The Mock Hobby Horse
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Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
"The Mock Hobby Horse", also known as "Mock Hoby-Horse" or "Les Macabees" is an English<br> country dance tune in 6/4 or 6/8 time and D Major. The parts are played ABB (Karpeles,<br> Raven, Sharp) or AABB (Barnes).<br> The melody first appears in Henry Playford's Dancing Master 10th edition (1698) and was<br> retained through the 18th and last edition of 1728.<br> "Mock Hobby Horse" was also published by John Walsh in The Compleat Country Dancing Master<br> editions of 1718, 1731 and (by his son, also John Walsh) 1754. Graham Christian (2015)<br> finds a version of the tune in Anthony Pointel's Deusiesme recoil des Dance et<br> Contre-Dances (1688). Christian remarks: "Pointel's title for the tune, "Les Macabees",<br> a garbled Francophone rendition of the English title, suggests that he was flummoxed by<br> this folkloric figure [i.e. the hobby horse], but also that the tune and perhaps the dance<br> itself, in some form, predated Playford's publication of it by at least a decade".<br> Christian also points out that a hobby horse is a representation of a horse, in effect, a<br> hobby horse is already a 'mock horse'. The extra emphasis of employing the word 'mock' in<br> the title suggests to Christian that "the association with the lively folk custom could<br> no longer be taken for granted" and suggests that the use of the term 'ride one's hobby<br> horse' to refer to one's self-image or self-presentation to the world, established by the<br> mid-18th century, had begun at the beginning of the century.<br> It was printed in<br> Barlow's The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master (1986),<br> Barnes's English Country Dance Tunes (1986),<br> Christian's A Playford Assembly (2015),<br> Karpeles & Schofield's A Selection of 100 English Folk Dance Airs (1951),<br> Raven's English Country Dance Tunes (1984) and<br> Sharp's Country Dance Tunes (1909).<br>
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