Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/182

174 presumably in the summer months—and that the money so collected was devoted to the relief of the poor and the repairs of the church. When the dance began is quite unknown, but there were other places in Staffordshire where it lingered until the end of the eighteenth or beginning of this century—notably, Stafford itself, and Seighford, a small village near it. There was a special tune played for the Horn-Dance, by a man with a fiddle, within the memory of some still living; but the tune is lost, and I have quite failed to recover it: now somebody plays a concertina, with ordinary dance-music of any kind. The under-jaw of the hobby-horse is loose, and is moved with a string, so that it 'clacks' against the upper-jaw in time with the music. The same is done with the arrow and the bow. Six men have each a pair of horns; then there is a woman who holds the pot and collects the money—probably 'Maid Marian'; a lad with the bow (? Robin Hood); a jester; and another with the hobby-horse—ten in all. They have a traditional sort of figure, which they dance over and over again. I am afraid I cannot tell you much else about the dance: we are on the borders of what used to be 'Needwood Forest', and probably it had some woodland meaning. But the curious thing is that the horns are reindeer. This has been settled quite satisfactorily just lately by Dr. Cox, the editor of The Antiquary, who came here to see them. Two pairs are very large, larger than any reindeer-horns I have ever seen myself in Russia or Norway. How they came here is a mystery."

Whatever the origin of the horns may be, I think we need entertain little doubt that the dance was, as Mr Bryant suggests, of some woodland character and significance; and from the bow and arrow, and the circumstance of the gifts to the poor, it seems to stand in relation to the Robin Hood epos. The presence of the hobby-horse again, is curious. Like the Doctor, the Hobby- requires a paper to himself. He figures largely in the Day games, as well as in the winter plays; and in  without doubt—or so it seems to me—we have the  of Odin's horse Sleipner; and probably his ubiquity  tradition suggests reminiscences of the other fabulous  of Asgard.