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The first record of the tune and dance is in an account of the Christmas festivities at the court of Edward VI of England in 1551, where a list of expenses for the year’s Lord of Misrule (the character responsible for overseeing the celebrations) included, for his dancers, the cost of thre garments of sarsenett with iij payre of sloppes of owde store, for them that daunsed trenchemore.
**Trenchmore**

**Played by**: *Jacob Heringman*
**Source**: *Soundcloud*
**Image**: *Portrait of Edward VI of England, seated, wearing a gown lined in fur (ermine or lynx) over a crimson doublet with the collar of the Order of the Garter and holding a Bible.*

The dance featured a number of ‘tricks’ or ‘capers’ and seems to have been a large, boisterous activity. Thomas Deloney, writing in his work The Gentle Craft, Part II (London, c. 1598), describes a character who “like one dauncing the trench more he stampt up and downe the yard, holding his lips in his hands.”

It was mentioned in a 1564 morality play by William Bulleyn, where a minstrel was described as "dancing Trenchmore”; William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) gives: “We had a Wedding to day and the young fry tickle Trench-more.”

Some time after its introduction the dance was sufficiently common as to attract allusion in both literature and common usage—any unrestrained, wild activity was likely to provoke comparison with ‘dancing Trenchmore’, and, on a more sinister note, one recorded letter threatens that a man will be made to talk by being suspended so that his feet barely touch the ground, so that he will ‘dance Trenchmore’ in his agony (see Donnolly).

Trenchmore is given by John Playford as the title of a dance, however, as Dean-Smith & Nicol point out:

The word is used elsewhere as the name for a kind of dance with an under-and-over movement (like 'Grimstock' or the roll-figure of certain sword-dances) or danced under and over the furniture through the hall and kitchen; the word is often used in the literature of the period:--"Capering a morrisca or trenchmore": "Like one dancing the trenchmore he stampt up and down, holding his hips in his hands," "Among a number of these contrey dances I did light on such a Galliard as had a tricke (caper) above trenchmore", while 'The West-country Jigg' or 'A trenchmore galliard' to the tune of 'Up with Aley' in the Roxburgh Ballads described a country gathering like "Come Lasses and lads" as the wedding of the Lasses of Trenchmore Lee^[1].

...more at: Trenchmore - full Score(s) and Annotations

↑ Margaret Dean-Smith & E.J. Nicol, “The Dancing Master: 1651-1728: Part III. “Our Country Dances.” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, vol. 4, No. 6 (Dec., 1945), p. 226.

[1] Margaret Dean-Smith & E.J. Nicol, “The Dancing Master: 1651-1728: Part III. “Our Country Dances.” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, vol. 4, No. 6 (Dec., 1945), p. 226.

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