Now that I’ve been able to test out my heys theory with real live people (many thanks to Aasa Thorvaldsdottir, Kean de Lacy, Katherine Gotehird, and Linet of Beaumaris for being my guinea pigs) I am picking up work on my heys paper again. I just spent about half an hour hunting down an unusually and annoyingly vague reference from the Oxford English Dictionary. Since I’m interested in making the research process more accessible (and helping people with research problems) I thought I would go into detail about how this research worked.
I started by looking up “hey” in the Oxford English Dictionary (as I have online access through my university). This brought me a bunch of early sources I can incorporate into my “evidence of heys as a period dance figure” section. What I had been hoping for, however, was some conclusive etymology and I was sadly disappointed. The etymology section of the page, in its entirety, states “Of uncertain origin: haye d’allemaigne is used in 15th cent. French by Marot.” This is earlier than the earliest French source I was aware of (Arbeau’s Orchésographie, first published in 1589) so I decided to locate this source.
At first I tried google searching “haye d’allemaigne” and “haye d’allemaigne marot,” neither of which bore fruit for me. I decided instead to locate the author’s works to try and find the phrase within them. The first step in this process was to determine who Marot was. A google search for “Marot 15th century” got me to the Wikipedia page for Clément Marot, who seemed to be a reasonable match. While Wikipedia frequently has links to public-domain texts, this particular article does not, so I then searched for “Clément Marot poems.” This led me to clementmarot.com, which appears to be a Marot fansite but does contain the text of some of his poems. After clicking on the various links to works and using the find function (ctrl+f) to look for “haye” and “allemaigne,” neither of which were effective, I decided to try googling the term again but in quotes this time.
Googling “”haye d’allemaigne”” led me to the text of Dictionnaire Historique de l’Ancien Langage François ou Glossaire de la Langue Françoise Depuis Son Origine Jusqu’au Siècle de Louis XIV (volume 7, which contains words beginning with letters H-M). While I am not well-versed in French, I was able to find the entry for “haye,” which contains the following on page 32:
Haye d’Allemaigne, » sorte de
danse :Processions, ce sont morisques
Que font amoureux champions
Les hayes d’Allemaigne frisques,
Passepiedz, bransles, tourdions. (C. Marot, p. 11.)
I then googled the dictionary title and looked through the Google Books results until I found volume 10, which covers words beginning with letters T-Z. It also contains the list of works cited, which led me to the entry for Clément Marot on page 16 of the list: “Marot (Œuvres de Clément) : La Haye, 1731″. This gave me a starting point for finding his complete works, although all a google search got me was a list of physical editions for sale (less than helpful when all I needed was to check what poem this was from). Searches of portions of the quote were less than helpful in finding the poem it came from. Eventually I went to worldcat.org and searched for “oeuvres de clement marot” and filtered by ebook editions. Under the “Find a copy online” section were several links to a Google Books edition. I used the “search inside” function to search for “bransles” in the book, as I was unsure whether “hayes d’Allemaigne” would be spelled the same way, and discovered the following on page 38:
Processions ce sont morisques
Que font amoreux champions,
Les ayes d’Allemaigne frisques,
Passepiedz, bransles, tourdions
(Interestingly, this verse apparently read “Branles guays, allemandes frisques,/ Basses danses et tourdions” in an older edition, though which one is opaque to me due to my lack of French skills.) Scrolling upwards led me to the title of this piece, “Description du Temple de Cupido,” which was composed in 1513-1514, preceding Orchésographie by about 75 years. While this poem was not composed in the 15th century and does not contain descriptions of how the hey was actually danced, it does indicate that it was a dance figure at least by the early 16th century.
This adventure in sourcing did not grant me a more detailed description of what a hey actually is, but the OED entry did lead me to earlier sources than I had previously found, bolstering my argument for the relevance of heys to pre-17th century dance.