The earliest representation of the crwth yet discovered dates from the
Carolingian period. In the miniatures of the Bible of Charles the
Bald,[10] in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, one of the musicians
of King David is seen stopping strings on the finger-board with his
left hand and plucking them with the right (fig. 2); this crwth has
only three strings, and may be the crwth _trithant_ of Wales. A second
example occurs in the Bible of St Paul,[11] another of the magnificent
MSS. prepared for Charles the Bald, and preserved during the middle
ages in the monastery of St Paul _extra muros_ in Rome (now deposited
in that of St Calixtus in Rome). Other representations are in the
miniatures of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. To Edward Heron-Allen
(_De fidiculis opuscula_, viii., 1895) is due the discovery of a
representation of the Welsh crwth, showing the form still retained in
the 18th cent. On the seal of Roger Wade (1316) is a crwth differing
but little from the specimen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The
14th-century instrument had four strings instead of six, and the foot
of the bridge does not appear to pass through the sound-hole--a detail
which may have escaped the notice of the artist who cut the seal. The
original seal lies in the muniment room at Berkeley Castle in
Gloucestershire attached to a defeasance of a bond between the
_crowder_ and his debtor Warren de l'Isle, and a cast (see fig. 3) is
preserved at the British Museum. The British Museum also possesses two
interesting MSS. which concern the crwth: one of these (Add. MS. 14939
ff. 4 and 27) contains an extract made by Lewis Morris in 1742 from an
ancient Welsh MS. of "Instructions supposed to be wrote for the
Crowd"; the other (Add. MS. 15036 ff. 65b and 66) consists of tracings
from a 16th-century Welsh MS. copied in 1610 of a bagpipe, a harp and
a _krythe_, together with the names of those who played the last at
the Eisteddfod. The drawing is crude, and shows an instrument similar
to Roger Wade's crowd, but having three strings instead of four.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Crowd on a 14th-century Seal.]
The genealogical tree of the violin given below shows the relative
positions of both kinds of rotta and chrotta.
Egyptian lyre-kissar Assyrian ketharah
| |
| +----------+---------+
Greek lyre or chelys | |
| Greek cithara Persian cithara
Roman testudo | |
| Roman fidicula Arab cuitra, guitra
+-------------+-------------+--------+ | or cuitara
| | | | | |
Latin Old High Germ. Anglo-Saxon Welsh Cithara in |
chrotta, Chrota or crowd crwth transition, Moorish guitarra
rotta, rote Chreta or rotta
|
+-------------------------------------+----------------+
| | |
Spanish viguela or Guitarra Latina Fidel, fidula,
vihuela de arco or vihuela de mano fyella, fythele,
| | &c.
| | |
| Spanish guitar |
+-------+---------+---------------+ |
| | | |
Italian viola French vielle Guitar-fiddle Fiddle
| or viole
Violin
The Welsh crwth was therefore obviously not an exclusively Welsh
instrument, but only a late 18th-century survival in Wales of an
archaic instrument once generally popular in Europe but long obsolete.
An interesting article on the subject in German by J. F. W. Wewertem
will be found in _Monatshefte fur Musik_ (Berlin, 1881), Nos. 7-12, p.
151, &c. (K. S.)