[700] Coquillart, Œuvres (†1470), 127.
[701] Mémoires de Pétrarque, ii. app. 3, 9; Petrarch danced ‘en pourpoint une belle et vigoureuse moresque’ to please the Roman ladies on the night of his coronation.
[702] Somers Tracts, ii. 81, 87. The Earl of Nottingham, when on an embassy from James I, saw morrice-dancers in a Corpus Christi procession.
[703] Douce, 480; Favine, Theater of Honor, 345: at a feast given by Gaston de Foix at Vendôme, in 1458, ‘foure young laddes and a damosell, attired like savages, daunced (by good direction) an excellent Morisco, before the assembly.’
[704] Tabourot, Orchésographie, 94: in his youth a lad used to come after supper, with his face blackened, his forehead bound with white or yellow taffeta, and bells on his legs, and dance the morris up and down the hall.
[705] Douce, 577; Burton, 95.
[706] A dance certainly of Moorish origin is the fandango, in which castanets were used; cf. the comedy of Variety (1649) ‘like a Bacchanalian, dancing the Spanish Morisco, with knackers at his fingers’ (Strutt, 223). This, however, seems to show that the fandango was considered a variety of morisco. Douce, 602; Burton, 124, figure an African woman from Fez dancing with bells on her ankles. This is taken from Hans Weigel’s book of national costumes published at Nuremberg in 1577.
[707] Tabourot’s morris-dancing boy had his face blackened, and Junius (F. Du Jon), Etymologicum Anglicanum (1743), says of England ‘faciem plerumque inficiunt fuligine, et peregrinum vestium cultum assumunt, qui ludicris talibus indulgent, ut Mauri esse videantur, aut e longius remota patria credantur advolasse, atque insolens recreationis genus ad vexisse.’ In Spousalls of Princess Mary (1508) ‘morisks’ is rendered ‘ludi Maurei quas morescas dicunt.’ In the modern morris the black element is represented, except at Brosely, chiefly by ‘owd sooty face,’ the fool: in Leicestershire it gives rise to a distinct figure, Beelzebub.
[708] Du Méril, La Com. 89, quotes a sixteenth-century French sword-dance of ‘Mores, Sauvages, et Satyres.’ In parts of Yorkshire the sword-dancers had black faces or masks (Henderson, 70).
[709] Cotgrave, ‘Dancer les Buffons, To daunce a morris.’ The term ‘the madman’s morris’ appears as the name of the dance in The Figure of Nine (temp. Charles II); cf. Furnivall, Laneham’s Letter, clxii. The buffon is presumably the ‘fool’; cf. Cotgrave, ‘Buffon: m. A buffoon, jeaster, sycophant, merrie fool, sportfull companion: one that lives by making others merrie.’