A Table explaining the characters which
are set down in the Rules for Dancing
| D. | Is for double. A double is four steps forward and backward, closing both feet. |
| S. | Is for a single. A single is two steps, closing both feet. |
| Wo. | Stands for Woman. |
| We. | Stands for Women. |
| Cu. | Stands for Couple. |
| Co. | Stands for Contrary. |
| 2. | Stands for Second. |
| 3. | Stands for Third. |
| 4. | Stands for Fourth. |
| • | This is for a strain play’d once. |
| : | This is for a strain play’d twice. |
| These two characters expresse the figures of the dance, | |
| ☉ | This stands for the Man. |
| ☽ | This stands for the Woman. |
In 1904 Miss Nellie Chaplin gave a performance of dances including the “Pavane,” “Galliard,” “Allemande,” “Courante,” “Sarabande,” and “Chacone,” and in 1906 led, through her study of old instruments and old music, to an interest in other ancient dances, and with the help of an expert in dancing she deciphered several of the dances from Playford’s Dancing Master, harmonised the tunes, added the appropriate steps from her collaborator’s knowledge of dancing, and began to give public performances of the dances in London and different parts of the country. No one who has ever seen these pupils of hers, with their beautiful, old-fashioned dresses, dancing the old-world dances accompanied by a string quartette and oboe, will ever forget the charm of the performance. Miss Chaplin chose some of the most complicated of the dances for revival, and has made the dancing of them a real art. Some years later, Mr Cecil Sharp published a number of Playford’s tunes and dances which were performed by the young ladies of the South-Western Polytechnic, generally as illustrations of his lectures on folk-dancing. They are now given by the Folk-Dance Society at their performances. His method of giving the dances is different from Miss Chaplin’s, because his pupils, unlike hers, do not use any steps, but only give the figures with a walking or running step, which is the same in all the dances. Which method is best is purely a matter of taste.
Through Miss Chaplin, the Folk-Dance Society, and the Espérance Guild, the country dances are now once more danced by numbers of people all over the country, and it is to be hoped that they will never again recede between the covers of a dancing-master’s book.
The country dance tunes are often ballad tunes.
The tunes played to-day by country fiddlers are often found in early books of opera and printed collections of airs.
For instance, the tune of Tink-a-Tink, a country dance collected by Mr Sharp and published in Set II. of Country Dance Tunes, collected from Traditional Sources, is a song in the Opera “Bluebeard,” by Michael Kelly, published in 1799.
“The Butterfly” in Set I. of the same series is apparently a remembrance of the once popular “I’d be a Butterfly,” the words and melody by Thomas Haynes Bayly. It is included in many books of airs.
The tunes did not always gain by passing through the hands of the village musician.