The Spanyard
The Spanyard is an English Country Dance. It was published by John Playford (website) in 1651 in The English Dancing Master. It was interpreted by Scott Pfitzinger (website) in about 2019. It is a proper 4 Couple Longways dance. It is a USA dance. The dance lasts 112 bars. It is in the key: D Major. An online description of the dance may be found here.
Playford writes:
Lead up a D. forwards, four slips to the right hand, set and turn S. Lead down, and as much First and last Cu. fall back, while the other meet and take both hands, the 2. Cu. slip up, and the third down, set and turn S. All this again, to your places
Sides all, set and S. That again First and third put your We. by both hands back, the other going the Co. way, fall into each others places, set and turn S. All that again the Co. way
Arms all, set and turn S. That again First man and 2. Wo. and third man and last Wo. meet and go back, take hands and go round once and a halfe, changing places The other four as much All that again, to your places
The animation plays at 120 counts per minute. Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color.
The dance contains the following figures: USA, hand turn (allemande), set, turn single, poussette, siding, arming (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 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=TheSpanyard
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © ~2019 by Scott Pfitzinger. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2020 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
This website is copyright © 2021-2025 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.