The hobby-horse, it would seem, is now at last, except in Derbyshire, finally ‘forgot’; but the two other traditional grotesques are still _de rigueur_. Few morris-dances are complete without the ‘fool’ or clown, amongst whose various names that of ‘squire’ in Oxfordshire and that of ‘dirty Bet’ in Lancashire are the most interesting. The woman is less invariable. Her Tudor name of Maid Marian is preserved in Leicestershire alone; elsewhere she appears as a shepherdess, or Eve, or ‘the fool’s wife’; and sometimes she is merged with the ‘fool’ into a single nondescript personage. The morris-dance is by no means confined to England. There are records of it from Scotland[697], Germany[698], Flanders[699], Switzerland[700], Italy[701], Spain[702], and France[703]. In the last-named country Tabourot described it about 1588 under the name of _morisque_[704], and the earlier English writers call it the _morisce_, _morisk_, or _morisco_[705]. This seems to imply a derivation of the name at least from the Spanish _morisco_, a Moor. The dance itself has consequently been held to be of Moorish origin, and the habit of blackening the face has been considered as a proof of this[706]. Such a theory seems to invert the order of facts. The dance is too closely bound up with English village custom to be lightly regarded as a foreign importation; and I would suggest that the faces were not blackened, because the dancers represented Moors, but rather the dancers were thought to represent Moors, because their faces were blackened. The blackened face is common enough in the village festival. Hence, as we have seen, May-day became proper to the chimney-sweeps, and we have found a conjectural reason for the disguise in the primitive custom of smearing the face with the beneficent ashes of the festival fire[707]. Blackened faces are known in the sword-dance as well as in the morris-dance[708]; and there are other reasons which make it probable that the two are only variants of the same performance. Tabourot, it is true, distinguishes _les bouffons_, or the sword-dance, and _le morisque_; but then Tabourot is dealing with the sophisticated versions of the folk-dances used in society, and Cotgrave, translating _les buffons_, can find no better English term than _morris_ for the purpose[709]. The two dances appear at the same festivals, and they have the same grotesques; for the Tommy and Bessy of the English sword-dance, who occasionally merge in one, are obviously identical with the Maid Marian and the ‘fool’ of the morris-dance, who also nowadays similarly coalesce. There are traces, too, of an association of the hobby-horse with the sword-dance, as well as with the morris-dance[710]. Most conclusive of all, however, is the fact that in Oxfordshire and in Shropshire the morris-dancers still use swords or wooden staves which obviously represent swords, and that the performers of the elaborate Revesby sword-dance or play, to be