In Anglo-Saxon times the sword dance was in great repute, and Saxon nobles kept dancers to amuse their guests. There is mention of Morris dancing in Edward III.’s reign, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain, but few, if any, vestiges of it can be traced in writers beyond the reign of Henry VII.: about which time, and particularly in that of Henry VIII., the Churchwarden’s accounts in several parishes show that the Morris dance made a very considerable figure in the parochial festivals. Some of the accounts of the May Games of Robin Hood include a Morris dance, but it is doubtful if the Morris was an intrinsic part of the Robin Hood pageant, as it was very often danced on separate occasions altogether. I am inclined to think that both are fragments of much older dances and dramas, and that it is almost impossible to say what was their exact relation to one another. By the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, when references to the Morris dance are very frequent, all idea of its religious significance had disappeared, and it represented the characteristics of the English peasant in a holiday mood in the days when life was a big adventure, and revelry and sport were rude and boisterous. It is a little difficult to realise, as one watches the few remaining traditional dancers to-day, either that their dancing has represented all that mankind knew of primitive religious aspiration and ceremonial, or later that it embodied all the frolic and revel of the rollicking days of Queen Elizabeth. Although there is only one written record of steps and figures, there are so many general descriptions of the dances in the writers of that time that it is a little difficult, in the short space at my disposal, to choose which will give the best idea of the dance as then performed. I have chosen a few descriptions which seem best to fulfil this purpose. But first there are four pictures of Morris dancing which may be here described. The first is a painted glass window at Betley, in Staffordshire. It exhibits in all probability the most curious as well as the oldest representation of an English May game and Morris dance that is anywhere to be found. The dresses look as if they belong to the reign of Edward IV., but the owner, Tollet, thought they were in the time of Henry VIII. Another early representation of a Morris dance is a copy of a very scarce engraving on copper by Israhel Van Meckenem (died 1503), so named from the place of his nativity, a German village in the confines of Flanders, in which latter country this artist appears chiefly to have resided, and therefore in most of his prints we may observe the Flemish costume of his time. From the pointed shoes that we see in one of the figures it must have been executed between the years 1460 and 1470, about which latter period the broad-toed shoes came into fashion in France and Flanders. It seems to have been intended as a pattern for goldsmith’s work, probably a cup or tankard.