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Scan 198
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 184. See the scan on archive.org.
1Society. This crouth had four strings for the bow, and two for a sort of pizzicato accompaniment. These appear to be the only bowed and bridged instruments known in this country until the old English viol—which was probably a development of the crouth—came to the front.
3That the crwth of the early times was played with a bow is, I think, extremely likely. It certainly was so played in the eleventh century, as is evidenced by a design of this instrument in a manuscript of that date, from the religious establishment of St. Martial in Limoges, and which is cited by MM. Fetis and Vidal. That it was also so played in the time of Howell Dda, and towards the end of the ninth century, does not appear to me very problematical, for, although we have no illustrations of the instruments presented by that monarch as a reward of merit to the musicians of his court, it does not require a great stretch of imagination to recognise in them, as prizes, convenient representatives of the three known methods of procuring musical sounds from instruments other than the human voice, viz., the harp for percussive or pizzicato sounds, the crwth for continuous frictional sounds, and the bagpipe for those produced by wind. The art of creating musical sounds by the aid of continuous friction was not unknown in Europe even as early as the ninth century, for in a manuscript of that date in the Imperial Library in Vienna there is a design of an instrument called the Organistrum, the sounds of which are so produced by the rotation of a handle. In the by-paths as well as the main roads of human invention the tendency has always been to substitute
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