_The Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance._—Mr Sharp has included this in his book of Sword Dances. The dancers have stags’ horns attached to their heads, but there is no very distinctive step. VIII. THE COUNTRY DANCE A few country dances are still remembered by old people living in villages, but, unlike the Morris dances, by far the greater number of country dances are recorded both as to steps and figures, so that they do not come under the same heading as the strictly traditional dance. The supposition that “country-dance” is a corruption of “contre-danse,” and that it came to England from France, is not correct. It was in fact, as in name, a country dance, danced by country folk in barn and ale-house and on village greens. It travelled to France, and was called there the “Contre-danse.” Later these dances were adopted by the upper classes and even penetrated into Court circles. At this time they were at their best, and many were danced in the round form, but gradually this form became obsolete, until in the middle of the eighteenth century only the dances “longways for as many as will” were danced. In Grove’s _Dictionary of Music_ Mr Kidson gives an account of a dance called “Mall Peatly, the new way,” which he has seen danced in a cottage on a Yorkshire moor. “You are to hit your right elbows together and then your left, and turn with your left hands behind and your right hands before, and turn twice round and then your left elbows together, and turn as before and so to the next.” Mr Cecil Sharp has collected a number of country dances still danced by country folk, and Mr Clive Carey has also collected country dances, principally in Sussex. But the great mine of wealth wherein are the greatest numbers of these beautiful, old-fashioned dances is _Playford’s Dancing Master_. The first edition of this collection is entitled “The English Dancing Master: or Plain and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the tune to each dance (104 pages of music). Printed by Thomas Harper, and are to be sold by John Playford at his shop in the Inner Temple neere the Church doore.” The date is 1651, but it was entered at Stationers’ Hall on the 7th of November, 1650.