Cheers. Just mucking around with formats and ideas more than anything else.
Strange timing, though. Since putting up that reply I've had a chat with a good friend of mine who has been doing military reenactment drumming for almost two decades. He assures me that what the command sprue depicts is in fact a field drum.
A tabor is a drum that is played one-handed, the other hand being left free to play a pipe or similar wind instrument, making the musician a "one-man band". A field drum, conversely, is a drum used for military and ceremonial purposes. It is all but identical to the tabor in constuction, but the head is tensioned rather tighter and it is played with two sticks.
We then got into a convoluted argument about when the earliest mention of the field drum is. It seems to come into existence at the end of the sixteenth century, a time of great transition in military styles across Europe.
Shakespeare, in the play Much Ado About Nothing, wrote "...I have known when there was no music for him but the drum and the fife; and now he had rather hear the tabor and the pipe..." (Act II, sc. 3). This work is generally agreed to have been written in 1598.
But the Empire models most closely depict Landsknecht from the first half of the 16th century, from a time when the field drum hadn't quite branched off from the tabor. The pictoral evidence also seems to support this (the mid-16th century image I included, for example, showed the military tabor).
But, conversely, there are references to "medieval" tabors that lacked counter hoops, the skins being tensioned directly by the ropes ... which is exactly what the command sprue drum depicts.
Though the medieval period is a bit elastic, it is considered to extend from the 5th century AD to the 15th century, with the High Middle Ages around 1050 AD to 1300 AD. This style of drum was a little out of date by the time the Landsknechts, who were noted for being "up to the minute" with fashion and technology, were blazing their trail across the pages of history.
Oh well, you live and learn.
Besides, this is fantasy, and we can mix and match if we want to. Field drums do seem more appropriate – rather more martial and far less festive.
All of this goes to reinforce PygmyHippo's point.
If you are going to publish factual information, make sure that you get it right, and put in references to the sources you are using so that other people can go and check them if they want to. Shame I didn't provide a few more in this latest diatribe.
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