Welsh Journals

The Fiddler in Eighteenth-Century Wales CASS MEURIG 1 To set the scene The eighteenth century was the heyday of the violin in Wales. Bowed instruments had long been popular in Welsh society; during the Middle Ages the six-stringed crwth was an instrument of status whose best exponents were able to earn a secure income from influential patrons. Various other bowed instruments, including the medieval fiddle, rebec, and three-stringed crwth, were also played by the common minstrels. By the seventeenth century the Welsh upper classes were more interested in following English fashions than in patronizing native instruments and archaic music, and the old instru- ments fell out of favour. Instead, instruments with greater range and flexibility, such as the viol and later the violin, became fashionable; a number of contemporary poems written in the latter half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century ask patrons to provide a feiol or ffidil for a particular musician. It is often unclear as to which instrument precisely such poems refer, since in Welsh the terms crwth, ffidil (fiddle, violin) and feiol (viol), could all be used interchangeably, just as 'fidler' could mean a player of any bowed instrument. This makes it difficult to determine the exact date at which the violin in its Italianate form came to Wales; it is impossible to know, for example, what instruments were played by some 'fidlers' to whom the diarist Robert Bulkeley (1597-1652) of Dronwy, Anglesey, paid two pence in 1634.2 The likelihood is that having progressed as far as England by the mid sixteenth century, the violin reached Wales sometime during the first half of the seven- teenth century, where it co-existed for a time with the older types of fiddle, the crwth and the viol. But by the mid eighteenth century, references to the viol cease and the crwth was treated as a 'relic' by antiquaries such as the harpist Edward Jones. The violin had won the