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At the beginning of the sixteenth century the May sports in vogue were, besides a contest of archery, four pageants, the Kingham, or election of a Lord and Lady of the May, otherwise called Summer King and Queen, the Morris-Dance, the Hobby-Horse, and the "Robin Hood."
This was drawn by a team of Lord W 's finest farm-horses, all covered with scarlet cloths, and decked with ribbons and bells and flowers. After this came twelve country lads and lasses, dancing the real old morris-dance, with their handkerchiefs flying, and in all the rustic elegance of apparel which they could command for the occasion.
James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north.
The English people have always been lovers of dancing; and it forms an accompaniment of almost all their old sports and pastimes. Witness the maypoles, wassails, and wakes of rural life, and the grotesque morris-dance, originating in a kind of Pyrrhic or military dance, and described by Sir William Temple as composed of "ten men, who danced a maid marian and a tabor and pipe."
She was only twenty at the time, and he was only twenty-one. He had about a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own and nothing else but his very considerable personal attractions. He had no profession: he earned nothing. But he talked of literature and music, he had a passion for old folk-music, collecting folk-songs and folk-dances, studying the Morris-dance and the old customs.
Gerson, de auferibilitate Papae ab Ecclesia. The Catalogue of the Nominated and Graduated Persons. Jo. Dytebrodii, terribilitate excommunicationis libellus acephalos. Ingeniositas invocandi diabolos et diabolas, per M. Guingolphum. The Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of the perpetually begging Friars. The Morris-dance of the Heretics. The Whinings of Cajetan.
The music and the morris-dance have gone from England; and instead of providing, as formerly, for the amusement of the grinded labourer, our legislators now regard with the most watchful jealousy his most distant approach to festivity. They cannot bear the rustic to be merry: disorder and amusement are words for the same offence."
I found myself in the midst of a company of people among whom were the other members of the new School Council. Below, upon the lawn, there was a little spectacle going on for our entertainment a morris-dance, simply and gracefully performed by young people dressed in quaintly fashioned frocks of calico; there was good music too one or two instruments, to which they danced.
The churchwardens and their allies have all sorts of experiences: they break in upon "exercises" or conventicles; they peep in at victuallers' houses or at inns where irate hosts slam doors in their faces and give them bad words on being caught offending; they come across merrymakers dancing the morris-dance on the village green during Sunday afternoon service, or they surprise men at a quiet game of cards at a neighbor's house during evening prayer.
After them followed a very good village band, and then a species of flowery canopy, under which walked a man and woman covered with finery, who, Lord W told me, represented Adam and Eve. The procession closed with a fool fantastically dressed out, and carrying the classical bladder at the end of his stick. They drew up before the house and danced their morris-dance for us.
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