themselves patronise the art.  There were a number of professional dancers in Gaul, as well as in the other provinces of the Roman Empire, who were hired to dance at feasts, and who endeavoured to do their best to make their art as popular as possible.  The lightheartedness of the Gauls, their natural gaiety, their love for violent exercise and for pleasures of all sorts, made them delight in dancing, and indulge in it with great energy; and thus, notwithstanding the repugnance of the Roman aristocracy and the prohibitions and anathemas of councils and synods, dancing has always been one of the favourite pastimes of the Gauls and the French.

[Illustration:  Fig. 182.—­Dancers on Christmas Night punished for their Impiety, and condemned to dance for a whole Year (Legend of the Fifteenth Century).—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut by P. Wohlgemuth, in the “Liber Chronicorum Mundi:”  folio (Nuremberg, 1493).]

Leuce Carin, a writer of doubtful authority, states that in the early history of Christianity the faithful danced, or rather stamped, in measured time during religions ceremonials, gesticulating and distorting themselves.  This is, however, a mistake.  The only thing approaching to it was the slight trace of the ancient Pagan dances which remained in the feast of the first Sunday in Lent, and which probably belonged to the religious ceremonies of the Druids.  At nightfall fires were lighted in public places, and numbers of people danced madly round them.  Rioting and disorderly conduct often resulted from this popular feast, and the magistrates were obliged to interfere in order to suppress it.  The church, too, did not close her eyes to the abuses which this feast engendered, although episcopal admonitions were not always listened to (Fig. 182).  We see, in the records of one of the most recent Councils of Narbonne, that the custom of dancing in the churches and in the cemeteries on certain feasts had not been abolished in some parts of the Languedoc at the end of the sixteenth century.

Dancing was at all times forbidden by the Catholic Church on account of its tendency to corrupt the morals, and for centuries ecclesiastical authority was strenuously opposed to it; but, on the other hand, it could not complain of want of encouragement from the civil power.  When King Childebert, in 554, forbade all dances in his domains, he was only induced to do so by the influence of the bishops.  We have but little information respecting the dances of this period, and it would be impossible accurately to determine as to the justice of their being forbidden.  They were certainly no longer those war-dances which the Franks had brought with them, and which antiquarians have mentioned under the name of Pyrrhichienne dances.  In any case, war-dances reappeared at the commencement of chivalry; for, when a new knight was elected, all the knights in full armour performed evolutions, either on foot or on horseback, to the sound of military music, and the populace danced round them.  It has been said that this was the origin of court ballets, and La Colombiere, in his “Theatre d’Honneur et de Chevalerie,” relates that this ancient dance of the knights was kept up by the Spaniards, who called it the Moresque.