The earliest musical documentary sources of Bohemian folk music date from the fourteenth century; but up to the end of the eighteenth century the volume of such sources is small. Despite insufficient historical evidence, however, it has been possible to determine the main developmental trends of earlier times from studies of literary and iconographic evidence and, in particular, from the wealth of church hymns for congregational use.

From the beginning, folk music did not pursue a course separate from that of professional performance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, the inter-relationship between these two was highly beneficial to both. The range of folk-musical instruments was roughly the same as that required for professional performance. Only a few instruments—bagpipes and other rural types—were not used by both cultures. The gradual switch from the bagpipes and whistle-flutes, so popular in the Middle Ages, to the stringed instruments of subsequent centuries, affected folk and professional performance equally. Only the wind instruments of the gothic and renaissance periods failed to find their way into Bohemian folk music on a large scale.