The fool's dress would seem to be designed to-day, as in the olden time,
upon no particular plan, but to follow the fancy of the individual
wearer. The Bidford man, whom we saw at his really funny antics, had a
fox's mask for headgear, the muzzle lying on the man's forehead, the
brush hanging down his back. His face was raddled like a clown's; he had
a vest of cowhide, with red sleeves; stockings and breeches much like the
dancers', and he wore his bells, not on a shin-pad like them, but in a
row all round the boot-top. He carried a bladder on the end of a stick,
and with it he freely whacked the hobby-horse man and occasionally
members of the audience.

The hobby-horse man of the same company was dressed like a jockey; and,
while the dancers had a rest, he and the fool carried on innumerable
capers, sometimes backing in amongst the audience, occasionally
overturning a few, and now and then chasing any maid that could be
started on the run. If this pair be typical of the olden time, we can
answer for it that their fun was uproarious and perfectly wholesome.


BELLS.

To the wearing of bells, stitched upon thongs and tied to the shin, there
would seem to be no exception amongst the Morris-folk, even from the
earliest times. The celebrated Kemp, who danced the Morris all the way
from London to Norwich in 1599, and whose picture we reproduce, wore his
bells in the traditional manner.

The records show that, even in recent times, both treble and tenor bells
were worn, each carried by the opposite files of dancers. There are