Maids Morris ~ Hume
Maids Morris ~ Hume is an English Country Dance. It was published by Henry Playford (website) in 1688 in A new Additional Sheet to the Dancing Master. It was interpreted by Colin Hume (website) in 2014 and published in Colin Hume's Website. Found in The Playford Assembly. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 24 bars. It is in the key: C Major. An online description of the dance may be found here.
The two men take hands and fall back, then meet their Partners and turn S. the two we. doing the like afterwards
All four take hands and go half round and turn S. then half round and back again, then the double Figure, and the 1. cu. lead down the middle.
Note that, a double Figure (of eight) is called for. Playford and Young do not use the term "double figure" often, so it is tricky at first to figure out what is meant by it. They also occasionally use the term "single figure". Colin Hume has analyzed these uses and concluded that in these dances a double Figure does not have the modern meaning. It just means a full figure eight.
In 2025 he modified his original interpretation to replace the double figure in B2 with a full figure of eight. Of course you may still chose to do a double figure, and if you do, the 2s cast up flows naturally from it.
The tune, Maid's Morris, was published by Playford in 1688 with the dance of the same name. The music was synthesized using Colin Hume's software.
The animation plays at 113 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily (no music plays during this slow set). Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dance contains the following figures: turn single, circle, cast, lead, figure eight, (and probably others).
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the transience of my youtube URLs. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=MaidsMorris-Hume
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2014 by Colin Hume. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2024 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2026 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.