Mr Addy asks:—“Has it (the Morris dance) descended to us from a dusky Iberian people, once a distinct caste in England, in whose magical powers and religion the dominant races believed? In his dictionary, Professor Skeat has concluded that a Morris dancer was a Moorish dancer. Assuming that such is the case, we may ask ourselves why these dances were so called. Are we to suppose that English peasants borrowed the dance from the Moors in historical times? Or are we to believe that it was handed down in England from an early period by the remnants of a dark-coloured Iberian people who, according to Tacitus, crossed over from Spain and were, in fact, Moors? In Yorkshire, a rude Christmas play known as the Peace Egg is performed. In that play the chief act is the slaughter by St George of England of a Black Prince of Paladine whom St George stigmatises as a ‘Black Morocco Dog.’ The play seems to represent an old feud between a light-haired and a dark-haired people once inhabiting England: and it may be that in popular speech the dark-haired people were once known as Moors. If this dramatised contest between St George of England and the ‘Black Morocco Dog’ does not point back to a time when conflicts existed in this country between a dusky race of Iberian or Moorish origin and a light-haired people which conquered and enslaved them, to what can we ascribe its origin? We can only say that this play is of historical or literary and not of traditional origin. But the form of the play renders an historical or literary origin impossible, and the whole performance seems to be nothing else but a rude and popular reminiscence of an ancient national feud. “It seems relevant to mention here an old earthwork, extending for some miles in length near Sheffield, known in one part of its course as Barber Balk. The direction of the earthwork is from south-west to north-east, and the ditch is uniformly on the southern side, as if it had been intended as a defence against attack from that side. Some modern scholars identify the Barbars or Berbers, a people inhabiting the Saracen countries along the north coast of Africa, with the Iberians. Can it be that an invading Celtic people threw up this earthwork as a defence against a dusky Iberian foe coming from the south, and that the ancient name of the earthwork has been handed down from a remote time, thereby preserving its true history? And is it not possible that the Iberians, the Morris or Moor, the ‘Black Morocco Dog’ of the traditional play and the Barber are identical? “A great authority on early Britain ‘has accepted and employed the theory advanced by ethnologists that the early inhabitants of this country were of Iberian origin.’” The fact that the Morris dancers sometimes blackened their faces need not necessarily mean that they wish to represent the Moors, but that they were thought to represent Moors because their faces were blackened.