The need for watchmen

The importance of watchmen in the Middle Ages can be seen in the fate of a trumpeter on the walls of Cracow in 1241. He started to signal the arrival of an enemy army but was silenced when an arrow pierced his throat. He must have been playing an elaborate and well-known signal. Performance of this interrupted fanfare continued in his honor and became a permanent institution by royal decree more than a century later.

Henry III of England commanded establishment of watches in towns and cities in 1253. It became customary to assign watch duty to citizens according to a roster of rows of houses kept by the city government. By law, all outside lanterns had to be extinguished by 9:00 at night. No one was allowed on the streets after that time except the night watchmen. Mounting of the watch became a public spectacle, with pageants and dancing in the streets.

Eventually, towns stopped assigning citizens for watch duty. They hired men to serve as watchmen. In England, they became known as waits, but towns all over Europe had them. As the Cracow incident indicates, at least some towns had official watchmen earlier than England did.

Minstrelsy in the Middle Ages

Neither watch duty nor ceremonial duty required anything more than the ability to make a clear sound on an instrument and memorize the signals. Eventually, though, someone realized that a group of trumpets and shawms could actually make music.

“Minstrel” has become the most common term in musicological literature to describe secular musicians in the Middle Ages. Minstrel instrumentalists usually specialized in either soft instruments (including various flutes and stringed instruments) or loud instruments.

Minstrels routinely performed a variety of non-musical tasks. The line between a minstrel and someone who used an instrument as part of other duties can be very thin.

Many minstrels were itinerant entertainers with low social status. Cities and courts offered permanent employment to some of them, which increased both their status and their financial stability.

Itinerant people had powerful incentive to settle down when they could. Steady work brought steady pay. Settled people had no need to fear vagrancy laws.

Meanwhile, towns could gain prestige from the kinds of people they could afford to hire to do publicly visible work.

Watch duty as a career

As early as 1311, Mechelin, a city in the Low Countries, established watchmen to stand on the towers of the two largest churches and play warnings on their instruments at the approach of such dangers as fires or enemies. They required that the watchmen have good eyesight as well as ability to play the signaling instruments. The city eventually had so many applicants for each vacancy that they established juried auditions.

Before Bruges would hire a watchman, he had to sign an oath that he would remain in the town’s service for a specified time. That is, he promised not to be lured away by some other town that promised more money.

For a while, the medieval watchmen performed both musical and non-musical duties with their instruments. Other people, not on the town payroll, learned to play the watch instruments strictly as musical instruments.

Signals from watchmen’s instruments had become so important that, in fourteenth-century Paris at least, citizens were forbidden to play loud instruments after curfew except at weddings.

The Crusades brought an especially impressive Arabic trumpet to European attention. It quickly became a royal prerogative. Towns that wanted to use it had to ask permission. Dijon, seat of the duchy of Burgundy, appealed to the duke in 1425 for permission to use the trumpet on grounds that its minstrels frequently had to entertain foreign guests. Many of them made fun of the of the city’s horns, and it found the ridicule degrading. But the imperial city of Innsbruck had already used herald trumpets beginning in 1337.

Innovations in the manufacture and design of trumpets

The rise of medieval cities coincided with a time of great technological innovation. Some of these innovations enabled trumpets to evolve from simple signaling instruments to musical instruments that could play complete scales.

Even the long, impressive herald trumpet could still only play the notes of the overtone series, and trumpeters did not start using the upper notes till much later. Two things happened to create a new brass instrument that could play a complete scale.

First, medieval craftsmen rediscovered the ancient technique for bending metal tubes. Trumpets were already made by assembling several lengths of tubing. One length of bent tubing made a curved trumpet with a backward-facing bell. Two lengths resulted in either an S-shaped instrument or a loop. Either form made the bell face forward and the instrument more compact and easier to hold.

Second, someone learned how to place one tube inside another. With the left hand holding the mouthpiece in place, the player’s right hand could move the outer tube along the inner tube. The rest of the instrument was attached to the outer tube. Extending it a full arm’s length would lower the instrument’s pitch by about one step. Between sliding the instrument along the inner tube and adjusting pitch with his lips, the player could achieve an entire scale.

A Bible prepared for Count Borso of Ferrara has a picture of a three-piece alta band with such an instrument. It certainly represents a band similar to his own. His court records name the man who played the instrument, which those same records call a trombone beginning in 1439.

Today’s musicological literature calls it a slide trumpet. Hints of its existence appear as early as the 1360s. Of course, the modern trombone slide did not exist until the latter part of the fifteenth century.

Watchmen as musicians

Medieval watchmen had to be vigilant in case some danger appeared, but most of the time, nothing much happened. Bored watchmen formed informal wind bands. Their shawms could play a complete scale and therefore the popular tunes of the day. Their trumpets and horns could provide a simple drone accompaniment. City leaders noticed.

Civic records from the fourteenth century are spotty. The first extant reference to watchmen in the city of Bruges is from 1310. It does not describe their watch duties, however. It does not even describe them accompanying a government official to attract attention to a proclamation. They entertained guests at a banquet as minstrels. They became an alta band for the occasion.

The standard of shawm playing increased dramatically around 1350. One writer noted that what had recently seemed like good shawm playing no longer amounted to a hill of beans. Another complained, “In modern times the shawms and loud trumpets generally banish the sober fiddles from the feasts, and the young girls dance eagerly to the loud noise, like hinds shaking their buttocks womanishly and rudely.”

The slide trumpet became available probably sometime before the end of the century. It certainly existed early in the fifteenth century.

Records from St. Omer show that a watchman and minstrel named Jehan Poulain had been sent with the city’s archers and crossbowmen to serve in the Battle of Agincourt (1415). There, he lost possessions, including his trumpet. The city reimbursed him so he could buy two new trumpets, one for war and one for peace.

The trumpet for war would have been a straight brass tube, the same sort of instrument that would have also been used for watch duty and anything else that required signals. The trumpet for peace would have been a slide trumpet, and the slide trumpet was always a wind band instrument, played by a minstrel.

The earliest medieval alta bands

Alta bands, an innovation in 1310, become commonplace by the end of the century. Many Flemish cities required their town bands to perform watch duty into the fifteenth century. Records in the cities of Ghent, Mechelen, Leuven, Oudenaarde, Dordrecht, and Ieper show a change from “watchers” to “city pipers” around 1430. The change occurred around 1460 in Bruges, Aelst, and Dendermonde.

German cities and some Flemish cities, on the other hand, also hired watchmen as early as 1300 and provided them with signal trumpet. But when they established alta bands, they hired musicians as distinctly different ensembles from the watchmen.

Whether descended from night watchmen or not, medieval alta bands became a fixture in towns and courts all over Europe. Even long after they became separate institutions from watchmen, the bands often performed from towers, balconies, and other venues above street level.

Related posts

Medieval night watchmen and the modern wind band
A prehistory of the trombone

Sources

Edmund A. Bowles. “Tower musicians in the Middle Ages.” Brass Quarterly 5 (Spring 1962)
Stewart Carter. The trombone in the Renaissance (Pendragon, 2012)
David M. Guion. A history of the trombone (Scarecrow Press, 2010)
Keith Polk. German instrumental music of the late Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
_______. “Minstrels and music in the Low Countries.” Archives et bibliothéques de Belgique 46 (1994)