If the spirit has been Anglicised, the steps remain.  Tabourot, for instance, a very quaint and interesting writer on dancing, tells us that when he was a youth—­that would be early in the 16th century—­it was the custom in good society for a boy to come into the hall after supper with his face blackened, his forehead bound with white or yellow taffeta, and bells tied to his legs.  He then proceeded to dance the Morisco the length of the hall, forth and back, to the great amusement of the company.  So says Tabourot, long dead; and to-day we learn that, in most winters, a side of Morris-men dances at White Ladies Aston, one-and-a-half mile from Spetchley, Worcester.  They blacken their faces and have for music accordion, triangle, and tambourine:  their flute-player died recently.  Tabourot suggests that the bells might have been borrowed from the crotali of the ancients in the Pyrrhic dance.  He then describes the more modern Morris dance, which was performed by striking the ground with the fore part of the feet; but as this proved fatiguing the work was given to the heels, the toes being kept firm, whereby the bells jingled more effectively.  He adds that this method in turn was modified, as it tended to bring on gouty complaints.

We are given by the same writer a notation of the Morisco, or Morisque, music, steps, and description:  this shows as nearly as possible the steps of the Morris as we have seen it danced in England to-day.

Again, Engel, in a passage to us of extraordinary interest, gives in modern notation “... one of the tunes headed La Morisque, probably the oldest tune of the famous Morris dance still extant.  As it is interesting from having been printed in the year 1550, when most likely it was already an old tune, it shall be inserted here ....”  And there we found the same tune which Tabourot gives for the dance that he described, as we have already told.  It is the tune of “Morris Off,” which we reproduce in our books of tunes.  Just a few weeks earlier we had taken down, at Redditch, from the fiddler of the Bidford Morris-men, the same tune, note for note, as Tabourot gives it.  Here in truth is a signal instance of that persistence and continuity which is always cropping up, to the lasting amazement and delight of the student of Folk-music—­to the delight more especially of the student who, like ourselves, holds that in our Folk-music is a treasury not to be hoarded for the delectation of the scholar, but to be expended with both hands for the revivifying of a national spirit.

The Morris, then—­once also the Moresc—­of England; La Morisque and Morisco of France; the Moresca of Corsica, danced by armed men to represent a conflict between Moors and Christians—­is in all reasonable probability Moorish in origin:  never mind if in our own country it is become as English as fisticuffs, as the dance called “How d’ye do” will show—­wherein our own folk, after their own manner, have suggested strife, as in the Corsican