A pipe out of place

part one

The Frestel

When David Munrow recorded Chanson à refrain (A prisai qu'en chantant plour) in 1976, slipping a panpipe into his pile of historically informed instruments, he engaged with a voice which had been conspicuously absent, and the early music revival had been doing a very good job of ignoring.

The panpipe appears in dozens of medieval artworks. It is, iconographically speaking, absolutely everywhere.

Shepherds play it. Anthropomorphic sheep try their luck. Even the occasional Cyclops deigns to lend it a philosophical wheeze. And yet, while the vielle, the psaltery, and the hurdy-gurdy basked in scholarly attention, the panpipe remained sidelined. An unsung hero of iconography waiting for the day some bold hand would blow upon it and set it loose upon the wind once more.

A Short Diversion

David Lasocki, in Researching the Recorder in the Middle Ages (2011), explains (allowing for a smidge of paraphrase) that frestel drifted in from Old French, slightly disoriented but in good spirits. English sources rendered it firstel; the Latins, never missing a chance for solemnity, upgraded it to fistellum; while Occitan settled comfortably on frestal.

We might also call it firlinfeu in Italy, and Frestèu in Provence.

It comprises of edge-blown aerophones arranged in a graduated series. The crucial distinction is medieval examples predominantly show a monoxyle construction. That is to say, pipes bored into a single block of wood, like a particularly musical Swiss cheese. This distinguishes them from the better known polycalame variants, wherein multiple pipes (Arundo donax) are bound together.

By the late fourteenth century, literary references to the fistula begin to appear, including a particularly intriguing one from 1398 in De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) by Bartholomaeus Anglicus:

Calamus hath that name of thys worde Calando, sowning; and is the generall name of pypes. A pype hyghte Fistula, for voyce comyth therof. For voyce hyghte Fes in Grewe, and send, Istola in Grewe. And soo the pype hyghte Fistula, as it were sendyng oute voyce other sowne. Hunters useth this instrument, for hartes louyth the noyse therof. But whyle the harte taketh hede and likynge in the pypynge of an hunter, another hunter whyche he hath no knowlege of, comyth and shoteth at the harte and sleeth hym. Pypyng begyleth byrdes and foules, therefore it is sayd "the pype syngeth swetely whyle the fowler begyleth the byrde." And shepe louyth pypynge, therfore shepeherdes usyth pipes whan they walk wyth theyr shepe. Therefore one whyche was callyd Pan was callyd God of hirdes, for he joyned dyverse redes, and arayed them to songe slyghly and craftely. Virgil spekyth therof, and sayth that Pan ordeyned fyrst to join [in one horne] Pan hath cure of shepe and of shepherdes. And the same instrument of pypes hyghte Pan donum, for Pan was fynder therof as Ysyder sayth. And wyth pipes watchynge men pleyseth suche men as restyth in beddes, and makyth theym slepe the sooner and more swetly by melodye of pypes.

Two points stand out here: First, the imagination of the age held fast to an ancient habit: the panflute belonged to the pastoral, to fields and flocks, to shepherds and shepherdesses tending their bleating charges. Philippe de Vitry, the fourteenth-century French composer, theorist, and poet, for instance, describes Pan and his reed pipe, the frestel de rosiaux.

The second point, stranger still, is the panpipe’s curious company. In the clamor of medieval ensembles, it stands not in the quiet corners of pastoral reverie, but among the loud ranks: minstrels, jongleurs, and even tower watchers (Lasocki, 2011, p.17).

Why Did it Disappear?

The frestel's disappearance from the annals of scholarly memory has a few causes. First, music iconography came sliding in up to the academic party late. The Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale wasn't established until 1971.

Next, the Cold War butted in. Aside from the usual apocalypse-lite global unpleasantness, it had the specific effect of isolating Eastern European panpipe traditions.

But the pièce de résistance: there are no surviving medieval frestels.

None.

Well... except for the fragmentary tenth-century Jórvík find, and a number of Roman relics. But the Jórvík thing is the only (partial) medieval one; leaving us with nothing but impressions in manuscripts and stone.

The Real Reason Nobody Was Rockin' With It

The frestel, as the eminent Jeremy Montagu noted in 2007, belongs to the 'old instrumentarium': those plucky survivors that were rattling about long before the Islamic world generously decided to share its musical technology with Europe.

As I already said, the systematic study of music iconography emerged comparatively late as a scholarly discipline; arriving at the academic feast roughly when everyone else had finished pudding. Prior to RIdIM in 1971 and the Research Center for Music Iconography in 1984.

Cultural factors prove equally vexing. The panpipe's thunderously strong association with Andean musical traditions creates anachronistic expectations, baby. The modern mind hears 'panpipe' and immediately pictures a chap in a poncho at Covent Garden performing 'El Condor Pasa' for bemused tourists; which is antithetical to medieval vibes.

The frestel's obscurity mirrors that of other instruments within the old instrumentarium. Meanwhile, the hornpipe and the bowed lyre have been given their fifteen minutes of fame, largely thanks to those zealous Norse revivalists.

Archaeological Evidence

Roman panpipes were crafted with remarkable consistency.

Take the Uitgeest-Dorregeest specimen from the Netherlands (second half of the second, or first half of the third, century AD); which boasts eight boxwood pipes, each sporting convex proximal ends. France’s Alise-Sainte-Reine contraption (late second/third century AD) echoes this design; adorned with sort of semi-circles and horizontal lines. Meanwhile, the Eschenz find in Switzerland (50–60 AD) offers seven convex pipes.

The Coppergate excavations (1976–1981), masterminded by the indefatigable Richard Hall for the York Archaeological Trust, produced a panpipe that seems to have wandered straight out of the Dark Ages and into the archaeologist's bucket.

Dating to somewhere between 866 and 1066 CE, this waterlogged boxwood relic survives with four complete pipes and one fragment; enough to render a scale roughly A–B–C–D–E, if one is feeling generous. Most divertingly, a conspicuous hole pierces the instrument's body, presumably for suspension from a belt (Viking-era fashion was evidently less accommodating than one might hope). One imagines a dour Norse musician strapping this thing to his tunic, trudging through mud and drizzle, all while carefully avoiding any pockets that could have come in handy.

Price (2020), the diligent observer of Viking domesticity, situates musical instruments within the humble rhythms of hearth and home: 'The hearth was also the arena of stories… Musical instruments have been occasionally found, including the simplest wooden whistles and pan pipes, sometimes the bridge of a stringed lyre.' In other words, Vikings did more than just pillage... they also apparently enjoyed a spot of light entertainment between raids.

This rather charmingly quotidian context suggests these instruments were as much about passing the time as performing ritual.

Now, the Jórvík instrument refuses to be pigeonholed into neat Roman or later medieval categories. Chronologically, it manages to predate the flourishing of frestel iconography. Culturally and geographically, it hails from Norse rather than Romance realms, thereby undermining any assumptions about tidy pan-European instrumental traditions.

And as for continuity versus revival? Well, the debate rages on. Did medieval makers inherit Roman craftsmanship via some unbroken chain of oral tradition, or did they stumble upon these design principles entirely by accident?

Iconographic Evidence

What was the Romanesque?

Between 375 and 568, Western Europe got thoroughly trounced by waves of nomadic invasions, and the Roman Empire went spectacularly belly-up. Political, cultural, and religious certainties evaporated faster than mead at a Viking feast. The Huns and Germanic tribes swept through, leaving Roman art in ruins and creating a curious vacuum where Christian and pagan cultures collided. Out of the chaos, a jumble of styles emerged. Roman, Germanic, Merovingian, Celtic, Viking, and Byzantine were all wrestling for attention, particularly in what we now call France.

When Charlemagne swaggered onto the scene around the year 800, he decided it was high time to dust off the Roman Empire and give it a polite shove back into relevance. That’s also when the earliest hints of Romanesque architecture started poking their arches out.

Now, before anyone gets too excited, let’s be clear: nobody at the time called it Romanesque. The term, which means 'Roman-like'and was coined in the nineteenth century due to the round arches of the romanesque resembling those of the Romans; indeed in early Christianity the architecture made a point of not emulating the Roman temple style. 

The style was the first since antiquity to wander across Europe, spreading as political and social stability decided to make a cameo appearance. For our purposes, let's pin it down: it popped up in the latter part of the tenth century and hung around, doing its thing, until Gothic architecture careened onto the scene around 1150 and stole the show.

In the Romanesque, visual iconography went full-on didactic, practically waving signs that said, 'Look here, learn this!' At the same time, animal style started popping up in art, probably thanks to Viking or Celtic influence. The idea of stuffing animals into Christian imagery wasn’t something the Graeco-Romans ever got excited about. With this animal style came symmetry, and human-like animals

(see A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting).

Pilgrims and the cult of saints were big business, with relics acting as the period’s version of neon billboards. Romanesque sculpture and architecture existed to deliver messages straight to these wandering visitors. Unsurprisingly, most frestel icons turn up along the pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela.

In the Romanesque, influences collided: Classical humanism and European architecture, while Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and mosaics looked on approvingly from the corners. Out of the chaos, the Romanesque built the foundations (quite literally) of Western Christian architecture.

Before the Romanesque period, references to the frestel are few and far between. One example appears in the twelfth century at Barfreston Church in Kent, where a grotesque on the south portal plays a panpipe, alongside a stone-carved man fiddling and a bear blowing a pipe (Galpin 1910/1978: 103, pl. 15). Another pre-Romanesque depiction shows up in De Universo by Rabanus Maurus (like, 780–856), one of the rare medieval occasions where Pan gets his hands on the instrument.

De Universo

Prior to the appearance of the instrument in stone carvings (a feature associated with the Romanesque) we find few depictions of the panpipes, and it is always in miniatures.

King David from 842-850, now found in Angers, France, is one such example.

The Romanesque Proliferation (eleventh-twelfth Centuries)

The eleventh century witnessed an explosion of frestel appearances, most conspicuously in French Romanesque sculpture. Key specimens of this pictorial proliferation include: 

The Psalter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where a square (or perhaps rectangular, one cannot be too pedantic) instrument is handled beside King David, joining his ensemble of harp, rebec (apparently played pizzicato although the player holds a bow), and horn.

Latin 11550 Psalter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The frestel here is decorated on the front, and has seven pipes. The instrument is played one-handed. There is a certain resemblance here to the 842-850 depiction: the design of King David’s lyre, and that the frestel player stands to Kind David’s left, looking at him. Both depictions show the frestel player holding the instrument with the right hand, while the left arm and hand is covered with a cloth.

Dating from the last third of the eleventh century, the frontal face of the capital in the southern porch of Jaca Cathedral, we see musicians playing lira, organ, horn and frestel. In this case the frestel is a square shape, and appears to be played by one hand in part of a consort.

Anzy-le-Duc, where the narrative takes a turn for the whimsical: a damaged square instrument, played double-handed by a sheep, inaugurates the anthropomorphic tradition and leaves one to wonder whether the medieval sculptor had recently enjoyed one too many ales.

Codex Taphou 14 presents a large, possibly monoxyle instrument, double-handed and expertly wielded by a shepherd, who is conveniently accompanied by a transverse flute.

Multiple twelfth-century sources demonstrate both continuity and innovation.

The Battistero di Parma (Benedetto Antelami) depicts a single-handed frestel in pastoral context with a shepherd.

MS B.18 f.1r Psalterium Triplex shows a square, single-handed instrument with seven visible pipes.

MS B.18 f.1r

Once again, we encounter King David, presiding over the scene, flanked by bells, organ, horn, singer… and, of course, frestel. Curiously, with the exception of the bells, they are all wind instruments. Clearly symbolic, and the lower panel provides a striking contrast:

The frescoes of Notre Dame du Vieux Pouzauges were discovered in 1948, and date from the late twelfth/thirteenth century.

The frestel depicted here is unplayed, yet the musician’s grip suggests the low notes would have been on the player’s left.

The instrument has five pipes and is somewhat similar in design to the frestel seen in Chartres. Its placement alongside a chalumeaux is a touch unusual.  It is possible this fresco tells the story of the angel visiting Joachim, who is standing beside the chalumeaux player.

And the Bergers sonnant du cor et jouant du frestel found on the Annonce aux bergers, on the North wall of Eglise Saint-Aignan de Brinay. The church dates from the eleventh century, the paintings date from the 1100-1200, based on style, and were rediscovered from 1911 by the painter André Humbert.

The Chartres Cathedral sculpture shows a single-handed instrument with four pipes in pastoral context.

Meanwhile, Hildegard von Bingen’s Liber Divinorum Operum (1163–1173) demonstrates not all instruments need actually be played; her single-handed, six-pipe frestel exists purely in theological-cosmological contemplation.

Battistero di Parma

And then, at Iguerande Church, a concave seven-pipe polycalame is performed by none other than a Cyclops; a uniquely medieval curiosity demanding serious analytical attention. Is this a survival of classical tradition? A deliberate archaism? Or simply the product of a medieval artist’s mischievous imagination? 

Altercacio inter filomenam et bubonem attributed to Nicholas de Guildford (Glasgow university), late twelfth century: 

Bet þuȝte þe dreim þat he wereOf harpe and pipe þan he nere,Bet þuȝte þat he were ishote
Of harpe and pipe þan of þrote.

Gothic Transition
(thirteenth century)

By the thirteenth century, the frestel was limping toward its eventual vanishing act, though not without leaving a few lingering traces for the patient scholar.

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Laon preserves a single-handed instrument in a pastoral tableau, quietly hinting at the instrument's once-cherished bucolic associations.

Around 1290, the David en andere muzikanten (fol. 2r) depicts a single-handed frestel in the left hand, a bell in the right, six dutiful pipes, and the treble neatly positioned to the left.

Yet by the close of the century, the frestel effectively disappears from iconography, making way for the pipe-and-tabor combination and the broader, inexorable transformations of instrumental practice.

Theme and Variations

Despite regional and temporal quirks, iconographic sources do, astonishingly, reveal a few stubbornly consistent features. Seven or eight pipes predominate, with the occasional five-pipe rebel appearing just often enough to keep us on our toes, rather neatly echoing Roman archaeological evidence.

Monoxyle construction dominates so thoroughly it becomes the defining hallmark of medieval frestel practice. And those convex proximal ends, cropping up again and again across disparate sources? Clearly, they were not mere decorative whimsy; one suspects they had actual functional purpose.

Playing technique demonstrates evolution: double-handed playing appears frequently in earlier Romanesque examples, whilst single-handed playing dominates later sources. Treble pipes, when visible at all, flit about haphazardly: sometimes left, sometimes right. Perhaps reflecting regional quirks, or individual whims.

Nevertheless, consistent features across geographically and temporally dispersed sources suggest underlying accuracy in essential characteristics. The challenge lies in distinguishing between accurate organological depiction and artistic convention, with cross-source consistency providing one criterion for reliability.

Montagu (2019), ever the voice of caution amid this chaotic visual record, reminds us medieval iconographers were not particularly troubled by organological accuracy. And yet, consistent features emerge across geographically and temporally dispersed sources, hinting that medieval artists occasionally did know what they were doing.

Symbolic Significance

Frestel performers, it seems, fall neatly into distinct categories, each apparently imbued with symbolic significance. 

Biblical and Sacred Figures

King David dominates the frestel stage, thereby conferring divine sanction and ensuring that no self-respecting medieval musician (or sculptor) could ignore the instrument’s sacred cachet.

The Psalter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Jaca Cathedral, MS B.18 f.1r, and the c. 1290 David en andere muzikanten all dutifully place the frestel beside David.

Other biblical luminaries, such as Joachim at Notre-Dame du Vieux Pouzauges, further reinforce this sanctified connection. With David as its patron, the frestel achieves unimpeachable sacred legitimacy: here is an instrument at once ceremonial, aspirational, and profoundly moral. The musician-king epitomises the ideal harmony between temporal authority and spiritual insight, warrior prowess and artistic sensitivity.

Shepherds and the Pastoral

Pastoral contexts abound, naturally, from the Battistero di Parma to Codex Taphou 14, San Isidoro León, Chartres Cathedral, and the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Laon, elegantly linking the frestel to bucolic tradition, and perhaps, if one is feeling quaintly literal, to actual shepherding practices. The shepherd-musician occupies that most charmingly ambiguous liminal space: halfway between wilderness and civilisation, solitude and community, woolly flocks and ecclesiastical architecture. 

Animals

One mustn’t overlook the delightful tradition of animal musicians: sheep at Anzy-le-Duc, equine or asinine performers at Beaune Basilica, Marnay, and yet another Anzy-le-Duc example, and assorted other creatures taking up the frestel with commendable, if unlikely, dexterity. While undeniably amusing, this tradition may well encode subtler meditations on the human-animal interface: reason versus instinct, civilisation versus nature, woolly versus not-so-woolly. As Mâle (1913) wisely observes, medieval iconography was not chaos incarnate; imagery adhered to common rules of position, grouping, symmetry, and number, ensuring even a donkey’s musical exploits could be interpreted within the familiar and comprehensible schemata of the time.

Liminal Figures

The Cyclops at Iguerande represents classical mythology in full, flouting neat medieval categorisation by being neither fully human nor fully animal, but instead luxuriating in the delightful interstitial spaces of medieval ontology. As a panpipe-player, this one-eyed colossus may well be tipping its hat to Pan himself, invoking a faint but unmistakable echo of pre-Christian traditions.

This exuberant diversity underscores the frestel’s thoroughly multivalent significance. The instrument moves effortlessly across sacred; pastoral; and transgressive registers, refusing to be pinned down by any single interpretative framework. A model of medieval nonconformity. Its appearance ranges from cathedral portals to marginal grotesques, from misericords secreted beneath choir seats to corbels supporting holy architecture, to manuscript margins cheekily interrupting sacred text. In short, the frestel functions as a kind of boundary marker, a musical fence-post straddling the sacred and the profane, simultaneously venerable, pastoral, comic, and a touch anarchic.

By the later Middle Ages, the frestel’s single-handed technique had become all the rage, neatly situating it within a broader class of instruments designed so one ambitious musician could deliver melody and percussive accompaniment simultaneously. Ideal for itinerant performers, festival musicians, or anyone whose ensemble ambitions were thwarted by geography, finances, or simple human laziness.

Unsurprisingly, the pipe-and-tabor swaggered onto the scene in the thirteenth century, achieving widespread adoption precisely as the frestel gracefully faded from fashion. Illuminations and carvings attest to this shift:

The Maciejowski Bible (MS. M.638, fol. 13v) shows Samuel and Jesse cheerfully juggling pipes and bells; the Hunterian Psalter (12th century, fol. 21v) presents an unusual triple pipe accompanying King David’s harp-tuning; and two near-identical carvings at Beverley Minster depict single-handed pipes with drum accompaniment, confirming that combining melody and percussion was clearly the medieval equivalent of a one-person band.

Thus, the frestel, elegant but increasingly impractical, cedes the stage to the more versatile, less aristocratically fussy pipe-and-tabor.

The Brinay fresco depicts a frestel in duet with a chalumeau, providing the rarest of glimpses into early ensemble practice. One may infer, with cautious delight, the frestel was not merely a soloist for pious kings or pastoral shepherds, but could participate in polyphonic or heterophonic textures. The functional complementarity is evident: the frestel, with its fixed pitches, presumably providing reliable harmonic scaffolding, while the more melodically flexible chalumeau dallied around it with jaunty independence. Naturally, this tantalising snippet falls far short of allowing a detailed reconstruction of performance practice.

Alas, no musical notation explicitly identifies the frestel, leaving modern scholars to gnash teeth and bemoan the insurmountable obstacle of reconstructing specific repertoire. This lacuna, naturally, is part of a broader medieval pattern: instruments were entirely reliant upon oral tradition, leaving only visual hints while the actual music evaporated into history. The panpipe, with its rigid limitation of one pitch per pipe, was perfectly suited to hocket performance, where melodic lines are cheerfully fragmented between multiple performers or instruments, such as is found with several panflute traditions, like the skudučiai of Lithuania.

Decline and Disappearance

Iconographic evidence makes the situation abundantly clear: after the mid-thirteenth century, the frestel goes into a dramatic decline, fading into near invisibility by the year 1300.

Naturally, the culprits for its demise are easy to identify. The pipe-and-tabor sashayed onto the scene with superior versatility. Meanwhile, the expanding recorder family provided alternative flute timbres. The shawm, arriving from the Islamic world, brought outdoor sonorities powerful enough to make any panpipe sound faint. And then there is the unrelenting march of polyphony: increasingly complex musical textures rendered the frestel’s pitch palette inadequate. Its usefulness in hocket performance could not compensate for these melodic limitations, and so the frestel, elegant but increasingly impractical, gracefully ceded the stage to its successors.

Indeed, the frestel’s misfortune was far from unique. The bowed lyre, hornpipe, and various other instruments suffered a similar fate, declining or transforming under comparable pressures. One is forced to conclude that this was a systematic reorganisation of European musical culture, intimately bound up with the social, economic, and cultural transformations of the High to Late Middle Ages.

Reflections and Reconstructions

Contemporary frestel reconstructions, naturally, have adopted a variety of approaches, each with its own mixture of rigour and imaginative flair. One school champions archaeological primacy, slavishly privileging actual finds such as the Jórvík specimen or Roman panpipes. Another pursues iconographic fidelity, striving to recreate instruments with painstaking accuracy according to visual depictions, thereby delighting medieval art historians and frustrating practical musicians in equal measure. And then there is the hybrid synthesis, combining archaeological, iconographic, and comparative ethnographic evidence, a sort of academic all-you-can-eat buffet of data, which produces instruments that are at once plausible, experimental, and confusing.

Denis Le Vraux’s reconstruction, inspired by the Vieux-Pouzauges frescoes, exemplifies the iconographic school, recreating frestels as medieval eyes might have envisioned them. Meanwhile, Raúl Lacilla and Gonzalo Pieters have contributed prodigiously through systematic comparison of iconographic sources, tirelessly mapping visual tropes onto playable instruments.

The medieval panpipe has found its strongest footing today in France: French makers and players have promoted the instrument more than anywhere else and a number of French luthiers have contributed immensely to the preservation of the instrument: Jeff Barbe, Jean-Daniel Talma, Benjamin Simao and Antoine Malot have been among leading makers of medieval style instruments in France in recent years. I would also mention Migelito, in the mountains of Provence making the frestèu (Provençal panpipe) which is enclosed in goat skin. In the US, Canada, the UK and Central/Eastern Europe, makers have seized upon the Jórvík specimen as their beacon attempting to breathe life into the fragments of a Viking-age instrument