The Hundred Pipers

"The Hundred Pipers" is a Scottish song and jig attributed to Carolina Nairne, Lady Nairne and popularised from 1852 onwards. It takes as themes events during and after the Jacobite Rising of 1745.

The song commemorates the surrender of the town of Carlisle to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, on November 18, 1745, when he invaded England, at the head of a mixed army of Highlanders and Lowlanders, after his victory at Prestonpans. He "entered Carlisle on a white horse, with a hundred pipers playing before him, whose shrill music was not calculated to inspire the citizens with confidence in their grotesque conquerors", according to Burtons History of Scotland.

The episode, recorded in the fourth stanza, of two thousand Highlanders swimming the River Esk, when in flood, on the occasion of the capture of Carlise, is not quite correct. It refers to a later period, when Prince Charles made his disastrous retreat from Derby, and Carlisle had been retaken. It was Scots, and not "fell English ground" which they reached on that occasion. But Lady Nairne, by combining the two events, produced a very spirited and successful ballad, which takes a high place among later Jacobite songs.

"The Hundred Pipers" is attributed to Carolina Nairne, Lady Nairne, a prolific songwriter of the period descending from a Jacobite family. The verses appears in the second edition of her Lays from Strathern (1846).

"The Hundred Pipers" does not seem to have been printed as a song until about 1852, when it was issued at Edinburgh in sheet form, with the music arranged by Elizabeth Rainforth. Rainforth, a soprano singer, appears to have been responsible for introducing it to the public, some five or more years after Nairne's death. Rainforth lived in Edinburgh from 1851 or 1852 to 1856, and contemporary publications post reviews of her performance of the song in the capital; and she published the song with her own (and the now standard) musical arrangement in 1852.

The song does not date from the Jacobite period, as is the case with many others now considered in the "classic canon of Jacobite songs", most of which were songs "composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were passed off as contemporary products of the Jacobite risings."

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Wikipedia