Clan pipers—Chief’s retinue—At weddings—Pipers prohibited—In sorrow—At funerals—Queen Victoria’s funeral—To lighten labour—The harvest dance—The shepherd’s pipe—In church architecture—In church services—As a call to church—Ministers and the pipes—Falling into disrepute—“As proud as a piper”—Jealousy of the old masters—“As fou as a piper”—An Irish piper.

The pipers of old were hereditary pipers, and lived from generation to generation in the family of the chief who ruled their clan. They were trained from childhood to the use of the pipes, and grew up as retainers of the family, whose services no chief would dare to dispense with. They were often sent by their employers to the great masters of Highland music for instruction, and when they were old they acted as mediums through which all that was best in Celtic lore and music was passed down to future generations. The piper was, in the days of his splendour, a living exhibition of his clan’s glory and greatness. Every chief had a piper. “It’s a poor estate,” said the piper of Glengarry, in 1801, to a lady who asked him why he did not work some in his leisure time, “that cannot keep the laird and piper without working.” Not only was the piper not expected to work; he had lands for his support, and was of superior rank to the other members of his chief’s retinue or “tail.” He accompanied his chief everywhere, and with the harper—when there were harpers—had a right to appear at all public meetings. The “tail” of a chief of the old time was rather an interesting company. Its composition, according to Sir Walter Scott, was as follows:—

The henchman, or right hand man.

The filidh or bard.

The bleadaire or orator, whose duty it was to make harangues to the great folks his chief visited.

The gille-mor or armourer, who carried his sword, target, and gun.

The gille-casfhliuch, who carried the chief on his back over the brooks.

The gille-comshreang, who led his chief’s horse in difficult paths.

The gille-truisernis, who carried his knapsack.

The piobair or piper.

The gille-piobair or piper’s man, who carried the pipes; with probably a dozen lads besides, who were always ready to do the bidding of their chief.

The chief of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a retinue twice as large as that of the chief of the degenerate eighteenth century. Besides those named, he had his gentlemen of the house, his harper, his seneschal, his treasurer, his standard-bearer, his jester, his body guard, his quartermaster, his cup-bearer, and his forester, all with clearly defined duties and rights. The offices of piper, standard-bearer, harper, cup-bearer, and treasurer descended from father to son. These “tails” were indeed so formidable that they were at last prohibited from appearing in Edinburgh.

In 1809, out of all the big retinue, only the piper remained. He remains still, not exactly as a clan piper—where there are no clans there cannot be clan pipers—but as an appendage to families having a Highland lineage, and to many that have but the remotest connection with the Highlands. His duties are still pretty much what they were. He has not now a gille, for the piper of those days is not too proud to carry his pipes himself, but the description written in the early years of the century is still partly applicable to pipers at houses where the Highland traditions are reverenced:—

“In a morning when the chief is dressing, he walks backwards and forwards close under the window without doors, playing on his bagpipe, with a most upright attitude and majestic stride. It is a proverb in Scotland, namely, the stately stride of the piper. When required he plays at meals, and in the evening to divert the guests with music when the chief has company with him. His gilley holds the pipe till he begins, and the moment he has done with the instrument he disdainfully throws it down upon the ground, as being only the passive means of conveying his skill to the ear, and not a proper weight for him to carry or bear at other times. But for a contrary reason his gilley snatches it up, which is that the pipe may not suffer indignity from its neglect.”

The last half of the paragraph is not applicable, and never was. One might as well expect a professional violinist to throw down his instrument on the stage after playing a solo, leaving the fragments for a super to pick up. Pipers respect the bagpipe as much as other musicians respect their own peculiar instruments, and they were never so “daft” as to indulge in the antics described by this writer. But then, the writer was an Englishman, and may therefore be excused.

The piper was a professional gentleman, a skilled musician, who went to college, and had a seat at the table with his chief. As a favoured retainer, he enjoyed certain perquisites. When, for instance, an animal was slaughtered for the family of the chief, a certain part of the carcase was allotted to the piper. When the civil wars broke up the clan system, the chiefs ceased to keep hereditary pipers, and the race soon became extinct. Afterwards, when a man considered he had enough of this world’s goods to warrant the expenditure, and felt that he would like to hark back a little to the ways of the fathers, he got the best piper he could, just as he got any other servant. In this way the system of family pipers is perpetuated, and will be so as long as the Sovereign and others of high rank set the example.

The pipes took an important part in the enjoyments of Highlanders. They were always to the front at weddings or where the people were making merry. An old time poet puts it plainly, if rather quaintly, when he says:—

Our present day equivalent for this verse is much better rhyme, if farther from the truth:—

The pipers, however, could not have been very “fou,” at least until after the wedding, for,

Had they been totally incapable they could hardly have got to twenty different “bog-holes.” It is difficult to define exactly the meaning of the phrases, “as drunk as a piper” and “as fou as a piper,” but they seem to have generally meant half seas over, not helplessly inebriated. The piper, being an important social personage, could hardly escape the reproach of being addicted to liquor, although there is nothing to show that his class were in this respect any worse than the average of the people of their day.

That the piper was a principal character at weddings in old times is certain. The wedding morn was ushered in by the music of the pipers, who followed the bridegroom and his friends on a round of early calls intended to warn the guests of their engagements. These joined the party, and before the circuit, which sometimes occupied several hours, had ended, some hundreds perhaps had gathered. The bride made a similar tour round her friends, and thus the complete company was collected. After the wedding a procession was formed, and with flags flying and pipers playing, and all kinds of demonstrations of joy, passed through the neighbourhood. Festivities were generally prolonged to a late hour, the pipers never ceasing their playing. The company danced either outside to the music of the pipes or inside to that of the fiddle. The Irish bagpipe was long used at festivities in Erin, and at a wedding the hat was sent round three times, the first twice for the priest and the third time for the piper. The piper did not always, however, lead to peace and goodwill at weddings, for at one time the ecclesiastical ordinances of Scotland interposed to prohibit the presence of above “fifteine persons on both sydes” at marriage feasts, among whom there were to be “no pypers.” These ordinances were frequently made, and in connection with one it is on record that “still their chief delight at marriages was bagpipes, and home they go with loud bagpipes and dance upon the green.”

The bagpipe joined in the sorrow as well as the mirth of the people. The coronach, a wailing recitation which recapitulated the good deeds of the deceased, came most immediately after death, and corresponded to the old ecclesiastical dirge and the Irish “keen” of the present day. The laments on the pipes were performed after the coronach, and accompanied the progress of the obsequies, a number of pipers attending the funeral of any eminent person. The coronach and the lament existed contemporaneously for some time, but gradually the coronach died out. The use of the pipes continued for many years later, more especially in the Lochaber district and also in Aberdeenshire. At a funeral in Skye of a notable chief the procession was two miles in length, six men walking abreast. Seven pipers were in attendance, and, placed at different positions in the procession, played the lament all the way from the residence of the deceased to the cemetery, and “upwards of three hundred imperial gallons of whisky were provided for the occasion, with every other necessary refreshment.” In these days a funeral was a funeral.

There was a burial in Inverness in the seventeenth century where few besides Highlanders in their usual garb were present, and all the way before them a piper played, having his drones hung with streamers of crape. In 1737 at the funeral of an eminent performer in Ireland his cortege was preceded by “eight couple of pipers” playing a funeral dirge, and it is alleged that when Lord Lovat was condemned for participating in the rebellion of 1745, he desired that his body might be carried to Scotland for burial, saying “he had once made it a part of his will that all the pipers between Johnnie Groat’s House and Edinburgh should be invited to play at his funeral.” Rob Roy’s funeral in 1736 was the last for many years at which a piper occupied an official position, although we read that in 1820 the pipes were played at the funeral of Sir John Murray Macgregor, of Lanrick, and that in Edinburgh in 1835 a Highland corps attended the funeral of a sergeant, the piper playing “Lochaber no more.” In later years, however, the custom has been revived, and the piper now frequently accompanies military funerals or the funerals of those connected with the Highlands. When the then Sirdar entered Khartoum after the Battle of Omdurman, one of the first things he did was to hold a formal funeral service on the spot where General Gordon was murdered, the pipers playing a dirge and the Soudanese band playing the hero’s favourite hymn, “Abide with me.” In old times, if the poet Dunbar may be believed, the bagpipe was preferred to other forms of honouring the dead:—

In connection with funerals it only remains to be added that at the magnificent ceremonial in February last (1901), when the body of Queen Victoria was conveyed from Osborne to Windsor, Her Majesty’s two Highland pipers had an honourable place in the procession. When the cortege left Osborne they played the dirge of the Black Watch, and later on they changed into “The Flowers of the Forest,” a tune that has been played over many a soldier’s grave. It was appropriate that the association of the Queen with the 42nd Royal Highlanders should be kept up to the last. In 1854, when the regiment was in Chobham Camp, Her Majesty and the Prince Consort visited them weekly, and the Queen was so pleased with the Highlanders that when she decided to have a piper, she chose Pipe-major Ross of the 42nd, who remained in her service until his death about ten years ago. Mr. James C. Campbell, the present royal pipe-major, was taken from the same regiment.

The bagpipe was also used to lighten labour. While the inhabitants of Skye were engaged in making roads in 1786, each party of workers had a piper, and in the North of Scotland men engaged in work requiring strength and unity of purpose, such as launching a large boat, had a piper to help them pull or lift together. In the harvest time a piper was often employed to animate the reapers, keeping them working in time to the music, like a file of soldiers, he himself following behind the slowest worker. This custom is alluded to in Hamilton’s elegy on Habbie Simpson, the piper of Kilbarchan:—

The dance of the kirn or harvest home was always danced with peculiar glee by the reapers of the farm where the harvest was first finished. On these occasions they danced on an eminence in full view of as many other reapers as possible, to the music of the Lowland bagpipe, commencing the dance with loud shouts of triumph and tossing their hooks in the air. The dance was retained for a time by Highlanders visiting the South of Scotland as harvesters, but it has now been more than a century in disuetude. In a poem of great antiquity, called Cockilby’s Sow, which describes such a dance, we are told that—

Also that—

In a manuscript of the seventeenth century, a song descriptive of shepherd life says—

It may sound irreverent to connect the bagpipe with religious ordinances, though why one form of musical instrument should be deemed sacred and another profane is a hard question. To the modern Highlander a blast from the pipes on Sunday would be considered enough to bring a curse on the whole land, but our forefathers were not all so strict. They worked references to the pipes into the architecture of many of their churches, particularly in England and on the Continent. In St. James’s Church, Norwich, there used to be a window on which a piper was shown with a bagpipe with one drone; under a stall in Ripon Cathedral there is carved in oak a representation of two hogs dancing to a third playing on a bagpipe; in Beverley Minster, a group of pigs is carved in wood, all dancing round a trough to the music of one of their number, who plays a bagpipe having two drones and one chanter; among the numerous carvings in Westminster Abbey, there is a woodland scene representing a group of monkeys along with a bear, the latter playing the bagpipe; and in St. John’s Church, Cirencester, a monkey is depicted playing on the bagpipe. Then at Rosslyn and in Melrose Abbey, we have the pieces of architecture mentioned in a previous chapter.^[9] Perhaps the most curious of these semi-ecclesiastical carvings is a representation of an ass playing on a bagpipe, which is graven on an ancient tombstone in the Cathedral Church of Hamburg. The animal walks on its hind legs, holding the instrument between its forelegs, and carved on the stone are the words—

Pipers, apparently, were not rich then more than they are now.

It is difficult to understand why sculptors should have connected sacred architecture with animals in the way they did. Artists, like poets, have a license, but this hardly accounts for their associating the pig, which never was venerated in any way, with sacred things. The carvings, however, while hardly respectful to the instrument, associate it, if only in a sarcastic way, with ecclesiastical affairs, and show that the foolish prejudice which considers the pipes profane did not always exist. It is possible that the connection between the pipes and churches was confined to ecclesiastical carvings, but as to that we cannot now speak definitely. The early reformers in their reforming zeal practised vandalism, and in rooting out the religion they wished to supersede, they left us but fragments of an architecture we would now have been glad to preserve. The references to the bagpipe in churches are so fragmentary it is impossible to draw any very reliable inference.

The pipes have, however, been associated with religious services on a good many occasions. The Italian shepherds, when visiting Rome to celebrate the Nativity, carry their pipes with them, and play to images of the Virgin Mary and the infant Messiah, which are placed at the corners of the streets. The pipes were used in the services of the Catholic Church in Edinburgh in 1536. In 1556 there was a procession in Edinburgh in honour of St. Giles, the patron saint of the town. The procession was led by the Queen Regent and was attended by bagpipers. When James I. came to Scotland in 1617, he did not take the organ from Holyrood chapel, when he was clearing out every other symptom of idolatry, because “there is some affinity between it and the bagpipes.” “I know a priest,” says an old English writer, “who, when any of his friends should be marryed, would take his back-pype and so fetch them to church, playing sweetlye afore them, and then he would lay his instrument handsomely upon the aultare till he had marryed them, and sayd masse, which thyng being done, he would gentylle bring them home agayne with back-pype.”

Then we have Dunbar, in his Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, throwing some light on the manners and customs of the Carrick district of Ayrshire, when he makes a brother churchman, with whom he held poetic jousts, desire that no priest may sing over his grave:—

So the poet knew the sound of the “bag pipe,” and thought it an instrument fit to “fie the fendis.” Here some lowlanders would, no doubt, be willing to agree with him.

We have at least one instance, and that from the far north, of the pipes being used to call people to church. In that corner of Caithness in which John o’ Groat’s House is situated there lived, more than two hundred years ago, a parish minister named Rev. Andrew Houston, or Hogston. Mr. Houston somehow could not get his people to attend church, and at last he decided to invoke the aid of the pipes. Accordingly, each Sabbath morning, a short time previous to the hour of service, a piper began at one of the more outlying portions of the parish and played his way to the church. The plan worked well, for the people, attracted by the novelty, followed the music Sabbath after Sabbath, and thus the minister gathered together a good congregation. This Mr. Houston was the first Protestant minister of the parish, and there is a tradition to the effect that not only did he use the pipes for the purpose mentioned, but that after the close of the service he allowed his congregation to have a game at shinty before going home. There is a large headstone to his memory in the kirkyard of his parish. It bears a Latin inscription and the date 1620.

In our own day the most notable instance of the pipes in church was at the first commemoration service held in York Minster in memory of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The 1st Royal Scots were stationed in York at the time, and three pipers, under the leadership of Pipe-Major Matheson—a Golspie man—played selections of Highland music inside the Cathedral. The King’s Own Scottish Borderers relieved the Royal Scots, their pipers playing “The Flowers of the Forest.” Afterwards the pipers of the Black Watch played.

The late Rev. Dr. George Mackay, of the Free Church, Inverness, was a man of a humorous disposition, and after referring one Sunday in an adverse manner to a proposal to introduce instrumental music into the church, said that if they (the congregation) were obliged to fall back upon a “human instrument” to aid them in the service of praise, they would have nothing to do with the organ—it was an instrument of foreign manufacture—they would use the bagpipe. What was more appropriate than that Highland people should use a Highland instrument? Some time later, when the question of instrumental music was being discussed at Inverness Free Church Presbytery, the Doctor, with a twinkle in his eye, turned to an elder who was a member of Presbytery, and who in his younger days was known to play the pipes occasionally, and asked him, “Could you let us have ‘French’ on the bagpipe?” The elder, however, was an austere individual, and, with an attempt at a smile, he replied, “Yes, and ‘Balerma’ too, doctor; but when I want to sing God’s praises, I use my own pipe.”

This antipathy towards their national music, showed itself very frequently among the “unco guid” of the Highlands. Two ministers in the north of Scotland were going along a country road in a gig towards a town where the following day was to be Communion Sunday. While on their way they heard the sound of pipe music in a field near a roadside cottage. They stopped the gig, and after listening intently to the notes of a pibroch, one of the good men jumped out, walked up to the piper, told him he was quite wrong with the tune, and said that if he (the piper) would lend him his pipes he would show him how the pibroch should be played. The piper, with some astonishment, consented, when the minister struck up the tune, and went through it in such a masterly manner that the piper was fairly overcome with delight, and thanked his reverend tutor. During the time the performance was going on the other minister sat in the carriage, quite horrified to see and hear what his fellow-traveller was about. When the piper minister returned to proceed on the journey, the other began a sermon on the wickedness of his conduct. The former replied that on hearing the piper perform he thought it his duty to correct him, as otherwise the false notes would be running in his head during the sermon, but now that he had played the tune he would think no more about it, and be able to preach a good sermon on the morrow.

In this connection it is only fair to ministers to add that they were generally not nearly so prejudiced as their people, especially their elders, were. Elders nearly always professed more religious knowledge than ministers, and were always less tolerant of what did not agree with their own opinions. In one Highland parish not quite a hundred years ago, a few people set themselves up as judges of what was right and wrong, and let the exercise of their powers become such that a young man learning to play the pipes laid himself open to exclusion from church privileges. Happily we are long past that stage now.

There is no denying, however, that at one time the race fell into disrepute. In Cockilby’s Sow, a poem already referred to,^[11] the bagpipe is mentioned as appropriated to swine herds, and in 1641 a sarcastic writer tells us, “The troopers rode from citie to court and from court to country with their trumpets before them, which made the people run out to see them, as fast as if it had been the bagge-pype playing before the Beares.”

Rather a nasty allusion that to the bagpipe and the bears. It reminds us of the dancing bear, or the organ and the monkey of our own day. Whatever the piper might think of himself, people seemed disposed to think the worst of him, and innumerable petty offences were laid to his charge. In 1570 three St. Andrews pipers were admonished to keep the Sabbath day holy, to attend sermon, and to abstain from playing on the streets after supper or during the night. Playing and dancing on Sunday came so often under clerical censure as to show very plainly the general use of the instrument on the one hand, and on the other its adoption in connection with dancing, particularly in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh.

In 1574 a great complaint was made by a burgess of Stirling to the Privy Council of an assault “by are namit Edmond Broun, are Highland piper,” when bit to the effusion of blood “by the said pyperis dog.” In 1591 and 1593 George Bennet, piper in the Water of Leith, and James Brakenrig, agreed to abstain from playing on the bagpipes on Sunday; in 1595 and 1596 Thomas Cairns, following the same vocation there, fell under displeasure for playing and dancing on Sunday; and William Aiken pledged himself never to profane the Sabbath day again with the pipes. In 1598 “Duncan Ure and Johnne Forbes, pyper,” were sentenced to imprisonment, and to be fed on bread and water, on confessing that they had sat up all night “playing at the dys quhill iiij hours in the morning,” when they quarrelled. In 1606 Richard Watsone, piper in the Water of Leith, was threatened with censure, and in 1624 James Clark was “fined of xxsh. for having an pyper playing in his house in tyme of sermon, vpoun the Lord his Sabbath.” “William Wallace, pyper,” was sentenced by the kirk session of St. Cuthbert’s “to stand for one day upon the pillar, and thereafter to remove furth of the parochine, ay an quhill he be ane renewit man of his manneris, and to get lief of presbyterie to retourne, after they sie amendiment in his lyf and conversatioun,” and in Galloway there is still the “great well of Larg,” of which it is said a piper stole the offering, but when he was drinking ale, which he intended to pay for with the stolen money, the gout seized on him, of which he could not be cured but at that well and after he had restored the money.

At length the immoralities of the humble musicians became a bye-word, so much so that a slanderous biographer of Archbishop Sharpe thought he had blackened his character enough when he said, “As for his father, he was a piper.” There was nothing to be said after that. So late as 1860, a traveller in Caithness-shire who visited Brawl Castle, one of the county seats, wrote, more let us hope in joke than in earnest—“John Gunn, their piper, played extremely well, but it was sometimes necessary to station him in a distant room, as the skirl was a little too harsh to be enjoyed at close quarters, particularly when John made too free with whisky, without which, however, it was not easy to get John to play at all.”

Gambling, ebriety, nocturnal revels, and gross immoralities, says the author of Musical Memoirs of Scotland, accompanied this subordinate species of music, to the manifest annoyance of the more tranquil part of the community, and even then (1849) where frequent in towns, licentiousness was seldom far removed from it. In 1661 the minister of a Scottish parish has left it on record, “he found two women of his congregation ‘full’ on a week day, and dancing with pipers playing to them.” Truly a severe indictment.

From these things it is refreshing to turn to the story of William Mac Donald of Badenoch, who played so well, even when rivals had given him too much drink, that he always got a prize at competitions. His son was piper to the Prince of Wales, but owing to religious scruples he resigned his situation and burned his pipes. He evidently did not think there was anything sacred about the instrument.

The evil that men do lives after them. So these stories derogatory to pipers have been preserved while many equally good and reflecting credit on their characters as public men have no doubt been buried with their bones. They always had a “guid conceit o’ themselves,” and were apt to think they were better than average humanity, so much so that “as proud as a piper” passed into a proverb. When the late Duke of Edinburgh required a piper he asked the advice of the Prince of Wales’s piper as to how he should get one. The Prince’s piper asked the Duke what kind of a piper he wanted, whereupon the Duke said “Oh, just a piper like yourself, Donald.” “Oh, it’s easy to get a piper,” said Donald, “but it’s no easy to get a piper like me.” Then there was Mac Donel, the famous Irish piper, who lived in great style, keeping servants and horses. One day he was sent for to play to a large company during dinner, and a table and chair were placed for him on the landing outside the door, a bottle of claret and a glass on the table and a servant waiting behind the chair. Mac Donel appeared, took a rapid survey of the preparations, filled his glass, stepped to the dining room door, looked full in the midst of the gathering, said “Mr. Grant your health, and company,” drank off the dram, threw half-a-crown on the table with the remark to the servant, “There, my lad, is two shillings for my bottle of wine and a sixpence for yourself,” then ran out, mounted his horse and galloped off, followed by his groom. An almost similar story is told of Ian Dall, the Gairloch piper, but in his case the language used was hardly so choice. It was of the kind which is best represented thus * * * *

Not only were the old masters proud, they were also jealous. When the colleges for training pipers were in Skye, the Mac Crimmons had some private “tips” on pipe music which they did not give away to their pupils. A girl friend, however, learned how some of the secret notes were produced, and in private she taught her sweetheart. When her nearest relatives learned what she had done, they instantly cut off her fingers that she might show no more how they practised their tunes. Ross, a grand old Breadalbane piper, in a mad fit of jealousy, thrust the right hand of his boy brother into the fire, and held it there till it became a charred lump, to prevent the boy becoming a better piper than himself, which seemed likely. Neil Munro’s story of Red Hand is but a variation of the same theme. Giorsal, jealous of her stepson Tearlach’s piping being better than that of her husband, cuts off Tearlach’s hand while he sleeps. It is beautifully told, but that is the whole story.

And they have always been a happy lot who could enjoy themselves to the utmost with pipe and music and song and dance, and also perhaps with some of the national beverage of Scotland, which is still rather unfairly coupled with the tartan and the pipes. When the Princess of Thule came back to the Lewis, John the Piper was told—“Put down your pipes, and tek off your bonnet, and we will have a good dram together this night! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you, John, and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was neffer born that could be hurt by whisky. And the whisky was never made that could hurt a piper.” This, too, passed into a proverb—“As fou as a piper”—but however true it may have been in one generation it has nowadays no more than a figurative meaning. Pipers now are as much in the public eye as ever they were, but they are matter-of-fact people, who have their livings to make and their characters to uphold. They are therefore neither over proud, over jealous, nor over jolly. They have fitted themselves into nineteenth century circumstances, and do not care how much the public eye is upon them.

The piper as a man of peace has been and still is closely concerned with every side of the social life of the Highland people, but his name is not writ nearly so large on history’s page as is that of the piper as a man of war. In Whistlebinkie we have verses by Alex. A. Ritchie, which illustrate the attachment of the Irish piper to his pipes, and which, for lack of a better opening, may be inserted here. They are too good to leave out altogether:—