Early Medieval Bone Pipes: Understanding the Sounds of These Instruments through Reconstruction

Abstract

Bone pipes are the most numerous instrument surviving from Early Medieval England. These instruments are usually classified as ‘flutes’ despite many of the examples missing the defining categorisations. Two examples from the archaeological record of early Medieval England will be used as case studies: one instrument from North-West Essex and the other from York. Through recreating these instruments as both reed pipes and flutes, it will be demonstrated how they could have been sounded by either mechanism. Additional experimentation will demonstrate an understanding of what type of sounding mechanisms were more likely and features of the bone pipes, such as holes for hanging the instruments from. These experiments will also show the distances over which the sound of the different mechanisms may have travelled and the way the features of the bone impacted on the results.

Keywords

• music and musical instruments
• (re)construction
• early middle ages
• united kingdom