J’entend le haut-bois jouer,
Et vous autr’, jeunes fillettes,
Qui allez au bal danser,
Allez, allez, tenez vous dreites,
Prenez gard’ de n’ pas tomber.
The transition is very evident. In another case[[807]] the leader calls on the dancers to make some cry imitative of animals, which now serves as refrain; but, wherever found, the test of a really popular refrain, as Jeanroy insists, is that it was made for the dance. Read “in the dance,” and communal conditions are even better satisfied.
For the ballad is a song made in the dance, and so by the dance; a mass of those older dance-songs which have come down to us as popular, are later development, are of either aristocratic or learned origin, and simply point back to the communal dance which is the real source of the song. Originally a chorus of all the dancers, it gave vent to the feelings of joy,—in the old vocero dance, of grief,—to the common emotion of the throng. An impulse which makes for this song of the dance is simple delight that the season of dancing is begun:—
A l’entrada del tems clar, eya;[[808]]
and so one may trace these invocations of nature to their later form at the beginning of a narrative song like Robin Hood and the Monk. This dancing of the round as an expression of feeling on the part of a throng—dancing in pairs, we know, did not reach Neocorus’s country, for example, until the middle of the sixteenth century—meets one everywhere in mediæval records, and it has died a reluctant death; unless observation be at fault, even children are ceasing to play the old round games common not many years ago, a city of refuge that seemed at one time so secure. But in those mediæval days one danced in throngs on almost any occasion; and impossible as the story may be if taken literally, there is truth enough for our purpose in that account[[809]] of Leicester’s army in 1173 pausing on a heath, where they “fell to daunce and singe—
“Hoppe, Wylikin, hoppe Wyllikin,