s. d.

1 Hen. VIII. For 6 brode arouys

5 Hen. VIII. 11 Hen. VIII.

To Mayde Marian, for her labour for two yeers
To Fygge the taborer

Recd for Robyn-hood's gaderyng 4 marks'
Recd for Robin-hood's gaderyng at Croydon
Paid for three brode yerds of rosett for makyng
the frer's cote

Shoes for the Mores daunsars, the frere, and
Mayde Maryan, at 7d. a peyre.

13 Hen. VIII. Eight yerds of fustyan for the Mores daunsars

A dosen of gold skynnes2 for the Morres

15 Hen. VIII. Hire of hats for Robyn hode

Paid for the hat that was lost

16 Hen. VIII. Recd at the Church-ale and Robyn-hode, all things deducted

0690

4000

0 9 4

0 3 6

0 5 4

3 10 6

Payd for 6 yerds of satyn for Robyn-hode's
cotys

For makyng the same.

For 3 ells of locram3

2210026+

For spunging and brushing Robyn-hode's cotys 0 0 2
Five hats and 4 porses for the daunsars
4 yerds of cloth for the fole's cote

4

0

0

0

8

0 4 6

0 10 8

2 ells of worstede for Maide Maryan's kyrtle
For 6 payre of double sollyd showne
To the mynstrele

0 8

To the fryer and the piper for to go to Croydon 0 “29 Hen. VIII. Mem. lefte in the keping of the Wardens now beinge, a fryer's cote of russet, and a kyrtle of worsted weltyd with red cloth, a mowren's cote of buckram, and 4 Morres daunsars cotes of white fustain spangelyd, and two gryne saten cotes, and a dysardd's5 cote of cotton, and 6 payre of garters with bells." After this period, says Mr. Lysons, I find no entries relating to the above game. It

'It appears that this, as well as other games, was made a parish concern. 2 Probably gilt leather, the pliability of which was particularly accommodated to the motion of the dancers.

3 A sort of coarse linen.

'Probably a Moor's coat; the word Morian is sometimes used to express a Moor. Black buckram appears to have been much used for the dresses of the ancient mummers.

5 Disard is an old word for a fool.

6 In the Churchwardens' Accounts of Great Marlow, it appears that dresses for the Morris Dance "were lent out to the neighbouring parishes. They are accounted for so late as 1629." See Langley's Antiquities of Desborough, 4to. 1797, p. 142.

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
May Day

Item, payed to the Morrys Daunsers and the Mynstrelles,
mete and drink at Whitsontide

Payed to them the Sonday after May Day
pd to the Painter for painting of their cotes
pd to the Painter for 2 dz. of Lyveryes

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
Were busied with a Whitson Morrice-dance."

"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,
When, cheefest of them all, the Foole
Plaied with a ladle and a toole;
When every younker shak't his bels,
Till sweating feete gave fohing smels :
And fine Maide Marian with her smoile
Shew'd how a rascall plaid the roile:
But when the hobby-horse did wihy,
Then all the wenches gave a tihy:
But when they gan to shake their boxe,
And not a goose could catch a foxe,

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

Tire, and the Maid Marian, resolved to jelly,

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
Their toes with so much iron,

"Twill ruine a smith to shooe him.
I, and then he flings about,
His sweat and his clout,

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