88 | The British Museum Citole Chapter 10 Cytolle , guiterne , morache A Revision of Terminology Crawford Young If organologists have Canon Francis W. Galpin to thank for applying the name ‘gittern’ to the world’s only surviving specimen of a Gothic citole (and thus inadvertently creating the title for the British Museum’s ‘Warwick Castle Gittern’ that was used for much of the 20th century), they must also concede that he was the frst commentator in English to have noticed that there were diferent kinds of ‘gitterns’ to be found in medieval iconography. 1 As seen in Plate 1, some depictions had what Galpin called ‘an oval-shaped hole pierced in it just behind the fngerboard, through which the player’s thumb passed and stopped, when necessary, the fourth string.... we are not left in any doubt as to this peculiarity, for there is still an English Gittern of the early 14th century in existence’. 2 Other depictions, he noted, had a neck ‘free from the body at the back’ and which he called ‘free neck gitterns’, giving the instrument illustrated in Plate 2 as an example. 3 The structural similarity between such ‘free-neck gitterns’ and vielles had already caught the eye of Kathleen Schlesinger by 1910, who duly introduced the term ‘guitar-fddle’. 4 Both instrument types, the free- neck and thumbhole, are seen in Plate 3, hanging respectively on the wall to the left of the vielle player, in this Parisian miniature from c. 1250. 5 Were these ‘free-neck gitterns’ or ‘guitar-fddles’ considered to be citoles in their day and referred to as such? Does the lack of a thumbhole change the citole’s identity? 6 Did a citole player typically play both types of instrument? The purpose of this chapter is to take steps towards answering these questions. The proposed answers necessarily involve a discussion of the gittern, here defned as ‘a member of the lute family, smaller than the lute, with a rounded back, one-piece carved construction, gradual neck joint and sickle-shape pegbox, often depicted with frets, used throughout Europe roughly during the period 1200–1500, that modern organologists and performers have referred to by this term since Laurence Wright’s impressive research published in 1977’. Alice Margerum has cogently summarized the path of research concerning these medieval instrument types from 1776 up to 2010 – frst the citole, but by association, also the gittern – that will be standard reading for any student of the subject. 7 For the purpose of this discussion I will give a condensed version of the same research history. Returning to Galpin, to confuse the names ‘gittern’ and ‘citole’ was, in a way, quite understandable. First, there are instruments in medieval art which, to the eyes of a 20th- century observer, look like small guitars, and the term ‘gittern’ sounds closer to ‘guitar’ than ‘citole’ does. Second, the term gittern (English) and guiterne (French) were, in fact, used from c. 1550 to mean a small Renaissance guitar of four courses, so there would be a certain logic in applying the name to a similar looking instrument from 200 years earlier. 8 The name ‘citole’ might have been understood sooner in modern research had there been only one ‘gittern’ term to explain. 9 The fact that a handful of 14th-century literary sources (see below) mention two similar name forms, guiterne latine and guiterne moresche, (or in Spanish, guitarra latina and guitarra morisca) drew attention as it were away from the term ‘citole’, and Galpin and Schlesinger suggested that guitarra latina was the earliest medieval name for the guitar or