An 18th-century Scottish pastoral reedpipe, sharing many characteristics with the English hornpipe (see Hornpipe (i)) and the Welsh Pibgorn. (The stockhorn, referred to in 16th-century Scottish literature, is not a reedpipe, but a type of forester’s horn blown like a brass instrument.) A primitive type of stock-and-horn was described by the poet Robert Burns in 1794:
it is composed of three parts; the stock, which is the hinder thigh-bone of a sheep, such as you see in a mutton-ham; the horn, which is a common Highland cow’s horn, cut off at the smaller end, until the aperture be large enough to admit the stock to be pushed up through the horn, until it be held by the thicker end of the thigh-bone; and lastly, an oaten reed, exactly cut and notched like that which you see every shepherd boy have when the corn stems are green and full-grown. … The stock has six or seven ventages on the upper side, and one back ventage, like the common flute.
The finger-hole section of Burns’s own instrument, made from a sheep’s leg-bone, is now in the Royal Museum of Scotland. It has seven finger-holes and a thumb-hole, giving it a range of nine notes (more than that of its European and Asian relatives). Several 18th-century pictures show similar but longer instruments, with the reed and finger-hole section probably made from elderwood with the pith removed, where the single reed is also placed directly in the mouth.
David Wilkie’s early 19th-century series of paintings The Gentle Shepherd (in Aberdeen Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland) depict an elaborately turned instrument with the reed enclosed within an elongated wind cap. These illustrate a scene from Allan Ramsay’s poem of the same name (1725), in which the player smashes his stock-and-horn after an unsuccessful attempt at playing the Scots air O’er Bogie. Three other specimens, elaborately made from blackwood inlaid with ivory or bone, survive in museums: at the Royal College of Music, London, at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and (with a double bore) at the Royal Museum of Scotland. These instruments, originally thought to be from the early 18th century, share not only the elongated wind cap of the modern bagpipe practice chanter, but also its very narrow bore and unusual finger hole sizes and placement. These similarities, as well as the exotic materials from which they are made, strongly suggest that all three are re-creations by a 19th-century bagpipe maker, based on the practice chanter of his day, rather than 18th-century pastoral instruments.
H. Balfour: ‘The Old British “Pibcorn” or “Hornpipe” and its Affinities’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, xx (1890–91), 142–54
L.G. Langwill: ‘The Stock-and-Horn’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, lxxxiv (1949–50), 173–80
A. Baines: Bagpipes (Oxford, 1960, 3/1995)
CHARLES FOSTER