was so much in fashion in the reign of Henry VIII. that the king and his nobles would sometimes appear in disguise as Robin Hood and his men, dressed in Kendal, with hoods and hosen. See Holinshed's Chron. iii. 805. In Coates's History of Reading, p. 130, Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Mary's parish, we have, in 1557, Item, payed to the Mynstrels and the Hobby Horse uppon £ s. d. 0 3 0 . 0 3 4 0 0 20 In the rare tract of the time of Queen Elizabeth, entitled Plaine Percevall the Peace-maker of England, mention is made of a "stranger, which, seeing a quintessence (beside the Foole and the Maid Marian) of all the picked youth, strained out of a whole endship, footing the Morris about a May-pole, and he not hearing the minstrelsie for the fidling, the tune for the sound, nor the pipe for the noise of the tabor, bluntly demaunded if they were not all beside themselves, that they so lip'd and skip'd without an occasion." Shakespeare makes mention of an English Whitson Morrice-dance, in the following speech of the Dauphin in Henry V. :— "No, with no more, than if we heard that England "The English were famed," says Dr. Grey, "for these and such like diversions; and even the old as well as young persons formerly followed them: a remarkable instance of which is given by Sir William Temple, (Miscellanea, Part 3, Essay of Health and Long Life,) who makes mention of a Morrice Dance in Herefordshire, from a noble person, who told him he had a pamphlet in his library, written by a very ingenious gentleman of that county, which gave an account how, in such a year of King James's reign, there went about the country a sett of Morrice-dancers, composed of ten men, who danced a Maid Marrian, and a tabor and pipe: and how these ten, one with another, made up twelve hundred years. 'Tis not so much, says he, that so many in one county should live to that age, as that they should be in vigour and humour to travel and dance." (Notes on Shakspeare, i. 382.) The following description of a Morris-dance occurs in a very rare old poem, entitled Cobbe's Prophecies, his Signes and Tokens, his Madrigalls, Questions and Answers, 1614:"It was my hap of late, by chance, To meet a country Morris-dance, The piper then put up his pipes, And all the woodcocks look't like snipes." As is the following in Cotgrave's English Treasury of Wit and Language, 1655, p. 56 :— "How they become the Morris, with whose bells They ring all in to Whitson Ales, and sweat Through twenty scarfs and napkins, till the hobby horse Be kept for spoon-meat." [Compare, also, the following curious song printed in Wits Recreations, 1640: "With a noyse and a din, Comes the Maurice-dancer in, With a fine linnen shirt, but a buckram skin. Oh! he treads out such a peale From his paire of legs of veale, The quarters are idols to him. Nor do those knaves inviron "Twill ruine a smith to shooe him. The wiser think it two ells: While the yeomen find it meet That he jingle at his feet, The fore-horses' right eare jewels."] We have an allusion to the Morris-dancer in the preface to Mythomistes, a tract of the time of Charles I. "Yet such helpes, as if nature have not beforehand in his byrth, given a Poet, all such forced art will come behind as lame to the businesse, and deficient as the best taught countrey Morrisdauncer, with all his bells and napkins, will ill deserve to be, in an Inne of Courte at Christmas, tearmed the thing they call a fine reveller." Stevenson, in the Twelve Months, 1661, p. 17, speaking of April, tells us: "The youth of the country make ready for the Morris-dance, and the merry milkmaid supplies them with ribbands her true love had given her." In Articles of Visitation and Inquiry for the Diocese of St. David, 1662, I find the following article: "Have no minstrels, no Morrisdancers, no dogs, hawks, or hounds, been suffered to be brought or come into your church, to the disturbance of the congregation?" Waldron, in his edition of the Sad Shepherd, 1783, p. 255, mentions seeing a company of Morrice-dancers from Abington, at Richmond, in Surrey, so late as the summer of 1783. They appeared to be making a kind of annual circuit. A few years ago, a May-game, or Morrice-dance, was performed by the following eight men in Herefordshire, whose ages, computed together, amounted to 800 years: J. Corley, aged 109; Thomas Buckley, 106; John Snow, 101; John Edey, 104; George Bailey, 106; Joseph Medbury, 100; John Medbury, 95; Joseph Pidgeon, 79. Since these notes were collected, a Dissertation on the ancient English Morris Dance has appeared, from the pen of Mr. Douce, at the end of the second volume of his Illustrations of Shakespeare. Both English and foreign glossaries, he observes, uniformly ascribe the origin of this dance to the Moors: although the genuine Moorish or Morisco dance was, no doubt, very different from the European Morris. Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, has cited a passage from the play of Variety, 1649, in which the Spanish Morisco is mentioned. And this, he adds, not only shows the legitimacy of the term Morris, but that the real and uncorrupted Moorish dance was to be found in Spain, where it still continues to delight both natives and foreigners, under the name of the Fandango. The Spanish Morrice was also danced at puppet-shows by a person habited like a Moor, with cas tagnets; and Junius has informed us that the Morris-dancers usually blackened their faces with soot, that they might the better pass for Moors. Having noticed the corruption of the Pyrrhica Saltatio of the ancients, and the uncorrupted Morris-dance, as practised in France about the beginning of the thirteenth century, Douce says: "It has been supposed that the Morris-dance was first brought into England in the time of Edward the Third, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain (see Peck's Memoirs of Milton, p. 135), but it is much more probable that we had it from our Gallic neighbours, or even from the Flemings. Few, if any, vestiges of it can be traced beyond the time of Henry the Seventh, about which time, and particularly in that of Henry the Eighth, the churchwardens' accounts in several parishes afford materials that throw much light on the subject, and show that the Morris-dance made a very considerable figure in the parochial festivals. We find, also, that other festivals and ceremonies had their Morris; as, Holy Thursday; the Whitsun Ales; the Bride Ales, or Weddings; and a sort of play, or pageant, called the Lord of Misrule. Sheriffs, too, had their Morris-dance." "The May-games of Robin Hood," it is observed, "appear to have been principally instituted for the encouragement of archery, and were generally accompanied by Morris-dancers, who, nevertheless, formed but a subordinate part of the ceremony. It is by no means clear that, at any time, Robin Hood and his companions were constituent characters in the Morris. In Laneham's Letter from Kenilworth, or Killingworth Castle, a Bride Ale is described, in which mention is made of 'a lively Moris dauns, according to the auncient manner : six dauncerz, Mawd-marion, and the fool.'" MAID MARIAN, OR QUEEN OF THE MAY. In Pasquill and Marforius, 1589, we read of "the Maygame of Martinisme, verie defflie set out, with pompes, pagents, motions, maskes, scutchions, emblems, impreases, strange trickes and devises, betweene the ape and the owle; the like was never yet seene in Paris Garden. Penry the Welchman is the foregallant of the Morrice with the treble belles, shot through the wit with a woodcock's bill. I would not for the fayrest horne-beast in all his countrey, that the Church of England were a cup of metheglin, and came in his way when he is overheated; every Bishopricke would procure but a draught, when the mazer is at his nose. Martin himselfe is the Mayd-Marian, trimlie drest uppe in a cast gowne, and a kercher of Dame Lawson's, his face handsomelie muffled with a diaper napkin to cover his beard, and a great nose-gay in his hande of the principalest flowers I could gather out of all hys works. Wiggenton daunces round about him in a cottencoate, to court him with a leatherne pudding and a wooden ladle. Paget marshalleth the way with a couple of great clubbes, one in his foote, another in his head, and he cries to the people, with a loude voice, 'Beware of the man whom God hath markt.' I cannot yet finde any so fitte to come lagging behind, with a budget on his necke to gather the devotion of the lookers on, as the stocke-keeper of the Bridewelhouse of Canterburie; he must carry the purse to defray their charges, and then hee may be sure to serve himselfe." [Maid Marian is alluded to in the following very curious lines in a MS. of the fifteenth century : "At Ewle we wonten gambole, daunse, to carol, and to sing, Till after long time myrke, when blest were windowes, dores, and lightes, And pailes were fild, and harthes were swept, gainst fairie elves and sprites : Rock and Plow-Monday gams sal gang with saint feasts and kirk sightes."] Tollett, in his Description of the Morris Dancers upon his Window, thus describes the celebrated Maid Marian, who, as Queen of May, has a golden crown on her head, and in her left hand a red pink, as emblem of Summer. Her vesture was once fashionable in the highest degree. Margaret, the |