Before the year 1905 few people knew that England possessed a traditional folk-dance of her own, and fewer still realised that the national dances were still practised on certain festival occasions in several villages and country towns, for the most part in the Midland and Northern counties. The word “folk” when used to describe a dance may be interpreted in two ways. It may be used to signify a dance (either traditional or not) at one time popular amongst the people, or its meaning may be limited to those dances whose origin is lost in antiquity and which have been passed on from generation to generation by unlettered folk without the aid of written music or written instruction as to steps or evolutions. That this book may be of more use to those who wish either to study the available English dances or to pass them on to the present generation, the wider meaning of the word “folk” will be understood. But a very marked distinction must be drawn between the two classes of folk-dance, between those recorded in books and still danced by peasant folk as a merely social dance, with no special significance beyond being an occasion for the display of gallantry, coquetry, and the courtesies of social intercourse; and those dances, until lately unrecorded, which are religious in origin and are the expression in rhythm of primitive beliefs and magical ceremonial. In the former are included the country dances and certain popular court dances. The latter include the Sword dances, Morris dances, the Furry dance, and Horn dance. As the origin of all dancing may be directly or indirectly traced to the ceremonial of primitive religions, it will be well first of all to give some account of those traditional dances still lingering in English villages which give unmistakable signs of their origin. The primitive forms of the traditional dance can only be guessed at by the student of to-day, for probably every epoch, every generation, and every individual dancer has added to, modified, or taken from the original dance, but enough is still with us to make the study an intensely interesting one both from the archæological and from the social point of view. The most important surviving traditional dance in England to-day is undoubtedly the Morris dance, both because of the far greater number of Morris dances still in existence and because of the greater differences between the individual dances. But very closely allied to, if not identical with, the Morris is the Sword dance, and again allied to both is the Mummers’ play.