A single hornpipe with mouth horn, of Wales. The name is formed from pib, meaning pipe, and corn, one of many Celtic synonyms for horn or trumpet. The three 18th-century specimens in the Museum of Welsh Life at St Fagans (Cardiff) consist of an elderwood or bone pipe with six finger-holes and one thumb-hole, to which is attached an upcurved bell horn carved with serrated edges and sometimes in an open-jawed shape; a mouth horn is fixed around the reed socket at the top of the pipe. The instruments are between 41 and 52 cm in length. The original reeds of the three extant pibgorns have been replaced; however it is likely (according to W.M. Morris, British Violin Makers, London, 1904, 2/1920) that the instruments were fitted with single reeds of cane or quill, like those used in comparable instruments elsewhere.
The importance of the pibgorn in Wales is evident in the earliest writings. The laws of Hywel Dda (codified 940–50) specify that every master employing a pencerdd (chief musician) should give him the necessary harp, crwth and pibgorn. However, the instrument was not described in writing until 1775, the date of Daines Barrington's account; the extant specimens also date from that time. References in literary and manuscript sources mention the pibgorn as a pastoral instrument used in the Berwyn Hills (Meirionethshire), in North Pembrokeshire and in the rural communities of mid-South Wales, where farm hands, cattle drovers and shepherds carried their pibgorns to fairs, markets and wakes. By the late 18th century it appears to have been exclusively a rustic instrument, though perhaps more functional than was realized by Edward Jones, who wrote in Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1794, p.116):
Its tone is medium between the flute and the clarinet, and is remarkable for its melody… it is now peculiar to the Isle of Anglesey, where it is played by shepherds and tends greatly to enhance the innocent delight of pastoral life.
At that time some pibgorns had a wooden reed-cap instead of a mouth horn, as do surviving specimens of the equivalent Scottish instrument, the Stock-and-horn. The ideal material for the middle section was thought to be bone – particularly the thigh bone (tibia) of a deer. (In lowland Scotland a rustic pipe was made from the thigh bone (stock) of a sheep: it would be reasonable to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon swegel-horn (shin-horn) was similar to the pibgorn.) No comparable instruments survive in Ireland, though F.W. Galpin considered that a deer bone now in the National Museum of Ireland may have been the tube of a hornpipe.
In the British Isles there is iconographic evidence from the 15th and 14th centuries. In the Beauchamp window (1447) of St Mary's Church, Warwick, one angel plays a single hornpipe while another holds an identical instrument (see Hornpipe (i), fig. 1). They resemble surviving pibgorns, apart from having apparently five rather than six finger-holes and straight-cut instead of serrated and jawed bell horns. An illuminated initial in the Beauchamp Psalter (1372) contains the figure of a shepherd outside the walls of Bath, playing what seems to be a single hornpipe with mouth horn. Stone carvings in the roof of the 15th-century parish church of St Eilian, Llaneilian (Anglesey) depict angels playing bagpipes with pipes that end in bells like that of the pibgorn. An early western European depiction is in one manuscript of the late 13th-century Cantigas de Santa María (E-E b.I.2), where a double hornpipe similar to the Basque alboka is shown. Actual hornpipe fragments survive from a still earlier time. During the latter half of the 20th century, the pibgorn has been revived for use in Welsh folk music.
D. Barrington: ‘Some Account of Two Musical Instruments used in Wales’, Archaeologia, iii (1775), 30–34
H. Balfour: ‘The Old British ‘Pibcorn’ or ‘Hornpipe’ and its Affinities’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xx (1890), 142–54
F.W. Galpin: Old English Instruments of Music (London, 1910, 4/1965 by T. Dart)
F. Crane: Extant Medieval Musical Instruments (Iowa City, 1972), 46
M.S. Defus: ‘The Pibgorn’, Welsh Music, iv/1 (1972–5), 5–10
J. Shoreland: ‘The Pibgorn’, Taplas, no.17 (1986), 15
T. Schuurmans and D.R. Saer: ‘The Bagpipe’, Taplas, 21 (1987), 12–15
JOAN RIMMER/WYN THOMAS