XLII.—DANCING AND CHESS PLAY.
Dancing was certainly an ancient and favourite pastime with the women of this country: the maidens even in a state of servitude claimed, as it were by established privilege, the license to indulge themselves in this exercise on holidays and public festivals; when it was usually performed in the presence of their masters and mistresses. [113]
In the middle ages, dice, chess, and afterwards tables, and cards, with other sedentary games of chance and skill, were reckoned among the female amusements; and the ladies also frequently joined with the men in such pastimes, as we find it expressly declared in the metrical romance of Ipomydon. The passage alluded to runs thus:
When they had dyned, as I you saye,
Lordes and ladyes yede to playe;
Some to tables, and some to chesse,
With other gamys more or lesse. [114]
In another poem, by Gower, [115] a lover asks his mistress, when she is tired of "dancing and caroling," if she was willing to "play at chesse, or on the dyes to cast a chaunce." Forrest, speaking in praise of Catharine of Arragon, first wife of Henry VIII., says, that when she was young,
With stoole and with needyl she was not to seeke,
And other practiseings for ladyes meete;
To pastyme at tables, tick tacke or gleeke,
Cardis and dyce—&c. [116]