In 1839 Francis Douce did much research and wrote 'Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners with Dissertations On the Clown and Fools of Shakespeare; On the Collections of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and On the English Morris Dance' ( London, 1839)

Dictionaries of all sorts were compiled before the old phrases and words were completely lost:

1854

"WAITS. The Corporation of Northampton, within the remembrance of my informant, had a band of musicians called the corporation
waits, who used to meet the judges at the entrance into the town at the time of the assizes. They were four in number, attired in long
black gowns, two playing on violins, one on the hautboy, and the other on a whip and dub, or tabor and pipe."

"Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases" by Anne Elizabeth Baker (1854), vol II page 388

Also see 'terminology' for other dictionaries.

In 1885, 'Cries of London, A History', the following is reported:

 "Holloway cheese-cakes" was once one of the London cries; they were sold by a man on horseback; and in
"A Drum's Entertainment," a Comedy, I600, in a random song, the festive character of this district is denoted:

"Skip it and trip it nimbly, nimbly,
Tickle it, tickle it, lustily,
Strike up the tabor for the wenches favour,
Tickle it, tickle it, lustily.
Let us be seene on Hygate-Greene,
To dance for the honour of Holloway.
Since we are come hither, let's spare for no leather,
To dance for the honour of Holloway."

The pipe and tabor accompanied many leisure-time activities:

1835 'Grand Excursion of the City Committee for General Purposes'
The boat travelled down the River Thames, London, to the sound of the pipe and tabor.

Morning Advertiser - Monday 03 August 1835

The pipe and tabor were occasionally to be heard in the concert-hall:

Morning Advertiser - Wednesday 14 February 1866 reviewed a concert given in aid of the University College Hospital,
Gower Street, London. ‘The programme was remarkable for its novelty...’  It included the use of the pipe and tabor.

It was thought that the pipe and tabor were instruments of the lower classes:

1829, July 4th (letter addressed To the Editor of the Mirror.)

"Three years ago you .... lamented the decrease of village
festivity and rural merriment, which in days langsyne cheered the honest
hearts and lightened the daily toil of our rustic ancestors. ... the song, the dance, and innocent
revelry are not quite forgotten in some part of our land, .....a village fete which I lately witnessed
and enjoyed....the company were just arriving in procession, preceded by a pink and white silken banner,
while a pipe and tabor regulated their march. ... led the party off in
the order they came to witness the ceremony of "dressing" the May-Pole...."

In a novel in 1836
"soon after the sound of pipe and tabor came from the servant’s hall"

Waldie's select circulating library, Volume 7

1835

" Music, of all arts, gives the most universal pleasure, and pleases longest and oftenest. 
Infants are charmed with the melody of sounds, and old age is animated by enlivening notes. 
... the English peasant delights in his pipe and tabor;"

THAUMATURGIA,OR ELUCIDATIONS OF THE MARVELLOUS BY AN OXONIAN

1842 The Maid of Saxony OR, WHO'S THE TRAITOR?
an opera in three acts from Poems by George Pope Morris

 “CHORUS OF PEASANTS.

Lads and lasses, trip away
To the cheerful roundelay !
At the sound of tambourine,
Care is banished from the scene,
And a happy train we bound,
To the pipe and tabour's sound.
Merrily, merrily, trip away,
"I is a nation's holiday !
Merrily, merrily, merrilie,
Let's be jocund while we may ;
And dance dance dance “

Street entertainers in towns were common but they earned very little:

Sunday, November 13, 1831 Bell's Weekly Messenger

"Whole houses are inhabited by these wretched boys, who sleep eight and nine in a bed; ... The following are the charges made by the proprietors upon the juvenile crew:...For a dog and monkey (the latter may be frequently seen in the street riding on the dog's back), 3s. per day. For dancing dogs, four in number, including dresses, spinning-wheel, pipe and tabor, &c. 5s. per day...Some of these boys, by their artlessness of manner and gesticulations, it is said, obtain six or seven schillings a day, and some more."

1868 Race meeting Chester

“Fellows were there with monkeys and music; the pipe and tabor and the hurdy gurdy.  Jugglers and montebanks with apes and bears.”

Liverpool Weekly Courier - Saturday 09 May 1868

Wedding procession 1840:

Works, by Edward Howard, Volume 1  ‘Jack Ashore’, p143

1849

“The street dances are always performed on a small piece of board (about three feet long and two feet wide), placed in the middle
of the road... Included in the twelve London street-dancers are six children; these are girls from five to fifteen years of age. The
fathers of these girls play the drum and pipes..."

1849-50 ‘The Morning Chronicle : Labour and Poor’ Henry Mayhew

In 1859, at  nine o'clock in the evening:
“a fife and tabour announce the advent of a little dancing boy and girl, with a careworn mother, in the street below. I look from
my window, and see the little painted people capering in their spangles and fleshings and short calico drawers.”

‘Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London’, by George Augustus Sala

1857

"Who knows how he may have been disturbed? A pretty milliner may have attracted Harry’s attention out of window—
a dancing bear with pipe and tabor may have passed along the common—a jockey come under his windows to show off a horse there?
There are some days when any of us may be ungrammatical and spell ill. "

 'The Virginians' William Makepeace Thackeray

“The air resounds with the pipe and tabor, and the drums and trumpets of the showmen shouting at the doors of their caravans,
over which tremendous pictures of the wonders to be seen within hang temptingly; while through all rises the shrill "root-too-too-too"
of Mr. Punch, and the unceasing pan-pipe of his satellite.”

1857 'Tom Brown’s School-days' Thomas Hughes

1867

"At the fair ... and the lads and lasses footing it to the fife and tabor, and the people chattering in groups"

'Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy' by Charles Reade

1860

"Frightful Infant Mortality - The world with pipe, tabor and dance move on unmindful of calamities which if simutaneously thrust
upon it would make society stand appalled..."

Wiltshire Independent - Thursday 18 October 1860

1897 dancing monkey entertained in the street:

..." a jackanapes he had seen once at the Stratford fair, which wore a crimson jerkin and a cap. The man who had the jackanapes
played upon a pipe and a tabor; and when he said, "Dance!" the jackanapes danced, for it was sorely afraid of the man.”

'Master Skylark' a novel by John Bennett

Traditional celebrations:

Punch and Judy: 1849 St Giles Fair, Oxford Oxford University and City Herald - Saturday 08 September 1849

May Day

"Hertfordshire has a long tradition of celebrating May Day ... The traditional celebrations started very early in the morning, before
dawn, when groups of young people, usually accompanied by musicians playing instruments such as the pipe and tabor, would
gather to collect branches of may (hawthorn) from local woodlands."

1896 May Day procession

“At Charlton-on-Otmoor, Oxon, on May morning a procession used to start from the vicarage, headed by two men carrying a large
garland of flowers on a stick. With them went six morris-dancers, a fool or " Squire," who carried a bladder and a money-box, and
a man who played the pipe and tabour”

'Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time An Account of Local Observances Festival Customs and (Ancient Ceremonies yet Surviving in Great Britain'
by T. H. Titchfield, London, 1896

Dunmow Flitch: The Flitch Trials are held every 4 years in Great Dunmow, Essex. They exist to award a flitch of bacon to married
couples from anywhere in the world, if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in 'twelvemonth and
a day', they have 'not wisht themselves unmarried again'. Four musicians were at the front of the procession in 1841, one of
whom was a pipe and tabor player' who played with so much glee that he cannot refrain from dancing to his own music.'
Two pipe and tabor players accompanied the Flitch of Bacon in the procession in 1855.

1823, 1 May: The chimney-sweepers as usual paraded the streets, but with more pomp than last year.
In addition to their ordinary finery they had a drum & pipe, &c.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.hist.c.144. Frederic Madden MSS., 'Journal for 1823', f.86.

Jack-in-the-Green

1836 The sweeps procession, in costume, entered "Bedford-row with a fife and drum, followed by an immense crowd of persons,
when they commenced dancing and disturbing the whole of the neighbourhood .."

The Morning Post, 4 May 1836, page 4.

1861

 "The juvenile members of the [sweeps] profession disport themselves in fancy dresses - faded finery from Drury Lane, and things
that once were smart from Monmouth Street - and parade the thoroughfares with drums and fifes ... To-day, however, in violation
of all the canons of art in such matters, some of the sweeps set at nought the good old custom, and actually had the hardihood to
appear in washed faces!"

1869 'Chambers Book of Days', May 1st

Jack-in-the-Green procession: "All of these figures or persons stop here and there in the course of their rounds, and dance to the
music of a drum and fife, expecting of course to be remunerated by halfpence from the onlookers. It is now generally a rather poor
show, and does not attract much regard; but many persons who have a love for old sports and day-observances, can never see the
little troop without a feeling of interest, or allow it to pass without a silver remembrance."

By the 1880's the Jack-in-the-Green procession had changed as the sweeps were invited to a formal dinner rahter than processing
round the streets:

"And on May-morning the deceivers take on the character of sweeps, and dance the unwary out of halfpence. As for the real sweeps,
they have advanced in luxury, and dine at Copenhagen-house. They dance, too, but then it is to the sounds of hireling minstrels ;
they have become respectable, and have left the streets to cheats and imposters"

Punch [almanac] VI (London: Punch, 1844), page 196.

Whitson Ale:

May 15th 1869

"It was the custom of our simple ancestors to have parochial meetings every Whitsuntide,... all agreeing to be good friends for once
in the year, and spend the day in a sober joy. The squire and lady came with their piper and taborer; the young danced or played
at bowls; the old looked on, sipping their ale from time to time. It was a kind of pic-nic..."

Francis Douce described an ‘ale’ ... "A large empty barn, or some such building, is provided for the lord's hall, and fitted up with
seats to accommodate the company. ... The lord's music, consisting of a pipe and tabor, is employed to conduct the dance."

"The last load is brought in and stops under the village maypole which has been decorated for the occasion.  The harvest queen
advances accompanied by the cheerful pipe and tabor"

1838 Harvest home:

" Crown'd with the cares of cornc, now come,
And, to the pipe, sing harvest home.
Come forth, my lord, and see the cart,
Drest up with all the country art.

 The pipe and the tabor are now busily set awork,
and the lad and the lass will have no lead on their heels.
O, 'tis the merry time," 

The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, part 3, ed Theodore Hook, Rural Festivals

1857 from:" Ballad: THE HAYMAKER'S SONG.

[AN old and very favourite ditty sung in many parts of England at
merry-makings, especially at those which occur during the hay-
harvest. It is not in any collection.]

And when that bright day faded,
And the sun was going down,
There was a merry piper
Approached from the town:
He pulled out his pipe and tabor,
So sweetly he did play,
Which made all lay down their rakes,
And leave off making hay.

Then joining in a dance,
They jig it o'er the green; ..."

Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England,
edited by Robert Bell, part 4

1892

"In summer they have music before they go to bed. We are in a city that has always been fond of music.
The noise of crowd and pipe, tabor and cithern, is now silent in the streets. Rich men kept their own musicians."

1892 London

"In the following chapters it has been my endeavor to present pictures of the City of London..... showing the streets, the buildings,
and the citizens at work and at play....  the cheerful sound of pipe and tabor; the stage with its tumblers and its rope-dancers;.....

It is an evening in May. What means this procession? Here comes a sturdy rogue marching along valiantly, blowing pipe and
beating tabor. After him, a rabble rout of lads and young men, wearing flowers in their caps, and bearing branches and singing lustily
.... Presently the evening falls.  The noise of crowd and pipe, tabor and cithern, is now silent in the streets...

Everywhere singing—everywhere joy and happiness. In the streets the very prentices and their sweethearts danced, to the pipe
and tabor, those figures called the Brawl and the Canary, and better dancing, with greater spirit and more fidelity to the steps,
had I never before seen."

Walter Besant 

In 1887 it was noted in a newspaper report that:

“the strains from a piano organ or a German band
take the place of the pipe and tabor”

1899

“Now these old world customs have either passed away, or have come to only a partial and precarious hold upon the minds of the present generation.”

Thetford & Watton Times and People's Weekly Journal. 
Saturday 09 September 1899

1914 GOETHE'S MOTHER

"Where are the echoes that bore the strains
Each to his nearest neighbour;
And all the valleys and all the plains
Where all the nymphs and their love-sick swains
Made merry to pipe and tabor?

Where are they gone? "

The Bed-Book of Happiness by Harold Begbie (1871-1929)

Not everyone appreciated the sound of these instruments:

1830 tabor and pipe are a noisy disturbance

Punch, Volume 3 MDCCCXLII Punch’s Comic Mythology: page 190,  Acis and  Galatea, chapter 3

“ Let us not, like the sour preacher, cry out upon a young man because he glorifies his body by fine raiment.
To such a jagg'd and embroidered sleeve is as bad as the sound of pipe and tabor or the sight of a playhouse. ..."

1892 London byWalter Besant

Sporting Life - Friday 14 December 1894
Review: A musical instrument exhibition at the Royal Aquarium included a pipe and tabor.

Oxfordshire Weekly News - Wednesday 14 August 1895
Music and musicians of the 18th century, a lecture by  Mr F Cunningham Woods, showed a pipe and tabor  
otherwise known as ‘ whittle and dub’  formerly belonging to an inhabitant of Hailey.

The pipe and tabor were played in an 1897 production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Musical direction by Arnold Dolmetsch
(The Goldsmith’s Hall, London: 13 November 1897).

The Dodo was Really a Phoenix: The Renaissance and Revival of the Recorder in England 1879-1941 Alexandra Mary Williams

In The Era of Saturday 27 November 1897 the reviewer describes the pipe and tabor as played in The Tempest.