ABSTRACT
Bagpipes have as good a case as many musical instruments to be considered ‘everyday objects’ from the European Middle Ages. Although none survive intact from the period, there is plenty of textual evidence to suggest their ubiquitous presence in a range of formal and informal seĴings where music was called for as part of particular forms of social interaction.1 On the other hand, it remains a problem for modern anthropologically-minded scholars working on the material culture of the pre-modern period that the extant visual and textual artefacts allowing us to guess the part played by bagpipes as ‘everyday objects’ are sometimes themselves very far removed from the mundane circumstances they depict or the normality they purport to represent. Many of the artefacts that depict bagpipes and bagpipe playing enjoy the status of being quite exceptional and oĞen luxury commodities of the period in which they were produced. For the purposes of a book of essays on the ‘everyday’, it seems worthwhile aĴempting to work with this familiar modern scholarly difficulty with a degree more specificity than is usually the case. As such, this essay will examine how bagpipes were represented visually as ‘everyday’ musical instruments in some very specific late fourteenth-century English visual and textual contexts that seem undeniably ‘upmarket’ or elite. I am particularly interested in what such representations of an ‘everyday’ musical instrument might have the potential to reveal regarding ideas of harmony and disharmony, concordance and discordance, and, ultimately, conformity and non-conformity, in the troubled last decade of Richard II’s reign and in ‘Ricardian’ literary culture generally.
