As this scene is mobled in the aforesaid mists of antiquity, I cannot
vouch for the details. Nor can I say just when the Moors found that
they could make a finer and more rhythmic jangle by attaching the
bells to their legs than by swinging them in their hands. Nor can I
fix the day when they tore strips from their turbans for their idle
hands to wave. I cannot say how long the rite's mode had been set when
first the adventurers from Spain beheld it with their keen wondering
eyes and fixed it for ever in their memories.
In Spain, and then in France, and then in London, the dance was
secular. But perhaps I ought not to have said that it was `not
explicitly religious' in the English countryside. The cult for Robin
Hood was veritably a religion throughout the Midland Counties. Rites
in his honour were performed on certain days of the year with a not
less hearty reverence, a not less quaint elaboration, than was infused
into the rustic Greek rites for Dionysus. The English carles danced,
not indeed around an altar, but around a bunt pole crowned with such
flowers as were in season; and one of them, like the youth who in the
Dionysiac dance masqueraded as the god, was decked out duly as Robin
Hood--`with a magpye's plume to hys capp,' we are told, and sometimes
`a russat bearde compos'd of horses hair.
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