Roger de Coverley

Roger de Coverley is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Thomas Wilson in 1809 and published in Treasures of Terpsichore, 1st edition, London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2021. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.

Presumably this is an early version of Sir Roger de Coverley/Viginia Reel.

Wilson writes:
Cast off two couple and up again ··, down the middle, up again, right and left ··, and swing corners ··.

Wilson has a surprising description of right and left (see pages 39-44 of Wilson's An Analysis of Country Dancing, 1808 where he defines it to mean: "2nd corner places change by left shoulders, 1st corner places right, 2nd corners change back by left, 1st corners by right."

The animation plays at 120 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. 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 dances of George Williams (including interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
An online description of the dance may be found here.

1-81s cast, go down the outside, turn and come back
9-121s lead down, turn and lead back to 2nd place as 2s move up
13-16M1+W2 change left, W1+M2 right, M1+W2 left, W1+M2 right (all back where they started)
17-20Swing corners: 1s right turn 1st corner
21-241s left turn partner once and a bit
25-281s right turn 2nd corner
29-321s left turn partner once and a bit to finish 2nd place proper

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 perils of youtube. 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=RogerDeCoverley

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The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2021 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2021 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This website is copyright © 2021,2022,2023,2024 by George W. Williams V
Creative Commons License 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.