The name of a musical instrument which is found frequently in medieval French poetry and romances, and is believed to denote a form of Bagpipe. Many forms of this popular instrument existed in the 13th and 14th centuries, but unlike the muse, which was a bagpipe in general, the estive was used more in association with the refined instruments, such as the harp and fiddle. This suggests that it was soft and delicate in tone, as these other instruments were. The name ‘estive’ may be connected etymologically with the Italian stivare (Lat. stipare, ‘to compress’), or else with estival (‘summer’); an English form, mainly of the 14th century, is ‘stive’.
Also frequently mentioned are the ‘estives de Cornoaille’. A 13th-century text quoted by Gérold in Histoire de la musique (Paris, 1936) describes a minstrel playing the ‘lai Goron’ faultlessly and very sweetly with this instrument. Again, in the Roman de la rose, a controvaille (invention) is sweetly performed on ‘estives de Cornoaille’ which Chaucer translated as ‘hornpipes of Cornewaile’. The Hornpipe (i) had a small out-curved bell of horn and was played with a bag or bladder, or with another horn enclosing the reed (or reeds) and held directly to the mouth. Both forms appear in English church sculpture of the 13th and 14th centuries, but it may be that ‘Cornish’ or ‘Breton’ estives denoted the latter kind, for Thomas Wright, in Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies (London, 1884), cited Alexander Neckam’s use (13th century) of estives as a gloss for ‘tibiae’ – a word which in general medieval usage denoted bagless reed instruments like the shawms. J.G. Kastner’s Danses des morts (1852) quotes a passage from a 12th-century French Bible in which estive does duty for the ‘tuba’ of the Vulgate in Psalm xcvii (xcviii).
ANTHONY C. BAINES