Books › The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from …, 1864 › scan 49
Scan 49
The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from …, 1864
15 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1rank who boldly persevered, but personally remember no musical attempts, excepting some half-dozen flutes and flageolets, in a greater or less state of perfection; we confess to two joints of one of the former. We must not omit some notice of Hudibras's Crowdero, said to have been one Jackson, formerly a milliner, who lost a leg in the service of the Roundheads, and was obliged to get a precarious livelihood by fiddling from one tavern to another.
3"I'th' head of all this warlike rabble
4Crowdero march'd expert and able,
5A squeaking engine he applied
6Unto his neck on north-east side,
7His warped ear hung o'er the strings,
8Which was but souse to chitterlings:
9His grizly beard was long and thick,
10With which he strung his fiddle-stick;
11For he to horse-tail scorn'd to owe
12For what on his own chin did grow."
14After this digression on the application of the word crowd to the violin, we must return for a short space to the ancient crwth, which appears to have continued in use in Wales until a comparatively recent time. Daines Barrington, in 1770, says that the only person that could then play on it was John Morgan of Newburgh in Anglesey, then aged fifty-nine years; but Bingley, in his account of North Wales, says he heard an old bard play on the instrument at Carnarvon in 1801. We have given a figure of one from Mr. Barrington's account in the third volume of "Archæologia" (Fig. 7). It has six strings placed in a peculiar way, with a flat bridge, so that the bow must have struck several together, and prevented any extent of execution. The bridge is curious, as one leg goes through the sound-hole to the back of
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