One thing you’d hear a lot of would be an instrument called a hurdy-gurdy, or vielle a roue (“wheel-fiddle”) or bauernleier (“farmer’s lyre”) or zanfoña.

Chaucer (probably) referred to it as a “rote”:

Men should give silver to poor friars all bare.

His tippet was stuck always full of knives

And pins, to give to young and pleasing wives.

And certainly he kept a merry note:

Well could he sing and play upon the rote.

It’s a kind of fiddle played with a wheel-shaped bow turned with a crank, and with keys that press down on the some of the strings to change notes, while the remaining strings function as drones or accents.

You can see what one looks like in the right panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - it’s that beige thing with the wooden keys that the harp is casting a shadow onto.

What does it sound like? It sounds surprisingly contemporary. The droning strings make a kind of trancey/shoegazery wall of sound, with the fingered notes coming through almost like a reed instrument or bagpipe. The name seems to have come from a 15th-century expression for a big noise: “uproar, confusion” is how the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it.

Here - this is Caroline Phillips talking about the instrument and playing an old Basque tune, and here’s the Clemencic Consort’s Eberhard Kummer playing “Alterslied,” and “In dem walde sueze doene” (In the woods, sweet sounds). That’s music around 900 years old, give or take.

If you’re a fan of Black Sails, you’ve heard a newer song played on a hurdy gurdy: soundtrack composer Bear McCreary’s a big fan of the instrument.

There’s a bit more about pre-1500s popular music beyond hurdy gurdies in this discussion.