Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/307

Rh pain of death, to use their national dress, to practice their national ceremonies, or to speak their vernacular tongue. Their baths, too, were to be destroyed, and the practice of bathing discontinued; their women also were to go about unveiled, and no Moor was to be allowed to wear arms or even to keep them.

It has been conjectured that the old English morris-dance, so great a favourite in the sixteenth century, was derived through Spain from the Moors: doubtless, if so, the Spanish dance called the Morisco had the same origin; it was popular in France in the fifteenth century under the name of "Morisque." In our own country it would appear to have become combined with an older form of dance, or rather pageant, which was founded on the history of Robin Hood and his outlaws. The writer perfectly well remembers when a child seeing this dance performed by the country people in Yorkshire at Christmastime; Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck were prominent figures; there was also a man on a hobby-horse. Shakespeare speaks of the fitness of the morris-dance for May-day, but a tract of the time of Charles I. says that the morris-dancer was sometimes employed at Christmas. "The natives of Herefordshire," this article goes on to state, "are celebrated for their morris-dancing; in the earlier part of the present century it was not uncommon in that county, and also in Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and Wiltshire about the same period. Miss Baker, in her Glossary of Northamptonshire Words, speaks of this dance as still met with in that county as late as 1854, and Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, also speaks of the morris-dance as still commonly practised in Oxfordshire, though the old costume had been forgotten, and the performers were only dressed with a few ribbons."