Frilled Canaries
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There’s very little surviving published information on Frilled Canary origins.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/donald.canaris/
origins.htm

The origins and development of the earliest Canary breeds are, for the most part, scarce,often obscure, and usually not very helpful. What little there may be is generaIly unclear, uncertain or even wildly contradictory between the few sources, especially for the very oldest of the Canary’s developing forms.

Moreover, a good deal of what can be found was written at least a century or two after the period in question (late 1600s to mid 1700s), primarily relying on hearsay -or, like Hervieux, expounds on color variations alone as if they were breeds.

Since little or no solid documentation exists, and since even the experts haven’t reached any consensus on the overall picture, let alone on it’s details, it’s necessary to resort to some suppositions to bridge the gaps.

To this end some sources for verification have come from biographical encyclopedias and history books. Actually, the Duchesse de Berry didn’t introduce the Frills to France. The French Revolution did. The most distinctive and identifible of the “Old Dutch Frills” was on the scene by about 1785.

It was a variable form that became known as the Trombettierre de RÈ (the King’s Buglar) or the Trompeter, so named because its frilled plumage bore a fancied similarity to the decorative braiding and epulates on the uniforms of the king of Holland’s ceremonial ar my buglars.

The larger and more heavily frilled of these birds which had developed the then recently evolved mantle frilling were christened the “Lord Mayor.”

During the French Revolution (1789-1799), especially during the chaos of the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), some of the French nobility, along with their entourages of servants, staff and birdkeepers, fled the ill-fated Paris court of Louis XVI and took refuge for a few years in the relative peace and safety of northern France, French Flanders and the European Low Countries.

There they were introduced to the various Belgian Gantese- types and the Dutch FriIls, becoming very taken with the grace and oddities of the various forms and postures. Most of all, they became enamored by the utter uniqueness of the frilled feathering of the Trompeters. They made it a point of acquiring as many of the finest examples of these Frilled and Posture Canaries as they could locate and, when the danger had passed, they returned to their homeland with them.
cont
This wholesale acquiring by the French probably saved most of the frilled and postured forms from extinction for the shockwaves of the French Revolution soon engulfed this region. The rapid-fire social and political upheavals during the forming of the Batavian Republic (1795-1806), the declaration of kingdom under French rule (1806- 1810), and then incorporation into the French First Empire (1810-1813) under Napoleon, followed by the swift reunification of HoIland and Belgium in 1815 and then their convulsive split only fifteen years later, all served to nearly obliterate the breeding of all cage and aviary birds throughout the area.

It was these Trompeters which formed the foundation stock for the Northern FriIl and the Dutch-Parisians, and then the *Parisian FriIls* and all of their modern derivatives (Giant Italian Frill, Milano, Padovan), including numerous extinct forms (Roubaix Frill, Brabacon Frill, Munich Frill, Picardy Frill, Lille Frill). The Trompeter Frills later captured the interest of a number of Belgian fanciers. They bred them with their Bossu and, with a careful selection, by about 1850 had created still another important variety of Canary that has gone by such names as the Dutch-Belgian Frill (Belgian Hollandais) and the Humpback Frill (FrisÈ Bossu).

This bird was the primary ancestor of all today’s Postured Frills like the Southem Frill, the Swiss Frill, the Fino Sevillano, the numerous Italian Humpback Frills, the Gibber.