The Spaniard
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Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
"The Spaniard" is an English country dance tune in 6/8 time in G major.<br> This is not the same tune as "The Spaniard" in The Dancing Master.<br> The title refers<br> perhaps to The Spaniards, a fashionable garden resort in 18th century England located on the<br> northern boundary of Hempstead Heath. An engraving dated 1745 shows it to have been laid out<br> with a formal arrangement of trees and turf introduced to England by the Dutch William of Orange.<br> It was said to have been built on the site of a lodge at the entrance to the Bishop of London’s<br> domain and that the lodge was once tenanted by a family connected with the Spanish embassy;<br> another version attributes to a Spaniard the conversion of the lodge into a house of entertainment. <br> The establishment’s greatest hour came during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London (1780) in<br> which the famous lawyer Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square was sacked and burned, the<br> rioters then crying “To Ken Wood!” Ken Wood was another of Mansfield’s residences, right next<br> to the Spaniard and directly along the route of the mob. The Spaniard’s publican, thinking quickly<br> and with cool nerves, invited the rioters to refresh themselves and threw open his house and<br> cellars for their entertainment. Secretly, however, he dispatched a rider to summon the Horse<br> Guards from their barracks. The staff of Ken Wood helped by setting up tubs of strong ale outside their premises<br> and by the time the small detachment of troops arrived the rioters were so disorganized they were<br> compelled to flee.The melody was published in the Netherlands in 1649 in a volume called Der Fluyten Lust-Hof<br> (The Flute’s Garden of Delights) by Jacob van Eyck (c. 1590-1657), a recorder player,<br> carillonneur of the Utrecht Dom Cathedral and director of all the bells and clock-chimes<br> of the city.<br> It was printed in Barnes's English Country Dance Tunes (1986), Barnes's English Country Dance<br> Tunes, vol. 2 (2005), Karpeles & Schofield's A Selection of 100 English Folk Dance Airs (1951),<br> Barlow's The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford’s Dancing Master (1985) and<br> Raven's English Country Dance Tunes (1984).<br>
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