MUSIC IN 12TH CENTURY WALES. Shahnaz Mosam©2010
Recently I have been reading Giraldus Cambrensis’ “Journey through Wales”, and “The
Description of Wales”, books written by this learned 12 th
century clergyman following his visit to
Wales in 1188 to recruit crusaders. (Available in Penguin paperback in the 1978 translation from the original Latin by Lewis Thorpe.) I felt that these works would complement and provide background for my playing of Welsh medieval music from the Robert ap Huw manuscript.
As many readers will know, Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales, is most often mentioned for his comments on the harp playing of the Irish during the 12 th century which he included in his earlier book about his travels in Ireland, comments which have given us valuable information about the use of fingernails, style of playing and string materials. However, Gerald himself was from Wales, being the grandson of a Welsh princess who had married a Norman baron, and he grew up on the family estates at Manorbier on the Pembrokeshire coast, where I think it is fair to suppose that the music he heard would have been that of the native bards, players of harp and crwth, music which was the ancestor of the music in the Robert ap Huw manuscript and which must have been similar to it. Indeed perhaps some of the pieces he heard continued to be played and maybe elaborated over the following centuries, and may even have been transcribed and copied into the MS.
Born in about 1145, just a few years after the death of Gryfudd ap Cynan (c.1055 -1137) to whom the Statute regulating the practice of cerdd dant (string music) is attributed, Gerald of Wales studied as a young man in Paris and became chaplain at the court of Henry II of England in 1184. I find this particularly interesting from a musical viewpoint since Henry’s wife was none other than
Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the greatest patrons of the arts in 12 th
century Europe, at whose court the poetry and music of the troubadours flourished. It seems that at least one troubadour, Bernart de
Ventadorn, came with her to England for a while.
So it is probable that by the time Gerald was in his early forties he would have been familiar with many of the cultured musical environments of his time; the bardic school of cerdd dant, the religious music of l’Ecole de Notre Dame in Paris and the avantgard works of the southern French troubadours. Thus he would have been in an ideal position to compare and comment on the various musics of the 12 th
century.
It is in Book One of “The Description of Wales” that Gerald talks about music, and what he says gives food for thought.
In chapter 12, on “Their natural acumen and shrewdness” he says that the Welsh play the harp, the pipe and the crwth. He says that “ they charm and delight the ear with the sweetness of their music.
They play rapidly and in subtle harmony. Their fingering is so rapid that they produce this harmony out of discord.
” (Could this last sentence be a reference to highly developed damping skills on the harp?) And then he says that to save time he will repeat what he wrote about the three peoples (ie.
Scots, Irish and Welsh) in his book on Ireland, and does just that. This is part of the famous much quoted passage mentioned before and it is interesting that he deems it equally applicable to the
Welsh. However he does not include the sentence about string materials, so that we do not know if the Welsh too used mainly wire strings on their harps, a view held by some scholars, which I am inclined to share, who believe that the music of cerdd dant evolved on and for a small harp with metal strings, rather than horsehair or gut. (See the article by Peter Greenhill “The Forgotten Silver
Voiced Harp of Wales” available on line on Paul Dooley’s website.)
In the next chapter he talks about “Their choral music and part singing” and states that whenever people sing together in Wales, they do so in parts, rather than in unison, with “symphonic harmony” and that even young children instinctively sing in this way. Considering that he is talking about the second part of the 12 th
century, when the harmonies used in most of Europe were limited to parallel fourths and fifths and polyphonic singing had yet to be, this seems amazing, but is not dissimilar to the advanced state of harmony which we find in the music of the Robert ap Huw MS. He states that people in northern England also sing like this and that perhaps this is a practice inherited from
Danish and Norwegian settlers, which is interesting as there is a possibility that early Irish music

was likewise influenced. In the case both of string music and singing, he says that they always finish together in or on B b.
However, the part of the book which really intrigues me comes earlier, in Chapter 10 where he deals with Welsh hospitality. He says that travellers who arrive during the day are entertained until the evening meal (the only meal!) by “ girls who play to them on the harp. In every house there are young women just waiting to play to you, and there is certainly no lack of harps..............In every Welsh court or family the menfolk consider playing on the harp to be the greatest of all accomplishments.”
Now this adds another dimension to the idea of medieval Celtic harpers as male professional instrumentalists. It confirms the many iconographic sources, carvings, illustrated manuscripts and so forth which depict women playing the harp. Moreover Gerald clearly states that this is the norm, and that harps are not rare instruments. He is probably referring to families of noble birth, the proportion of which in a tribal based or feudal society can be high (we must remember that in the
12 th century there was no middle class), but he begins the chapter by saying that in Wales no one begs and hospitality is given to all, so it seems that even poor travellers and servants may have benefited from the skills of the lady harpers, thus spreading the fame of the harp and love of its music.
It is this which intrigues me; who were these young women, and just what did they play on their harps? (He does not say that they sang as they played, so it would seem that they were mainly instrumentalists.) Did they play the same pieces as the musicians who served the princely courts, did they improvise and invent pieces of their own, or did they have a separate repertoire reserved only for women? It would be fascinating to know. Did they play simpler versions of the bardic tunes, or were they also highly skilled harpers in their own right? According to Gerald of Wales it would seem so.
I wonder if some of the pieces in the Robert ap Huw MS, such as Y Diggan y Droel and Kaniad
Susanna may originally have been the repertory of women, or perhaps were even composed by women given that their titles refer to female themes. Y Diggan y Droel is “The Whirling of the
Spindle” and for most of history women of all classes have spent much time spinning.
Gerald does not go into details of the kind of harps played by these women, if they had strings of metal or horsehair, if they played the same harps as men, but oddly he does not mention men playing the harp at all! He does mention bards, but as poets. As a woman I cannot help but find it curious that he talks about women playing the harp and then says that the menfolk hold this in the highest regard, almost as if it were a predominantly female skill which the men greatly admired .
Perhaps at his time it was, and then later on it was taken over by men in search of economic and social power, in much the same way that the priesthood may have been in even earlier times. It is a pity that he does not say who played the crwth and pipe (note that he says pipe not pipes, does he mean bagpipe or not?); perhaps these instruments were the domain of the men.
The Statute of Gryfudd ap Cynan does not mention female musicians at all, and the pieces in the
Robert ap Huw MS whose composers are known are all by men who lived in the 14 th
and 15 th centuries, but the statute may well have been drawn up a few centuries later, and most of the pieces in the MS are anonymous, although clearly each one was composed by an individual. I think it is possible that two or three hundred years before, in the time of Gerald of Wales, some of these women who played the harp to weary travellers as they sat by the fire waiting for dinner may have been recognised “professional” musicians, and that some of the older pieces which were copied into the MS could be theirs.
In modern times we are so used to judging a person’s professional status by the receiving of money, that it may be hard now to relate it to their function or role. In a medieval society payment or reward was often, even commonly given in kind, (in food and lodging, clothing or livestock, the use of land). We know from various sources that harpers were often still paid by their patrons in this way even in the 17 th
century, so it is possible that these women were “ just waiting to play the harp” because that in fact was their work (otherwise they would probably have been spinning or embroidering or whatever else it was that medieval women had to do). I was once approached at a concert by a lady who told me that she had read that there were no women “bards” in ancient times; well, I am not so sure.