ABSTRACT
Many of the manuscript dances feature rudimentary country-dance figures, such as casting off, setting, turning either single or with partner, and changing places with two Singles and a Double. All sources begin with choreographies for the standard seven 'Measures', or formal dances, which many scholars have believed were an essential ingredient of the masques performed at the Inns of Court, followed by a selection of other dances which varies between sources. Turning to the content of the dances themselves, all shared the basic structural units of Double and the Single, usually forward and back but sometimes to the sides. In addition to ordinary Singles, Doubles and simple figures, the English almains explicitly require a promenade of special Doubles — aptly called by Melusine Wood the 'Almain Double'. The apparent lack of specified Almain Doubles in the sources, together with the use of increasingly partisan country-dance language, implies that the almain had certainly merged with the country dance by the 1670s.
