[Notes in this section are incomplete]

Social dance in the western European tradition can be usefully thought to have its origins in half-a-dozen pre-16th century phenomenun. These might be sketched in turn.

Song dances (carols)

Song-dances once had a place in nearly every culture and social milieu. There is probably not an aspect to human life (birth, initiation, marriage, worship, war, death) with which they have not been connected, and they probably had a place in pre-Christian ritual in Europe before evolving into a Medieval art. The song-dance style of the 13th century English was particularly influenced by the French tradition (English court custom of the day being essentially French). The English took the word 'carole' from the French, who in turn may have taken it from Italian. Dante, for example, in his Paradiso (canto xxiv., v.17) used the word 'Carola' as meaning a singing-dance:

'And as the wheels in works of horologes / Revolve so that the first to the beholder / Motionless seems, and the last one to fly, / So in like manner did these carols, dancing / In different measure, of their affluence (cosi quelle carole differente-mente danzando , della sua richezza) / Give me the gauge, as they were swift or slow' (Longfellow's translation).

In the 14th and 15th centuries the English went on to use the word 'carol' in a variety of ways - sometimes for a song sung during a procession, sometimes for something approaching a game, sometimes as a virtual synonym for dance. Thus in a retelling of the legend of the dancers of Kolbigk, the dancers are condemned to carol for a whole year without stopping, and thus Chaucer, in the 'Dreame', says 'I saw her daunce so comely, carol and sing so sweetly'. Where the word carol was referring to a song, the subject could be anything from feasting to politics. Most commonly, however, carol songs had a religious subject, were in a simple unpretentious style, used stock phrases, mixed dramatic devises with elements from the liturgy, decorated honest emotions with exotic folklore, and alternated between the vernacular and Latin. Such songs seemed to have been called for whenever communal movement was at the centre of a civic, aristocratic or church ceremony. The alternation between a refrain (for the people, party guests or a congregation) and a verse (for individuals, soloists or a priest) suited such situations. Carols sat well with the English tradition of repartee (smart reply), of mystery plays and of wassailing (going from door-to-door singing and wishing householders good-health in return for a small gratuity). They sat particularly well with the celebration of Christmas, which like Easter had become an important holiday in Medieval times. Christmas, sitting as it did on winter solstice, a date Druids had celebrated with a feast, Romans the Saturnalia and the Scandinavians the Yule festival, could not but help inherit some of the social nature of these earlier celebrations. Accordingly, unlike Easter, Christmas became an occasion for much feasting, music, liturgical license, well-wishing, drinking and dancing. Although the separation of song and dance had began and the medieval church frowned upon dancing in church contexts, the dancing that was once associated with songs for different occasions persisted, mostly in the form of circle dances.

Follow the leader dances

Notes still to come... gave birth to so many of the basic elements of later dance (e.g. the hey possibly evolving out lines wending through each other or turning back on themselves, and turning as a couple possibly evolving out of couples breaking off from the head of lines to rejoin at the end)

Early partner dances

Notes still to come... given the imperative for the man to have his sword on his left and feel as if he is leading his partner, these gave rise to the propensity for the woman to be on the man's right and for couples to circle clockwise (she following him to the left - perhaps happily concurring with the a lingering sense that moving with the sun was more propitious than the other way) but promenade (when dancing found floors) anti-clockwise (she being guided palm down in his palm up on the longer outside route around a room).

'International' court practise

Notes still to come ...interesting extant 15th century manuscripts such as the Salisbury manuscript and Gresley manuscripts show how dances from France and Italy respectively were being adopted and adapted in England at a very early date.

Ritual dance

Notes still to come ..... e.g. Maypole, Sword dancing....

Exstatic dance

Notes still to come....

Pageant choreography

Notes still to come... everything from horse shows to courtly masks

 

In late 16th century Italy dance became an artform and the first comprehensive dance manuals were produced. In 1581 Fabritio Caroso (c.1530-1605) released his Il Ballarino with music and instructions for 80 'upper class' dances, and in 1600 he issued his Nobilta de dame with descriptions for 68 steps and 49 dances. In 1602 Cesare Negri (c.1535-c.1604) published his Le gratie d'amore (reissued in 1604 as Nuvone inventioni di balli) with descriptions 43 dances (together with music) and the steps which an accomplished courtier or keen amateur might attempt. Though some dances in these manuals were for two or more couples, most were for a solo couple and most had perfectly symmetrical floor patterns. Though the choreographies were often complex, the simple human imperatives behind the art was fully appreciated, thus the comment by Caroso in his Nobilta that (translation):

Dance rouses the spirit to joy, relieves and refreshes us, keeping away annoying or unpleasant thoughts.

In France the Orchesographie appeared in 1588 under the name Thoinot Arbeau - a near perfect anagram of Jehan Tabouret, a canon of Langres, who had hoped to go down in history for his work on mathematics and astronomy, but is today remembered for his recreational writings published after his death by a former student. The manual is in the form of a dialogue between the elderly Arbeau and young Capriol. Capriol wants to please a young lady in a way that befits an eligible bachelor and Arbeau encourages and instructs him. The dances which Arbeau teaches included many which are also dealt with at length in contemporary Italian manuals - eg. the galliard (the showcase for the male dancers) and the pavan (danced with 'measured gravity'). They also included dances for which there are no other contemporary descriptions: 'Les Bouffons' (a sword dance), the 'morisque' (with the bells and stomping that still feature in Morris dancing today - the later certainly having some continental influences in its step names, 'galley' coming from 'galliard', 'caper' from 'capriole' or little goat), the 'volte' (a type of tordion or galliarde in which the leader turns his partner at the same time as leaping with her high in the air), the 'gavotte', the 'almain' (a German couples dance - proto-schottische?), and the'courante' (a running dance). Above all, they included 20 different 'branle'. The word 'branle' is used in the Italian manuals to refer to a sideways step with an accompanying swaying or twisting of the body. For Arbeau, however, a branle is not the step but the whole dance - usually danced with lots of sideways movement in a circle dance and usually not requiring a partner. These dances involved repeated footwork patterns (combinations of singles and doubles, jumps, kicks and mimed gestures) to tunes in duple, triple and mixed meters, sometimes with irregular phrases. Individual branles would be combined in suites and could be danced by any number of couples, woman on right of man (and new couples joining on to the right of couples already holding hands, in either a circle or a line with the man on the left hand end leading. One other element of the dances Arbeau described was kissing:

And there is more to it than this, for dancing is practised to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb, after which they are permitted to kiss their mistress in order that they may touch and savour one another, thus to ascertain if they are shapely or emit an unpleasant odour as of bad meat. Therefore, from this standpoint, quite apart from the many other advantages to be derived from dancing, it becomes an essential in a well-ordered society. 

Continental dance had an enormous influence on English dance in this century. All the latest dances and dance steps crossed the channel where the former were clearly mixed with indigenous favourites and the later were incorporated in indigenously devised patterns. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have delighted in La Volta and the English dance. Dargeson has much in common with Branle de la Haye. There were certainly many French dance teachers working in England. In Henry the Fifth (1599, Act III Scene 5), Shakesepeare has the French officers on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, complain that their mistresses think they cowards and has the Duke of Bretagne say:

They bid us to the English dancing-schools
And teach lavoltas high and swift corantos,
Saying our grace is only in our heels
And that we are most lofty runaways.

In other plays Shakespeare refers to 'lavoltas high and swift corantos', 'the hot and hasty French gigue', the 'branlse', as well as the 'old measures' (indigenous English choreographies using the continental alman and pavan footwork).

Some of the best insights into English scene in this period are offered by six manuscripts which describe dances enjoyed between 1570 and 1675 during 'revels' at the Inns of Court. These inns were groups of building in London where approximately 1,000 English trial lawyers lived, studied, taught and held court. Though dancing was not taught at the Inns, it was a regular diversion and though some dances were for men only, women also appear to have participated. In these manuscripts continental dances are commonly mentioned alongside the 'old measures'. For example, for Gray's Inn 1594 Christmas celebration a court of mock royalty was chosen and 

his Highness [the Prince of Purpoole] called for the Master of Revels, and willed him to pass the time in dancing: so his gentlemen-pensioners and attendants, very gallantly appointed, in thirty couples, danced the old measures, and then galliards, and other kinds of dances, revelling until it was very late.

It was not just aristocrats and professionals who enjoyed French style dancing. An anonymous broadsheet from 1569, in addition to speaking of Morris dancing and rounds as appropriate for a wedding, declares:

Good fellows must go learn to dance,
The bridal is full near-,
There is a Braule come out of France,
The trick'st you heard this year-a

For one Englishman writing in 1581, however, getting the brain and feet around any of these was just hard:

As firste for Dauncyng, although I like the measures verie well, yet I could never treade them aright, nor to use measure in any thyng that I went aboute, although I desired to performe all thynges by line and by leavell, what so ever I tooke in hande. Our Galliardes are so curious, that thei are not for my daunsyng, for thei are so full of trickes and tournes, that he which hath no more but the plain Sinquepace, is no better accoumpted of them than a verie bongler; and for my part thei might assone teache me to make a Capricornus [goat] as a Capre in the right kinde that it should bee. For a Jeigge my heeles are too heavie; and these braules are so busie, that I love not to beate my braines about them. A Rounde is too giddie a daunce for my diet, for let the whit the nier to the ende of the daunce with shame, that was begonne but there are many others that love them as well as I. Thus you maie perceive that there is no daunce but either I like not of theim, or thei like not of me, so that I can daunce neither. (as cited in Allison Thompson's 1998 Dancing Through Time, p.10)

One dance element which was shared between France and England in this period and which might not have required much practise was kissing. Just as Arbeau makes it clear that kissing of a chaste nature was appropriate in French dance, Shakespeare's Henry VIII says, when inviting Anne Bolyn to dance ('to take out'): 

I were unmannerly to take you out / And not to kiss you.

You could , however, kiss too much. Thus, Phillip Stubbes observation in his 1583 The Anatomie of the Abuses in Ailgna writes 

For what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and uncleane handling is not practised in those dancings.

During this period many French words came into common English use, e.g. 'double', 'hey' (from 'haye', meaning 'hedge' or 'woven branches') and 'almain'.

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