Cursed Dancers of Colbeck, The

DESCRIPTION: On a Christmas morning, a group of young people gather to carol and dance. A priest, who is saying mass, looks on in disapproval. The young people cannot stop dancing; they dance for a year, until many die or go mad or wander broken in body
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: (cannot be shown to have existed, but the underlying story was known by 1328)
KEYWORDS: dancing curse travel disease clergy religious MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
RELATED: Versions of the "Cursed Dancers" section of Handlyng Synne --
Kenneth Sisam, editor, _Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose_, Oxford, 1925, pp. 4-12, "The Dancers of Colbeck" (1 text, of 256 lines)
Robert D. Stevick, _Five Middle English Narratives_, Bobbs Merrill, 1967, pp. 27-36, "The Cursed Dancers of Colbeck" (1 text, a heavily standardized version of Sisam's text)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Judas" [Child 23] (subject: The Earliest English Ballad) and references there
NOTES [725 words]: This, like "The Knight of Liddesdale" [Child 160], is a "ballad on speculation" -- and the speculation in this case is even weaker than that for the "Knight."
The tale of the Cursed Dancers, although probably not actually true, is certainly ancient. Gerould, p. 207, reports that the tale, set in Kölbigk, was in circulation by the eleventh century, shortly after the alleged date of the tragedy, although Moore, p. 7, says that the Latin version of the tale is the Vita Sanctae Edithae virginis (Life of the Holy Virgin Edith), which he dates c. 1300.
The story of the Cursed Dancers is Thompson #C94.1.1 (although that number specifies that they must dance until the Judgment Day). Most of Thompson's citations appear to be German (or, in one case, Swiss), but he has one English and one Finnish/Swedish.
Brown, p. xi, mentions a tale told by Gerald of Wales (late twelfth century) that sounds a bit like this: A party of young people spent the night singing a song with the refrain "Swete lamman dhin are" (meaning, I think, [My] sweet leman/lover you are"). The priest, having been kept awake by the song, the next morning opened a service by singing that refrain rather than "Dominus vobiscum," resulting in a scandal.
Another version of the tale, closer to the original, says that a cursed dancer named Theodoric showed up at Wilton Abbey and was cured at the shrine of St. Editha (Gerould, p. 208). This would have allowed the story to reach England. Gerould quotes a bit of Latin verse about the story.
A ballad? Not even Gerould claims that. But Friedman, p. 16, following others who link the story to the evolution of carols, hints that he (or Gerould, or someone, at least) considers the tale of the Cursed Dancers to be a ballad.
Similarly, Chambers, p. 178, interprets Gerould as finding "the earliest European record of a ballad in the combination of dance and song and story described in the eleventh- or twelfth-century legend of the Dancers of Kölbigk."
If they are right and this is a ballad, it follows that, since the story is eleventh century, it is a candidate for the Earliest English Ballad. So here it is in the Index, even though this is probably the worst of all the "earliest ballad" candidates I've examined. And most of the cases are quite feeble.
Although the tale apparently goes back to the eleventh century, in England, it cannot be documented before the early fourteenth. In 1303, Robert Mannying of Brunne, or Bourne (sometimes called simply "Robert of Brunne") began to write Handlyng Synne ("Handling Sin") ("Þe ȝeres of grace fyl þan to be / A þousynd and þre hundred and þre"; Sisam, p. 2). It was based on an apparently Anglo-Norman work (i.e. French, but written in England), William of Wad(d)ington's Manuel de (la) Pechiez or Manuel des Pechiez Mannyng's version is metrical and is more adaption than translation; William provided the framework, but Mannyng made the book his own. It is a collection of rules and commandments, often illustrated with exemplum, or tales illustrating the point. William deals with "the Commandments, the Sins, the Sacraments, the Requisites, and the Graces of Shrift. But such a bald summary gives no idea of the richness and variety of the content" (Sisam, pp. 2-3).
Most of Mannyng's content derives from William, but the story of the Cursed Dancers is an exception. This was taken from a Latin version; there is a related copy of this Latin source in MS. Rawlinson C 938 (Sisam, p. 3).
The story of the Cursed Dancers is lines 8987-9252 in Furnivall's standard edition of Mannyng, apparently based on MS. Harley 1701 of about 1375 (Sisam, p. 4); there is a second complete manuscript copy (Bodley 415) and another fragment; none of these is the original (Stevick, p. xix). This seems to be regarded as the most interesting part of Handlyng Synne; at least, it's the part reprinted by both Sisam and Stevick.
Emerson, p. 276, says that Mannying was born around 1260 and died around 1340. Emerson dates the Harley copy slightly earlier than Sisam, to c. 1360; since paleography generally cannot date a manuscript closer than the nearest fifty years, and sometimes not to the nearest hundred, this is a trivial difference. Either date would make the copy more than half a century more recent than Mannyng's translation, and a generation or so after his death.- RBW
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