Cornish bagpipes
variety of bagpipes
Cornish bagpipes (Cornish: Pibow sagh kernewek) are the forms of bagpipes once common in Cornwall in the 19th century. Bagpipes and pipes are mentioned in Cornish documentary sources from c.1150 to 1830 and bagpipes are present in Cornish iconography from the 15th and 16th centuries.
Early documentary references
Pipes, type unspecified, are mentioned in many medieval Cornish sources:
The Cornish word piþhit (modern spelling pibydh 'piper'), glossing the medieval Latin lemma Tibicen, appears in the Vocabularium Cornicum of about 1150.
The first named 'piper' in Cornish records is that of Reginald Tibicen noted as holding land in Cuby before 1260/61. (probably a player of the flute or pipe, perhaps a bagpiper).
The Accounts of the Earldom, 1296–7, mention Henri the pipere of Trigg: his wife Joan was paying a fine of 2s 6d. The assize record of the 1302 Cornwall Eyre mentions Osbmus Le Pibith and Richare/us Le Pybyth, both of Mousehole.
A 1344 account tells of a disturbance at a Cornwall stannary in Redruth involving a man with the surname Pipere.
Pipers receive many mentions in Cornish-language plays from the 15th to early 17th centuries. These are:
The Ordinalia, a trilogy of Biblical plays known individually as Origo Mundi (OM), Passio Christi (PC), and Resurrexio Domini (RD), written c.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cornish bagpipes” is variety of bagpipes. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cornish, bagpipes and variety, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cornish bagpipes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.