In view of the wide range of the sword-dance in Germany, I do not think it is necessary to attach any importance to the theories advanced by Sir Walter Scott and others that it is, in England and Scotland, of Scandinavian origin. It is true that it appears to be found mainly in those parts of these islands where the influence of Danes and Northmen may be conjectured to have been strongest. But I believe that this is a matter of appearance merely, and that a type of folk-dance far more widely spread in the south of England than the sword-dance proper, is really identical with it. This is the morris-dance, the chief characteristic of which is that the performers wear bells which jingle at every step. Judging by the evidence of account-books, as well as by the allusions of contemporary writers, the morris was remarkably popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[685]. Frequently, but by no means always, it is mentioned in company with the May-game[686]. In a certain painted window at Betley in Staffordshire are represented six morris-dancers, together with a May-pole, a musician, a fool, a crowned man on a hobby-horse, a crowned lady with a pink in her hand, and a friar. The last three may reasonably be regarded as Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck[687]. The closeness of the relation between the morris-dance and the May-game is, however, often exaggerated. The Betley figures only accompany the morris-dance; they do not themselves wear the bells. And besides the window, the only trace of evidence that any member of the Robin Hood _cortège_, with the exception of Maid Marian, was essential to the morris-dance, is a passage in a masque of Ben Jonson’s, which so seems to regard the friar[688]. The fact is that the morris-dance was a great deal older, as an element in the May-game, than Robin Hood, and that when Robin Hood’s name was forgotten in this connexion, the morris-dance continued to be in vogue, not at May-games only, but at every form of rustic merry-making. On the other hand, it is true that the actual dancers were generally accompanied by grotesque personages, and that one of these was a woman, or a man dressed in woman’s clothes, to whom literary writers at least continued to give the name of Maid Marian. The others have nothing whatever to do with Robin Hood. They were a clown or fool, and a hobby-horse, who, if the evidence of an Elizabethan song can be trusted, was already beginning to go out of fashion[689]. A rarer feature was a dragon, and it is possible that, when there was a dragon, the rider of the hobby-horse was supposed to personate St. George[690]. The morris-dance is by no means extinct, especially in the north and midlands. Accounts of it are available from Lancashire and Cheshire[691], Derbyshire[692], Shropshire[693], Leicestershire[694], and Oxfordshire[695]; and there are many other counties in which it makes, or has recently made, an appearance[696].