"... with garlands gay
Was made the Lady of the Maye."
V. The Fool. This character in the morris was the same, in point of dress, as the domestic buffoon of his time. In Mr. Tollett's window he has additional bells tied to his arms and ancles as a morris dancer, but is, in other respects, the English fool of the fifteenth century. Yet the habit of this eccentric person was not the same in all countries, nor even uniform in the same country. Accordingly, he is very differently accoutred in the Flemish print. He has a cap or hood with asses' ears, and a row of bells for the crest; in his left hand he carries a bauble, and over his right arm hangs a cloth or napkin. He wears behind what seems intended for a purse or wallet, with which the fool in the old German prints is generally exhibited. It is certain that there was only one fool in the morris; and therefore Mr. Steevens and Mr. Tollett have erred in supposing the figure No. 1, in the window, to be the Bavian fool with the bib. The former gentleman had apparently misconceived the following passage in Fletcher's Two noble kinsmen,
"... and next the fool,
The Bavian, with long tail and eke long tool."
Here are not two fools described. The construction is, "next comes the fool, i. e. the Bavian fool," &c. This might have been the idiot fool, and so denominated from his wearing a bib, in French bavon,[187] because he drivelled. Thus in Bonduca, Act V., Decius talks of a "dull slavering fool." The tricks of the Bavian, his tumbling and barking like a dog, suggested perhaps by the conduct of Robert the Devil when disguised as a fool in his well known and once popular romance, were peculiar to the morris dance described in The two noble kinsmen, which has some other characters that seem to have been introduced for stage effect, and not to have belonged to the genuine morris. The tail was the fox tail that was sometimes worn by the morris fool; and the long tool will be best understood by referring to the cut of the idiot in the genuine copy of the dance of death usually, though improperly, ascribed to Holbein, and by reflecting on some peculiar properties and qualifications of the idiot character.
What Mr. Tollett has termed a bib was in fact no uncommon part of the male dress in the fifteenth century. Some of the contemporary figures of the Beverley minstrels are so habited, as well as others in the representation of the Whitsun ale at Cirencester.[188] Whatever character the supposed Bavian of the window was, he is also found in the print by Israel on the left hand of the fool, not only in the same habit, but with his hands and feet precisely in similar attitudes. There is no doubt that the morris dance was in some respects a sort of chironomy; and Higgins, the English editor of Junius's Nomenclator, has actually translated the word chironomia by "the morrise dance."[189] In the absence of some of the other characters of the morris dance, the exertions of the fool appear to have been increased, as we learn from Ben Jonson's Entertainment at Althrope:
"But see the hobby-horse is forgot.
Foole, it must be your lot,
To supply his want with faces
And some other buffon graces.
You know how."—
Coryat relates that near Montreuil he saw "a Whitsuntide foole disguised like a foole, wearing a long coate, wherein there were many severall peeces of cloth of divers colours, at the corners whereof there hanged the tailes of squirrels: he bestowed a little peece of plate, wherein was expressed the effigies of the Virgin Mary, upon every one that gave him money: for he begged money of all travellers for the benefite of the parish church."[190] The romance of The spiritual Quixote has a morris fool with a fox's tail depending from his cap, and a sheep bell attached to his hinder parts. In the modern morris dance the fool is continued, but his real character and dress appear to have been long since forgotten. In some places he is called the Squire.
VI. The Piper. Sometimes called Tom Piper, an obvious and necessary attendant on a morris, and who requires very little illustration. Mr. Steevens has already referred to Drayton for the mention of him; and Spenser, in his third eclogue, speaking of the rimes of bad poets, observes that
"Tom Piper makes as little melodie;"