Medieval Musicians
(Viol & Tambor)
    135mm (5.25") high x 60mm (2.3") wide

After the curfew was sounded (from the French 'couvre feu' or 'cover the fire') the shutters and doors were fastened against the dangerous dark of the unlit streets and alleys. Through the night, watchmen were posted on church towers or posts around the city walls to spy for fire or mischief. In reassurance they would chime a bell upon the hour, 'Three o'clock and all's well.'

As the size of towns increased a human cry became inadequate and the sounding of a hunting horn became fashionable. As if to while away the lonely hours of the night the calls from these horns became more elaborated and characteristic fanfares evolved. Other instruments were, in time, added to form an ensemble - so a little chorus (known as 'The Waits') soon sounded over the sleeping town.

Being the most practiced musicians, the Waits often became engaged for terrestrial entertainments, and as the need for calls from the watchtower diminished the bands took to walking the streets at night, serenading likely windows in the hope of remuneration - 'money with menacing music.' The bands became louder, more raucous and more importuning and inevitably by-laws were passed banning their activities so the local burghers could sleep at peace at night in their beds.

Many of the instruments familiar to us today evolved from Middle Eastern originals - brought to Europe by returning Crusaders from the thirteenth century onward. The Viol developed from the Rebec, the Lute from the Oud, the Guitar from the Cittern, and so on. It is one of the pleasing by-products of those senseless campaigns of mass slaughter and suffering that Beethoven and Debussy should have had such a broad palate of Orchestral colour to draw upon in their compositions.

 

The figures shown on these plaques are taken from an illumination in a Book of Hours in the British Library from about 1350

 

 These castings are designed, sculpted and manufactured in England, using resin-bonded marble, bronze and Cotswold stone. Modern moulding techniques faithfully reproduce the intricate and painstaking work of the sculptor whilst giving the appearance of real carved stone or sculpted terracotta. The resin sculptures are weatherproof, the plaques having a hole drilled in the back for easy hanging