Theatre and dance · John Playford, The English Dancing Master, 1651

Your Owne Side

John Playford printed Newcastle and Nonesuch in 1651 as plain instructions for eight dancers. Danced by nothing but those words, Newcastle reaches every position the book itself announces, and Cecil Sharp's 1913 names for who stands beside whom come out of the same ring, 7 of 7. Under the default woman-on-man's-right convention, own-side-after-last-crossing test, and source-specific hey lengths, Nonesuch's last line, 'come up on your owne ſide', is reached by both readings dancers actually hold: one in 32 passes that never pair two men or two women, the other in 28 passes that include 12 such pairs. Both mixed readings finish on the wrong side, and the Sharp reconstruction's 4312 is 5 rounds, using its 152-bar record and Sharp's progressive second part.

Newcastle's words put every couple in the Contrary place and home again; Nonesuch's two held readings both come up on their own side, one in 32 passes with no same-sex pairing, the other in 28 with 12 such pairs. The default is the woman-on-man's-right convention, with an own-side-after-last-crossing test and source-specific hey lengths.

The English Dancing Master prints each dance as a tune and a few lines of instruction. There are no drawings of the steps, no counts, and no word on which foot goes first. Dancing masters have argued about what the words mean for more than a century. This page runs Newcastle and Nonesuch's second and third blocks under declared readings, writes down every meeting, and checks the result against the few lines where the book stops giving orders and says where everybody should be standing. Those lines are never used to move anyone.

One · ten seconds

Newcastle, danced by its own words

Newcastle is on page 77: Round for eight, three parts, each with a line for the first strain of the tune and a line for the second. Press next line. The ring moves only as the words say. The dancers are drawn in the book's own characters, a crescent for a man and a circle with a point for a woman; the number is the couple.

    Loading the transcription.

    Now tick the box. With the two changes of place struck out of the second part, the rest of the dance still runs, and every one of the book's own statements fails: the first man never stands beside the third woman, nobody reaches the Co. place (the book's key: Co. Stands for Contrary), and nobody falls into his place as at first. Read literally, as a swap that stays swapped, change places is what makes the page true.

    How the words are read (the lexicon, in full)

    your owne is each dancer's partner. the next is the neighbour of the other sex who is not the one you last danced with. change places with them swaps the two named dancers and leaves them swapped. foure and foure a breſt to each wall splits the ring into two lines of four, and your oppoſites are the dancers facing you across that split; along the roome is the split at right angles. Figures that bring dancers back to your places (meet, back again, casting off under the arms, hands in) are logged and move nobody. Every clause on the page must match an entry; a clause that matches none is refused and named, never guessed.

    A second witness names who stands where

    Cecil Sharp printed his reading of Newcastle in The Country Dance Book, Part II. The copy read here is the second edition, revised, 1913 (Internet Archive countrydancebook12shar, pp. 58 to 61). Along the way he names who stands beside whom, which the 1651 text never does: First man and third woman lead forward, Second couple joins hands with first man and third woman, all resume original places. At the default clockwise numbering, default ring split, and partner-side reading of your We., run the 1651 words and compare: 7 of his 7 statements come out of the same ring.

    None of these three is printed in 1651. With the partner-side reading of your We., the book's own three statements survive every numbering and every split. Sharp's lines of four appear only with the couples numbered clockwise, as his own diagram numbers them, and with one particular split. Read your We. as each man's own woman and the third part cannot be danced: at that moment no man is standing beside her, and the engine says so instead of moving anybody.

    Two · the dismissal

    “Every reconstruction ends at 4312 anyway”

    Nonesuch is on page 29. The Up a Double Playford index lists 6 Nonesuch interpretations, of which 4 print 4312; the direct Nonesuch ~ Sharp page records that variant's 152 bars. So the readings do not matter, the dismissal goes. Here is how the dance ends, as printed:

    Armes all as you ſtand, that againe, ſlip all to the left hand, and back to your places, then as much to the right hand / Firſt man ſlip to the left hand, and ſtand the Wo. as much to her left hand, the 2. Cu. as much, third as much, fourth as much / Then the ſingle Hey, all handing downe, and come up on your owne ſide.

    Two phrases in it are genuinely disputed. Sharp slips each dancer into his original place and dances the ſingle Hey as a Circular hey, danced progressively, all handing as they pass (p. 103). Mike Barraclough, as Colin Hume reports him, has everyone ... in their partner's place when you get the final instruction, and a hey that goes round a corner. Scott Pfitzinger's instructions do the same: slip to his left into his Partner’s place, then crossing at the bottom but not crossing at the top. The grid runs all four combinations. The printed last words, come up on your owne ſide, move nobody. They are the test.

    An encounter, exactly

    An event the reading's program names between two dancers: set to, side with, arm with, turn, take hands and meet, change places with, or pass in a hey. It is keyed by where it falls (part and strain, or the change of a hey) and by the two dancers. How a figure is danced (which shoulder, how many arm turns, which foot) rides beside the key and is not part of it. Standing near someone is not an encounter.

    Two names on this page are not the book's. Circular hey is Sharp's own term, and corner hey is a modern name for the hey Hume describes as going round a corner. The book says only the ſingle Hey. Woman on the man's right is a modelling convention, not a reading anyone holds.

    'Come up on your owne ſide' is tested as: every dancer finishes on his or her own side, and every move after that dancer's last crossing of the set runs along that own side. A stricter test also asks that every one of those moves goes up.

    At the default woman-on-man's-right convention, own-side-after-last-crossing test, and source-specific hey lengths, 2 of the 4 readings pass, and they are exactly the two that people hold. Sharp's hey takes 11 changes and 32 passes; every pass is a man with a woman, and each man meets each woman twice. The corner hey takes 8 changes and 28 passes; every pair of dancers meets once, and 12 of those passes are two men or two women. Both mixed readings finish with every dancer on the wrong side.

    a reading

    Who hands whom, in order

      Same meetings, different sides

      Which way the hands go

      All a Mode de France, printed as a separate dance on page 49, ends with a figure in words: the firſt man takes his Wo. by the hand, his left hand to the 2. Wo. the right to the 3. and ſo forward. Sharp's circular hey hands in exactly that order. The corner hey does not.

      Sharp read the same words two ways

      Nonesuch says to the left hand twice in its last block, eight words apart. Both readings on this page take the first as each dancer's own left. Sharp does too, and then, for the second, sends the first man the other way.

      The side the men stand on is a convention, and the book does not settle it

      Which hand is her left hand depends on which side of the set the men stand. The 1651 text never says. Its characters do not settle it either: Newcastle's ring draws every man's crescent opening toward the centre, as if the crescent opens the way he faces; Nonesuch prints each woman above a man whose crescent opens to the left; and All a Mode de France prints its file as woman, man, woman, man with each Wo. behinde her owne man, which, read the same way, would have the men facing the other direction. Sharp draws the men along the left wall (his legend: women by squares, and those of the men by circles). Set mirror above and to her left hand puts everyone in their own place: then only the circular hey passes.

      Where 4312 comes from

      In the default bar-count view, the permutation is made entirely in Sharp's second part, which he heads (Duple minor-set) and marks (progressive). Such a part, he writes, must be repeated as often as the dancers decree (p. 28). The Nonesuch ~ Sharp page says his Nonesuch lasts 152 bars. Sharp's own bar column gives 72 bars to the other four parts and 16 to each round of the second, so 152 bars is 5 rounds. Run his duple minor-set rule (Part I, pp. 19 to 21) for 5 rounds and the couples stand 4312. His own usual practice, repeating until the leader has returned to his original place at the top of the General Set, takes 7 rounds, 184 bars, and ends 1423.

      So 4312 is not a witness to the 1651 words. It is the endpoint of a count someone chose for a figure Sharp built out of two dances. Colin Hume: Sharp tried to combine the two and gave himself problems. The 1651 book prints them separately, on pages 29 and 49. Asked for an endpoint from the 1651 Nonesuch itself, the engine refuses: Doe thus to the laſt. prints no count.

      Three · the famous disputes

      Siding, setting and arming move nobody

      The arguments that fill the literature are real. They are about how a figure is danced, not who dances it or where anyone ends up. Each control below changes what the page draws, and each time the engine re-runs both dances under both readings and compares every place and every meeting.

      Siding

      Setting

      Arming

      Where Sharp's siding came from

      Sharp says his right-then-left siding was deduced from “Nonesuch” (see p. 102), where the figure in question is described as “Side to the right” and “Side to the left,” (Part II, p. 19). Those words are his own notation on his page 102. The 1651 Nonesuch says only Sides all, that againe. Sides all to the right and left stands under All a Mode de France, page 49. Whether a later edition's Nonesuch carries the right-and-left wording was not checked.

      The check

      Recomputing.

      The record, and how it was read

      The 1651 text is transcribed from the Wikimedia Commons PDF of The English Dancing Master, whose page images are 1-bit scans at 300 ppi: PDF pages 7 (the key), 36 (Nonesuch, printed page 29), 56 (All a Mode de France, 49) and 84 (Newcastle, 77). Letters, spellings and the long s are kept as printed; the only normalisation is the long s to s and two printed line-end hyphens closed up. Every word was then collated against a second, independent transcription, Up a Double's. Of 562 words there are 18 places where the two differ in more than spelling, and 1 strain mark; each is resolved against the scan below.

      Which Sharp

      Up a Double and the brief for this page cite Sharp's Nonesuch as 1911. The copy read here is the second edition, revised, 1913, whose title page says so. The passages used were compared by OCR with the third edition of 1927: the names and relations the engine checks are the same, and some wordings changed (1927 has the hey paragraph as Very often they are identical where 1913 has Apparently they are identical). The 1911 first edition was not seen.

      Anchors, and what kind they are

      Every choice, live

      What the engine refuses

      Press a button.

      Not modelled

      Every figure on this page, recomputed

      Data files, hashed in your browser

      Prior art

      The Up a Double Playford index lists six Nonesuch and five Newcastle interpretations as separate variants and prints permutation strings; the direct Nonesuch ~ Sharp page is one variant at a time. Colin Hume's pages on the hey and on siding already say in prose that Sharp merged two dances, that Nonesuch's hey goes round a corner, and that siding has several versions. Scott Pfitzinger's Playford's Dancing Master gives facsimiles and modern instructions. Greg Lindahl's Reconstructing an English Country Dance from Playford discusses the gap between the text and modern practice. The corpus neighbours Plain Changes and The Extent treat bell permutations. We searched the open web (three queries on Playford, Nonesuch, Newcastle, the single hey and simulation), Up a Double's Playford index, Colin Hume's hey and siding pages, Pfitzinger's site and Lindahl's notes on 2026-09-14 and did not find a page that runs held readings of the 1651 Nonesuch and Newcastle text through one engine, checks each against the book's own printed position statements, and shows the resulting encounter traces side by side.

      Sources and terms