FROM VITRIOL TO FLUFF – Literary References to the Pipe and Tabor

FROM VITRIOL TO FLUFF – Literary References to the Pipe and Tabor

a talk for the 2014 IPATF

Ten years or so ago I gave a talk to the IPATF Symposium about the quotes I had collected concerning the pipe and tabor. Bill has asked me to revise and repeat it, and on looking through my collection I find that it has expanded quite considerably in the intervening decade.

I have tried to martial the quotes into groups with similar themes, and I am going to begin with the famous quote from Shakespeare from Much Ado about Nothing:

“I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife; and now he had rather hear the tabor and the pipe”

which contrasts nicely the military and ceremonial functions of fife and drum with the social functions – dancing, weddings – of the pipe and tabor.

In The Tempest Ariel plays the pipe and tabor to tempt two characters away from the tasks they are supposed to be doing:

Trinculo: The sound is going away. Let’s follow it, and after do our work.

Stefano: Lead, monster; we’ll follow – I would I could see this taborer. He lays it on.

Shakespeare’s taborer was of course Richard Tarlton of nine days’ wonder fame. He died in 1588, but his fame lived on and illustrations always showed him with pipe and tabor. In 1590 a booklet was published with the title “Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory” in which we hear that his punishment in Purgatory was to

“sit and play Jigs all day on my Taber to the ghosts without ceasing, which hath brought me into such use, that I now play far better then when I was alive; for proofe thou shalt heare a hornepipe; with that putting his pipe to his mouth, the first stroake he struck I started, and with that I waked.”

In The Cuck-queanes and Cuckolds Errants by William Percy (1575-1648) Tarlton’s ghost speaks the Prologue after he had “played a while lowe on his Tabour”, and he lists his usual accoutrements as “my drum, my cap, my Slop, my shoos”

In The Commendation of Cockes, and Cocke-fighting” (1607) George Wilson tells of

“a Cocke called Tarleton (who was so intituled, because he always came to the fight like a Drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges)”

Even as late as 1798, some 210 years after Tarleton’s death there was an inn in Shoreditch whose inn-sign was a portrait of him complete with pipe and tabor.

Having spoken about one famous taborer, I must mention a second. This is Old Hall, a contemporary of Tarleton, who was still playing at the age of 97 in 1607,

“giving the men light hearts by thy pipe and the women light heels by thy tabor. O wonderful piper! O admirable tabor man!

A pamphlet sets out Old Hall’s legacy:

“To that renowned ox-leech Old Hall, taborer of Herefordshire, and his most invincible, weather-beaten, nut-brown tabor, which hath made bachelors and lasses dance round about the Maypole, three score summers, one after another in order ...... and is not yet worm-eaten, being already old and sound three-score years and upward. Thou – sweet Hereford Hall, bequeath in thy last will thy vellum-spotted skin to cover tabors, at the sound of which, to set all the shires a-dancing!”

Accompanying dancing of course is the main purpose of the pipe and tabor. Arbeau in Orchesography (1589) says

“In our fathers’ time, the tabor, accompanied by its long flute among other instruments, was used because a single musician could play them both together in symphony without necessitating the additional expense of other players, such as violins and the like. Nowadays there is no workman so humble that he does not wish to have hautboys and sackbuts at his wedding”

Later, though, he does admit that expense is not the only reason for preferring the pipe and tabor:

“Capriol: Must the tabor and flute necessarily be used for pavans and basse dances?

Arbeau: Not unless one wishes it. One can play them on spinets, transverse flutes, and flutes with nine holes, hautboys and all sorts of instruments. They can even be sung. But the tabor with its regular rhythm is an immense help in bringing the feet into the correct positions required by the movements of the dance”

Edmund Spencer in his Pastorals of 1597 wrote:

Before them yode a lustic tabrere

That to the many a horn pype played,

Whereto they danncen, eche one with his mayde

Michael Drayton in 1612 wrote:

Some blowe the Bagpipe up, that plaies the Country-round:

The Taber and the Pipe some take delight to sound

In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith the company are having a country dance.

“Our music consisted of two fiddles with a pipe and tabor”

There is even an echo of this in the 20^th century, for in the second of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944) we read:

On a summer mid-night, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing round the bonfire

This is not to say that everyone approved of dancing or of the pipe and tabor – by no means! In 1303 Robert Mannyng of Bourne in The Cursed Daunsers (part of Handlyng Synne) wrote:

Karolles, wrastlinges, or somour games,

Whoso ever haunteth any swich shames

In cherche, other in cherchyerd,

Of sacrilege he may be aferd;

Or enterludes, or singing,

Or tabure bête, or other pypinge,

Alle swiche thing forbodin is

Whyle the prest stondeth at messe.

Moving on to John Lydgate (1370-1450) a monk of Bury St Edmonds, taboring is even more roundly condemned, and this is where the vitriol spills out. In The Fall of Princes of 1439 we read:

Thei may be called the devilis taboureris, with froward sownys eris to fulfille.

In The Order of Fools he tells us:

Tabourerys with ther duplycyte

Plese more this daies when stuffed is ther male,

Farsed with fflateryng

In The Booke of the Pylgremage of the Sowle of 1413 we have his most vitriolic condemnation:

Thenne come there dauncynge forth a lothely companye with fowle defourmed visages and grisely of theyr personnes; they flouted, and they tabard; they yellyd and they cryed, ioyinge in theyr maner as semd by theyr semblaunt

Moving on to 1595 and A Quest of Inquirie taborers are not condemned, but the unwary are warned to be on their guard:

Good people, beware of wooers’ promises; they are like the musique of a tabor and pipe; the pipe says ‘golde, gifts and many gay things’ but performance is moralized by the tabor, which bears the burden of ‘I doubt it, I doubt it’

Nine years later – in 1604 – the Vicar of Mitcheldean (some 10 miles from here in the Forest of Dean) and 15 parishioners were arrested for piping and dancing.

The Puritan Richard Baxter (1615-1691), church leader, theologian, poet, hymn-writer, and ‘the chief of English Protestant Schoolmen’ disapproved of frivolity, but lacks the vitriol of John Lydgate:

In the village where I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day even till dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a Maypole and a great tree not far from my Father’s door; where all the town did meet together. And though one of my Father’s own tenants was the Piper, he could not restrain him nor break the sport; so that we could not read the Scripture in our family without the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise in the street! Many times my mind was inclined to be among them; and sometimes I broke loose from conscience and joined with them; and the more I did it the more I was inclined to it. But when I heard them call my Father ‘Puritan’ it did much to cure me and alienate me from them; for I considered that my Father’s exercise of reading the Scripture, was better than theirs, and would surely be better thought on by all men at the last....

By 1794 Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason can dismiss the pipe and tabor:

Were we now to speak of prophesying with a fiddle or with a pipe and tabor, the expression would have no meaning,

Other writers mention the pipe and tabor to show the joy and pleasure they bring. In 1360, Bartholomew, an English monk, is quite factual:

Tympanum is....beathen with a styeke right as a tabour...and maketh the better melody yf there is a pype therwyth

In The Vicar of Wakefield the Rev Primrose and his family are moving to a new parish:

Being apprized of our approach, the whole neighbourhood came out to meet their minister, drest in their finest clothes, and preceded by a pipe and tabor

George Eliot in Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) conjures up a contrast:

She was smitten with some compassion at the sight of poor Sarti, who struck her as the mere battered wreck of a vessel that might have once floated gaily enough on its outward voyage to the sound of pipes and tabors

When pipes and tabors get mentioned in songs and ballads, it is a short step to risqué words. In “Young Damsel’s courage” a ballad from the Pepys collection c1690, we hear of “Bonny brisk Kate” who invites a soldier to “beat upon my drum, boy, fain would I see how thou canst Tabor” and in Montefort, Greenwich Park (1691) Sir Thomas tells a lady that if she “dare venture, you shall finde I can Tabor and fife still, Madam”, though it is suggested that “old instruments are long time a-tuning”

And now for the fluff - here is Phyllis, a country girl and a ward of court in Iolanthe (1882):

I’m very much pained to refuse

But I’ll stick to my pipes and my tabors;

I can spell all the words that I use

And my grammar’s as good as my neighbour’s

While we are looking at poetry, here is some more from the nineteenth century from “A Chanted Calendar” by Sydney Thompson Dobell (1824-1847):

As a happy people come,

So came they,

As a happy people come

When the war has roll’d away,

With dance and tabor, pipe and drum,

And all make holiday.

and this from 1660 The Contented Man’s Morice” by George Wither:

Then, why should I give way to grief?

Come, strike up pipe and tabor

He that affecteth God in chief,

And as himself his neighbour,

May still live a happy life,

Although he lives by labour.

And here is a real challenge from Robert Browning (“Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”):

Who thinks Hugues wrote for the deaf,

Proved a mere mountain in labour?

Better submit: try again; what’s the clef?

‘Faith, ‘tis no trifle for pipe and for tabor –

Four flats, the minor in F.

While we’re thinking about approval and disapproval of taborers, I don’t think that I can approve of using a taborer as bait to draw others to their deaths, even in revenge, as happened in Virginia in 1610:

Then Sir Thomas Gates, being desirous for to be revenged upon the Indians of Kekowhatan, did go thither by water with a certain number of men and among the rest a taborer with him being landed, he caused the taborer to play and dance thereby to allure the Indians to come unto him, the which prevailed. And then espying a fitting opportunity fell in upon them, put five to the sword, wounded many others, some of them being after found in the woods with such extraordinary large and mortal wounds that it seemed strange they could fly so far. The rest of the savages he put to flight.

Jamestown: 1609-10: “Starving Time” George Percy - A True Relation of the Proceedings and Occurrences of Moment which have happened in Virginia from the Time Sir Thomas Gates shipwrecked upon the Bermudes anno 1609 until my departure out of the Country which was Anno Domini 1612

In mediaeval manuscripts there are numerous illustrations of the pipe and tabor being played to accompany a variety of animals, acrobats and even animal-acrobats. There is a nineteenth century painting by W. F. Witherington of a bear dancing to the pipe and tabor, which was used on the cover of one edition of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, so it is good to read references to this too, both in fiction and in fact. In Thackeray’s The Virginians (1859) Harry, a young man, is not paying attention to the serious discussion in the room:

A pretty milliner may have attracted Harry’s attention out of the window – a dancing bear with pipe and tabor may have passed along the common – a jockey come under his window to show off a horse there?

In 1851 Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) undertook a ground-breaking survey of the poor of London and interviewed people about how they made a living. One was a ‘street-musicianer’ who talked to Mayhew about what he had done 30 years earlier – i.e. c1820:

A stout, reddish-faced man, who was familiar with all kinds of exhibitions, and had the coaxing, deferential manner of many persons who ply for money in the streets, gave me an account of what he called ‘his experience’ at the drum and pipes ..... “I’ve played with Michael, the Italy Bear. I’ve played the fife and tabor with him. The tabor was a little drum about the size of my cap, and it was tapped with a little stick.”

In the musical instrument collection of the V and A Museum, before they removed them from display and packed them all away, was a pipe and tabor collected in London. The tabor was small as a cap, as described here, and the pair was, surely erroneously, described as “probably a toy”.

My next animal quotes are more likely to be about bagpipes than tabor pipes, but I have a reason for including them. In the mid-seventeenth century John Playford related that while travelling near Royston in Hertfordshire he met a herd of about 20 stags on the road, following a bagpipe and a violin,

which, while the music played they went forward, when it ceased they all stood still; and in this manner they were brought out of Yorkshire to Hampton Court

I include this because I was always puzzled that ‘stags’ were being driven. I have now discovered that this is not innovative mid-seventeenth century deer farming, but that ‘stag’ here means a young horse, especially one unbroken; so the reference makes perfect sense.

The next quote from 1398 I must include because it is still my favourite:

and sheep lovyth pypynge: therefore shepherdes usyth pipes when htey walke with theyr shepe

The Pied Piper of Hamelin effect of music upon animals is fascinating. There are plenty of rodents in my garden, so once I tried playing outside, keeping an eye out for mesmerised animals, but saw none. A few years ago, however, at one of our festivals we were playing our concert in St Nicholas’ church, and after I had played my piece, Rebecca told me that a little church mouse had sat motionless in the aisle, listening. There is room for more investigation here!

Meanwhile, back to the pipe and tabor on the streets and particularly in association with folk customs. Washington Irving (1783-1859) gives an account in 1817 of Plough Monday:

Sherwood Forest is a region that still retains much of the quaint customs and holiday games of the olden time... These rude pageants are the lingering remains of the old customs of Plough Monday, when bands of rustics, fantastically dressed, and furnished with pipe and tabor, dragged what was called the “fool plough” from house to house, singing ballads and performing antics, for which they were rewarded with money and good cheer.

I should just like to comment on this that I know of at least one taborer who plays for a dance on Plough Monday, and some of the York Gentlemen Longsword dancers do wear fantastical garments, and their antics include striking sparks with their swords on the York stone paving! I have, however, never seen them rewarded with money or good cheer!

The same writer gives an account of Jack-in-the-Green on May Day in 1819:

In London there are, and have long been, a few forms of May-day festivity in a great measure peculiar. The day is still marked by a celebration, well known to every resident in the metropolis, in which the chimney-sweeps play the sole part. What we usually see is a small band, composed of two or three men in fantastic dresses, one smartly dressed female glittering with spangles, and a strange figure called Jack-in-the-green, being a man concealed within a tall frame of herbs and flowers, decorated with a flag at top. All of these figures or persons stop here and there in the course of their rounds, and dance to the music of a drum and fife, expecting of course to be remunerated by halfpence from the onlookers. It is now generally a rather poor show, and does not attract much regard.

The milkmaids too had their procession, as recorded by William Hone in his Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements:

In London, thirty years ago

When pretty milkmaids went about,

It was a goodly sight to see

Their May-day Pageant all drawn out:-

Themselves in comely colours drest,

Their shining garland in the middle,

A pipe and tabor on before,

Or else the foot-inspiring fiddle.

They stopt at houses, where it was

Their custom to cry “milk below!”

And, while the music play’d, with smiles

Join’d hands, and pointed toe to toe

In 1826 the Whitsun Ale is described as:

The modern Whitsun Ale consists of a lord and lady of the ale, a steward, sword-bearer, purse-bearer or page, fool, and a pipe and tabor man, with a company of young men and women who dance in a barn.

Another Whitsun folk festival is celebrated in the American Negro A Pinkster Ode of 1803, Pinkster being Pentecost. This celebration was stopped in 1811 because of riotousness and drunkenness.

The ode is some 480 lines long, but here is a taste:

Now hark! The Banjo, rub a dub,

Like a washer-woman’s tub;

And hear the drum, ‘tis rolling now,

Row de dow, row de dow.

The pipe and tabor, flute and fife,

Shall wake the dullest soul to life.

And further on:

And the pipe and tabor plays,

Brisk and merry rounde lays.

Again the fife and hollow drum

Calls you – come together come.

John Prescott Knight (1803-1881) painted the ‘Harvest Home Evening’ which was described in the 1837 Liverpool exhibition catalogue thus:

The last load is brought in and stops under the village maypole which has been decorated for the occasion. The harvest queen advances accompanied by the cheerful pipe and tabor.

Another Harvest Home, painted by Rowlandson (1756-1827), has a girl playing the pipe and tabor. I must add that I do know of a modern harvest home in Gloucestershire where a girl regularly plays the pipe and tabor.

As early as 1839 a decline in the playing of the pipe and tabor is noted by William Thomas in “Anecdotes and Traditions, Illustrative of Early English History and Literature”

The pipe and tabor, after contributing to the amusement of the people for centuries in a manner to ensure them the admiration, if not of musicians, at least of all advocates of “the greatest happiness” principle, have at length disappeared from among us, and left behind nothing but a name closely associated with the rural pastimes of the country.

By the mid-nineteenth century a fiddler had often replaced the taborer for dancing, and later collectors trying to discover old tabor pipes were often disappointed in their searches. As an example, Percy Manning (1870-1917) reported that the pipe and tabor of John Fathers (1789-1873) born at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire had come to a sticky end:

He played the Whittle and Dub for the different Morris round about – the wife of his son ... told me that she gave her Children the Whittle and Dub to play with and she remembers them Breaking them to Pieces.

All these instances seem to signify that the pipe and tabor played a widespread role in outdoor and country life, and this naturally brings us to the Morris dance. There are many mentions of pipe and tabor with Morris, and I have selected just a few notable ones. Morris taborers and drunkenness seem to go hand in hand.

James Simpson – otherwise known as McDonald, and nicknamed ‘Jim the Laddie’ – played his pipe and tabor for Northleach, Sherborne and other sides till 1856 when, at the age of 45, while performing at Bourton-on-the-water he became “so Drunk that he Died from the Effects of it”

(quoted in Folklore of Gloucestershire, Roy Palmer)

1722 Gloucester Journal

Jun 8. By a letter received from Campden last week, we find there is too much reason to believe that WARNER was an accomplice with KELLY in the murder of RICHARD DYER. It seems that KELLY is a famous Morrice-dancer; and on Sunday morning before the fact was committed, he was teaching a set of fellows to dance. WARNER used to play on the tabor and pipes to the dancers. It is to be hoped the Justices will suppress such nurseries of idleness and drunkenness as Morrice-dancings have generally proved.

For Ilmington Morris the taborer was evidently essential.

The old Ilmington Morris team, which had danced annually for as many years as the oldest inhabitant of the village can recall, was disbanded in 1867, owing to the death of their pipe and tabor player, Tom Arthur ... (twenty years or so later it was reformed) ...The reconstituted team was, unhappily, short-lived; the pipe and tabor player, James Arthur, son of the original player, became too old to play, and as there was no one to take his place, the dancing came to an abrupt conclusion.

(Cecil Sharp – The Morris Book)

Not only was the player essential to the dancers, but the musician in many cases relied on such employment to help earn his living, a fact possibly not taken into consideration in the following incident:

1733 Gloucester Journal

May 22. Gloucester, May 19. Last Tuesday a poor woman of this City, being disorder’d in her Senses, hang’d herself.

About the same time, two Children were burnt in a terrible Manner, at Hempstead near this city, one of which is since dead, and the other lies dangerously ill: it is observable, that the affectionate Father was then attending upon a Company of Morrice Dancers with his Tabor and Pipe, and when the News of this melancholy Accident was brought to him, he refus’d to return Home, saying He would not lose his Whitsuntide.

Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623) set a poem to music which includes the words:

Strike it up tabor and pipe us a favour

Thou shalt be well paid, well paid for thy labour.

I was interested to discover that in the early 19^th century, before misogynist tendencies crept in, female dancers were noted:

Spelsbury Morris (Oxfordshire) around 1820’s was a set of women Morris Dancers who used to dance on Whit Monday. They were mostly farmers’ daughters, girls of 18-20, and were under the escort of a man who looked after them ... With them went a clown or ‘squire’ with bladders or cow’s tail and a man playing the pipe and tabour.

Some of the Morris quotes are complimentary. Gutch, writing in 1847 says that, a few years before, he witnessed:

a numerous retinue of morris-dancers, remarkably well habited, skilfully performing their evolutions to the tune of a tabor and pipe in the streets of Oxford University.

I find it hard to play a tune without the tabor and so can certainly relate to the following story quoted in The Coleford Jig:

William Henry Watts (b. Cheltenham) told Sharp that he had learned the tune of a Morris dance from an old pipe and tabor player, a bricklayer, who often used to whistle the tune, making the rhythm of the tabor with his trowel and a tin.

I shall finish this talk as I began it – with a quotation from Shakespeare. In Two Noble Kinsmen the characters ‘dance a morris’ and get themselves prepared for the dance:

- Draw up the company. Where’s the taborer?

- Here, my mad boys, have at ye!

Gillian Guest September 2014

http://gillianguest.blogspot.co.uk/