regal was derived from the rule (regula) or graduated scale of keys, and its use was to give the singers in religious processions the note or pitch. The only instrument of this kind known to exist in the United Kingdom is at Blair Atholl, and it bears the very late date of 1630. The Brussels regal* may be as modern. These are instances of how long a some-time admired musical instrument may remain in use after its first intention is forgotten. We attribute the adaptation of the narrow regal keyboard to what was still called the mono chord, but was now a complex of mono chords over one resonance board, to the latter half of the 14th century;it was accomplished by the'substitution of tangents fixed in the future ends of the balanced keys for the movable bridges of the mono chord or such stoppers as are shown in the Shrewsbury carving. Thus the monochordium or “ payre of monochordis ” became the clavichordium or “ payre of clavichord is ”-pair being applied, in the old sense of a “ pair of steps, ” to a series of degrees. This use of the word to imply gradation was common in England to all keyed instruments; thus we read, in the Tudor period and later, of a pair of regals, organs, or virginals. Ed van der Straeten2 reproduces a socalled clavichord of the 15f.l'l century from a MS. in the public library at Ghent. The treatise is anonymous, but other treatises in the same MS. bear dates 1503 and 1504. Van der Straeten is of opinion that the drawing may be assigned to the middle of the 15th century. The scribe calls the instrument a clavicimbalum, and this is undoubtedly correct; the 8 strings in the drawing are stretched from back to front over a long soundboard, the longest strings to the left; 8 keys, 4 long and 4 short with levers to which are attached the jacks, are seen in a horizontal line behind the keyboard, and behind them again are given the names of the notes a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. In the Weimar Wunderbuch is a pen-and-ink sketch of the “ clavicimb3.ll1lI1"3 placed upon a table, in which we recognize the familiar outline of the harpsichord, but on a smaller scale. The keyboard shows white and black notes-the latter short keys, one between each group of two white keys, precisely as in the instrument reproduced by Van der Straeten-but no mechanism is visible under the strings.
The earliest known record of the clavichord occurs in some rules of the minnesingers,4 dated 1404, preserved at Vienna. The mono chord is named with it, showing a differentiation of these instruments, and of them from the clavicymbalum, the keyed cymbal, cembalo (Italian), or psaltery. From this we learn that a keyboard had been thus early adapted to that favourite medieval stringed instrument, the “ cembalo ” of Boccaccio, the “ sautrie ” of Chaucer. There were two forms of the psaltery: (1) the trapeze, one of the oldest representations of which is to be found in Orcagna's famous Trionio della Morte in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and another by the same painter in the National Gallery, London; and (2) the contemporary “ testa di porco, ” the pig's head, which was of triangular shape as the name suggests. The trapeze psaltery was strung horizontally, the “ istromento di porco ” either horizontally or vertically the notes, as in the common dulcimer, being in groups of three or four unisons. In these differences of form and stringing we see the cause of the ultimate differentiation of the spinet and harpsichord. The compass of the psalteries was nearly that of Guido's scale; but according to Mersenne,5 the lowest interval was a fourth, G to C, which is worthy of notice as anticipating the later “ short measure ” 6 of the spinet and organ. The simplicity of the clavichord inclines us to place it, in order of time, before the clavicymbalum or clavicembalo; but we do not know how the sounds of the latter were at first excited. There is an indication as to its early form to be seen in the church of the Certosa near Pavia, which compares in probable date with 1
See Victor C Mahillon, Catalogue descriptif (1880), I. p. 320, No 454: regal with two bellows, end of XVI. C. Compass E to az. 2 La Alusique aux Pays Bas, i. 278
See Dr Alwin Schulz, op. cit., fig. 524.
V. 410 and 414. See Ambros, Geschichte der Musik (1892), 11. 226.
L'Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), livre III. p. 107. the Shrewsbury example. We quote the reference to it from Dr Ambros.1 He says a carving represents King David as holding an “ istromento di porco ” which has eight strings alld as many keys lying parallel to them; inside the body of the instrument, which is open at the side nearest the right hand of King David, he touches the keys with the right hand and damps the strings with the left. The attribution of archaism applies with equal force to this carving as to the Shrewsbury one, for when the monastery of Certosa near Pavia was built by Ambrogio Fossana in 1472, chromatic keyboards, which imply a considerable advance, were already in use. There is an authentic representation of a chromatic keyboard, painted not later than 1426, in the St Cecilia panel (now at Berlin) of the famous Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eycks. The instrument depicted is a positive FIG. 2.-Diatonic Clavichord Keyboard (Guido's Scale) from Virdung. Before 1511.
organ, and it is interesting to notice in this realistic painting that the keys are evidently boxwood, as in the Italian spinets of later date, and that the angel plays a common chord-A with the right hand, F and C with the left. But diatonic organs with eight steps or keys in the octave, which included the B Hat and the B natural, as in Guido's scale, were long preserved, for Praetorius speaks of them as still existing nearly two hundred years later. This diatonic keyboard, we learn from Sebastian Virdung (Musica getutscht und auszgezogen, Basel, 1 511), was the keyboard of the early clavichord. We reproduce his diagram as the only authority we have for the disposition of the one short key.
The extent of this scale is exactly Guido's. Virdung's diagram of the chromatic is the same as our own familiar keyboard, and comprises three octaves and a note, from F below the bass stave to G above the treble. But Virdung tells us that even then clavichords were made longer than four octaves by repetition of the same order of keys. The introduction of the chromatic order he attributes to the study of Boetius, and the consequent endeavour to restore the three musical genera of the Greeks-the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic. But the last-named had not been attained. Virdung gives woodcuts of the clavichordium, the virginal, the clavicymbalum and the clavicytherium. We reproduce three of them (figs. 3, 6 and 12), omitting the virginal
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FIG. 3.-Virdung's Clavichordium, 1511; reversed facsimile. as obviously incorrect. Writers on musical instruments have continually repeated these drawings withoutldiscerning that in the printing they are reversed, which puts the keyboards entirely wrong, and that in Luscinius's Latin translation of Virdung (M usurgia, sive praxis musicae, Strasburg, 1 5 36), which has been hitherto chiefly followed, two of the engravings, the clavicimbalum and the clavicytherium, are transposed, another cause of error. Martin Agricola (Musica instrumental is, Wittenberg, 1529) has copied Virdung's illustrations with some differences of perspective, and the addition, here and there, of errors of his own.
° A. J. Hipkins, History of Pianaforte (London, 1896), p. 51. 1 " Geschichte der Musik, ii. 544-555.
