 2 players of curved trumpet, above centre and right.

In designing this extra row, Francis Bernasconi appears to have taken a few ideas from the angel musicians row of 1473 to 1500 – the bow, harps, shawms, cymbals and trumpets – made up the lute-like instruments without understanding, then filled the rest of the space – the majority of the row – with 68 singers. Prior to Bernasconi’s work, this row of the pulpitum was presumably empty since c. 1500, or possibly the stonework had suffered sufficient damage over time that work was needed to replace carvings that were eroded beyond repair.

Summary and conclusion

The following numbers of each instrument are represented on the top row of angels on the Kings Screen, from the most to the least numerous in their respective instrument families:

wind:
shawm (7), bagpipe (2), trumpet (2), transverse flute (1), recorder (1), double recorder (1).

plucked strings:
bray harp (3), lute (2), gittern (2), rota (1), probable psaltery included in the unidentified instrument list below.  

bowed strings:
fiddle (2), symphonie (1), tromba marina (1).

keyboard:
portative organ (2), clavicimbalum (2).

percussion:
cymbals (2), fool’s percussion (2), triangle (1).

unexplained:
bow (1) and arrow (1).

unidentified:
unknown (3 – with 1 a probable psaltery), obscured (2).

With instruments from all parts of the screen included for the years 1473–1500 (not including the modern additions of 1803–05), the numbers divided into instrument families are:

wind:
shawm (7), bagpipe (2), trumpet (2), transverse flute (1), recorder (1), double recorder (1).

plucked strings:
lute (7), bray harp (3), gittern (2), rota (2), probable psaltery and probable harp or rota included in the unidentified instrument list below.

bowed strings:
fiddle (5), symphonie (1), tromba marina (1).

keyboard:
portative organ (2), clavicimbalum (2), positive organ (1).

percussion:
cymbals (2), fool’s percussion (2), triangle (1), nakers (1).

singers:
1 couple

unexplained:
bow (1) and arrow (1).

unidentified:
unknown (5 – with 1 probable psaltery and 1 probable harp or rota), obscured (2).

From this we can make the following observations.

It is not possible to know if these numerical proportions are representative or typical of the mix of instruments played in late 15^th century York or in England generally. In all likelihood, the designer of the pulpitum was concerned only with representing a range of instrument types, not with proportion of usage among the population. Nevertheless, while the number of depictions of each instrument is usually a nominal number of 1 or 2, there are far more shawms (7), lutes (7), and fiddles (5), and these greater numbers require an explanation. The reasons for these higher numbers are likely to be that:

• shawms or waits stand for the York Waits, the municipal band employed to play on civic occasions, so the shawm is shown multiple times to represent a band;
• at the end of the 15^th and into the 16^th century, the lute was rising to prominence as the renaissance instrument par excellence, so its greater representation may be a sign of its increasing importance;
• fiddles of various types were among the most popular instruments of the medieval and renaissance periods.

It is notable that while all 7 shawms are on the top row of angel musicians, of the 7 lutes, only 2 are on the top row, with 2 on the crockets and 3 on the columns. The reason the shawms are grouped in one row is probably because the shawm is an ensemble instrument. Since it can play only a single line, it needs to be played with other shawms, so schematically it would make sense to group the shawms together to represent the city waits.

The pulpitum is effectively a survey of the musical instruments of the period. This can be illustrated by imagining it had been made 100 years before, in 1373–1400. Many of the instruments would be still be represented 100 years previously – harps, gitterns, bagpipes, cymbals, symphonie, shawms, portative organs, trumpets, psaltery, triangle, transverse flute, recorder, double recorder, nakers, positive organ, rotas – and there would also be some significant changes. The harps would have been of the previous medieval design, not bray harps. It would be unsurprising if there were no lutes 100 years previously, as the lute became much more populous in iconography from c. 1400 when it became fretted. There would probably have been a citole, often seen and written about in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, waning by the beginning of the 15^th century. The clavicimbalum existed in 1373–1400, but since its first visual representation was not until the altarpiece in Minden, Lower Saxony, 1425, and Henri Arnaut de Zwolle’s treatise of c. 1440, it would not have been on the pulpitum of a century before. There is no evidence of the rommelpot in 1373–1400, and no convincing evidence of the tromba marina.

Iconography is invaluable for information about medieval and renaissance musical instruments. Like any other human endeavour, it is not perfect. We noted above, for example, the perspective distortion typical of art of the period, and some of the compromises necessary when carving in stone, so we do need to know how to read what we’re seeing. We also noted some fine details of realism and accuracy on the pulpitum, such as the different shapes of lute body, diverse styles of bagpipe, of cymbals, of shawms, of trumpets, of fiddles, and the fine carving of the belt and its attachment from which the nakers are suspended.

The big surprise was the presence of 2 rotas, an instrument for which all the other written and iconographical evidence is significantly earlier. If the rota was played in late 15^th century England, it is another reminder that there is always more to discover in early music research.

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.

 

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