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I want to ask you what it's all about. Now that's a serious problem because you can fob almost anybody off but when they come up to you you're usually on your own so you're stuck with trying to answer it. The problem is what do you tell them quickly and easily so that they go away satisfied. The usual trouble is that whoever comes up already knows an answer and is inclined to doubt your knowledge and will argue with it. So, the question is what are the facts that you ought to be saying to people, if they're are convinced that you are doing fertility rites with Pre-Christian origins don't argue with them it isn't worth it. You say yes... and perhaps they'll go away.

There is no evidence of Morris having a ritual origin. There is ample evidence of other customs having such origins but there's a problem in the folk world, there's a problem really with anthropologists not just folklorists, that when they see a lot of customs of similar character i.e. something which occurs at a similar time of year and has people going around collecting money they assume that all these customs are of similar age and have the same distant past, this just isn't so. It isn't so in any other aspect of life so why in folklore? All these customs didn't suddenly appear at the same time in prehistory.

In fact you can say in 6000 BC there wasn't any prehistory because there was an icesheet everywhere. The forty or fifty families running round didn't have enough people to form a Morris team anyhow. It wasn't until the Celts were here that the place was settled enough to even have a society where you can imagine people got together fairly regularly. Now any one society is limited in what it does by the things it's got experience of and you can't imagine farm workers, serfs as they were, doing a sophisticated Mummers play when they'd never seen theatre of any sort. You can't imagine people doing sophisticated dances when they hadn't seen dancing of any sort. So a lot of customs, all the customs we are aware of, originated some time in the past when society, I mean upper classes, had evolved something that the lower people could take away and start to use for their own purpose. So, you had to have dancing as social activity before you could have Morris and you had to have theatre as church activity before you could have mummers and you had to have...

Well the oldest thing I can think of is that you had to have people wearing disguises, that is probably very old because if you kill something you end up with a skin and a head. If it was bear or a wolf or a horse you end up with something you can wear so the earliest references to customs are disguises in skins. What they were familiar with, acting out the hunt, the chase or the behaviour of the animals themselves and one can say certainly that's Pre-Christian because that's something that could be very old.

The Morris as we know it... that's two people dance... sets sorry, of two lines, had to wait until the idea of dancing against each other in a sort of mirror image, with a partner opposite as it were didn't occur as an idea until the eleventh or twelfth century. Dancing in two lines in a processional is classical Roman but dancing opposite each other is middle ages and you had to have something like that before you could have the Morris. The Morris as far as one knows, the view that used to be taken at the end of the nineteenth century, it's probably right, because seventy to eighty years of dance folklore in trying to prove that Cotswold Morris has ancient origins have found no facts to support other than the original theory that it started in Spain and spread across France and Italy, underwent several transformations and finally arrived in England about 1500.

The literary references to this and one says Oh, the literary references are just the top layer, the folk could have been doing something else, there are a lot of church references, like the bishop said " you mustn't dress up in skins... you know, you mustn't do your pagan things in the woods". He didn't mean Morris dancing of course, he meant the sort of thing you did on Mayday, you had a bar and danced yourself silly and disappeared with somebody into the woods, although that's a very interesting thing, there was research into mediaeval population figures because one thing they wanted to establish was what was the structure of society, what was the average age of people, how long did families live and things like this. They found out the average length of a family name would run was four generations because if you don't live very long, like 30 to 40 and the number of children you can have in that time there's a good chance that after three or four generations you won't have any boys so the family name goes. They examined records of when people were born through the year, if this Mayday business meant anything there'd be a peak somewhere, say February, but there isn't. The peak actually is about Whitsun, and one thinks about it people were being very sensible and actually choosing the time of year between ploughing and harvesting, the slack bit of the year. In fact, spring time customs are a result of this. The time of year when you don't have to work so hard. The winter is a slack period because there isn't much you can do. But once you have the Spring, it's very busy, planting, calving, the sheep. Then a slack period in May, particularly when the Calendar was 13 days different, then you start the haymaking and it was unremitting work round to harvest supper at the end of October. So really, customs were in the spring because they had to be.

We always have the problem in anthropology of chicken and egg.... now I'm rather pragmatic and I always go for what I consider rational explanations. Now, if you can find a good ordinary reason why people did it then that's probably true rather than a nice romantic view. It's not true to say all customs had such an origin, so were ritual. Some had ////////////// because there were idiots in the past who persuaded other idiots to go out and dance around these stone circles on the top of some hill on May morning, things like this, there are always people like that, still.

The first recorded Morris somewhere in the twelfth century, I can't remember the date, in Spain the year after they pushed the Moors out of a town, they got these two lines up Christians and Moors and they did a ritual battle and this proved so popular that not only did every town that got liberated in the next two or three centuries start it's own Morris but it spread back into France and into Italy.

Now in Italy after a hundred years or so, they invented something called the matachin which is a stick or sword dancing which started off as fencing with a few figures in between. This spread back as well and into France and to Paris and into what were then being formed and I'm talking about the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the societies of fools. These were quite common in those latitudes, and by that I mean Germany through France and Luxembourg. Society would have it's entertainment through these companies of fools which would be semi-professional people, people who had had a little bit of training, clerks and so on, that sort of people who could read and write. They would organise masques, entries.... how do you organise and entry?.. just walk in... o, no, no, these were the grand thing with lots of people and lots of noise and things that opened up, they'd come in with a float that slowly opened up into something gorgeous. They organised dances and the dances were Morris.

A friend of mine Forest who was at North Carolina University... he's somewhere else now... an Englishman naturally... analysed all the available early references to Morris up to 1600 in what he considered a scientific way that is to take a model of all the things you'd expect to go with a custom - costume, did they black their faces, when did they appear, how many were there, were there supernumerary characters, all this sort of thing and every reference you'd tick off and start looking for common elements because unfortunately people (and Sharp was as bad as the others) would shove all the references into one bag and say the custom consisted of this, this and this. 'This' unfortunately came from that place and 'this' from the other and if you read the introduction to Book I of the Morris books, you'll find he's run a lot of things together which on mature reflection just don't fit.

Forest went through all these and he discovered three things; one, they weren't seasonal, they always happened during local celebrations but they didn't happen at particular times of year. The second thing, they all wore uniforms, and usually very expensive ones, long jackets in those days, wasn't the baldric which has grown up really based on the militia regimental costume but it was so costly that people would leave it as an expensive item in their will. In East Anglia there are quite a few wills where somebody left his Morris coat to someone in his will. Places, villages, towns like Marlow on the Thames couldn't afford costumes of their own and used to hire them from the next town down the river. The earliest reference to Abingdon is of church wardens buying costumes for the Morris, there's a very interesting sidelight on that because looking at records at Berkeley castle over in Gloucestershire, Lord Berkeley had a troupe of players who toured the country. This particular lot besides doing plays, and their accounts still exist, used to do the Morris, used to bring in the May, and they were paid in 1542 for doing the Morris in Abingdon, the same year that the church records paying X pence for bells for the Morrismen. So, one imagines that the first Morris troop to ever appear in Abingdon was a paid troupe from Gloucestershire.

So there are the elements, they didn't black their faces, they didn't come out at a particular season, they had expensive costumes and there was an element of professionalism about it. There was a Morris side paid f25 about 1530 to do the Morris. That was three or four pounds a head when a pound was something incredible. The earliest records are in towns where the royal family had palaces, like Woodstock, Kingston and Richmond and was often associated with a major do where the novelty was to bring in the Morris. A little later the stick dance side of it, all these early references are to kerchiefs, no mention of sticks, the bedlam Morris the matachin came some eighty years later as another fad.

There had been fads in society before, the Robin Hood, dressing up as a party and doing what we would call children’s games, much more the element of the farmer in his dell type of thing, simple choosing games but remember in those days people were relatively unsophisticated, if you hadn't met anything sophisticated you were quite happy to run around kissing the girls. One must remember that many of today’s children’s games are direct descendants of adult pastimes certainly of Tudor times and a bit earlier.

Well before I said ///////////////// so called May games which were pantomime type behaviour and before that there was a phase when the round table was all the thing and people used to go round being sets of knights. As far as I can gather the Mummers, the Seven Champions of Christendom, not the present lot, the originals all come from this period, the twelfth and thirteenth century.

But all these customs have different origins. Now, how you explain that to somebody who comes up and asks? All you can say is: 'the Morris as we do it is very English'. If you see continental sides who dress up vaguely like Morris, the dance itself has no connection, the fact that they have sticks is the only thing in common, in terms of formation, step and things like this there is no cultural connection, so you can say what we do is terribly English.

In fact, it's grown as far as I can tell out of the social dance of about 1600 with a big revival in interest at the restoration in 1660. So, if you like you can say the Cotswold Morris became popular or was revived after the restoration of 1660. 29th was Charles's birthday and the date of the restoration. A lot of the tunes, Princess Royal, Jockey to the Fair can be traced to that time. Now, if he says "where did it really come from?" Well alright, late mediaeval times have the first references to Morris in England and it had been brought back by people like John O'Gaunt who had angled for many years to be King of Spain, failed of course but he was bought off with and enormous pension and numerous works of art and he brought a team of dancing girls back with him, you can't really blame that on the Morris, you could make up a lovely story that he brought back a women’s Morris team........

That Morris only has the occasion, the show. There were two forms of dance, one where you have a ring of people who dance around a character in the middle, usually a man dressed as a woman or sometimes a girl bride and often had this pantomime element in it, or with two lines of people moving forward and back, passing through, and having a serpentine movement but very little to do with the form of dance we do at the moment. Now, the other dance tradition we have, the Longsword, that had an ancient origin but not pre-historic.

If you read Violet Orford's book 'Sword Dance and Drama', she talks about the folklorists gap. The earliest references are in the fourteenth century and then there's an enormous gap back in to pre-history. But no references to anything you could call sword dancing. She doesn't make the obvious conclusion that any scientist would make, it wasn't there, and she also doesn't do what German authors have done and that's plot on the map of Europe references to sword dancing, where they occur and when.

The earliest references are Nuremberg, southern Germany and over 150 years it spread through Europe and the first occurrence in England is in Lancashire I'm pleased to say, not Yorkshire. There are early references to sword dancing in Winchester and other places. So again it was wide spread before settling down into a local tradition.

As I've said before about Morris, it was all over the country from East Anglia to Edinburgh in Tudor times. But it coalesced into a fairly local custom and that's what one sees about many of these old customs, they are made fairly universal but they coalesce into an area. Well, sword dances...

The correlation that the Germans identified (which I have a great deal of faith in) is that following the collapse of the Italian banks and the discovery of silver in the Northern Alps; Southern Germany dominated Europe financially and technically. There was a period when Germany supplied engineers for mining everywhere, from Portugal through to Romania and up into Scotland. More recently, it was Cornish miners in the 19th century, there are many English records of bringing Germans over to set up mining in the areas where sword dancing is done, and also in the rest of Europe. The southern banks had factors where sword dancing later appeared sooner or later. The Germans believe, and I support it, that the dance was invented probably about 1300 in Southern Germany and was spread by the Germans, a terrible admission isn't it?

Like a lot of things folk, some of the earliest understanding of what was done was from people bringing together evidence and it's been impossible to shake this evidence. It would be nice to imagine that some of these things date back to the dim and distant past but there is no evidence, except for the animal disguises.

Now the Rapper sword, you see, at the turn of the century there were people who remembered it being invented. The Longsword was always for eight, then people discovered you could do it with six and then the Northerners discovered you could do it with Five with flexible rappers. Dr Court has a scrapbook of stories of who was the first side, where was the first area, who were the first half dozen teams, where was the first competition and how it spread out from that area.

North-western Morris hasn't got a long origin either, the rushcart business is probably two or three hundred years old and the dressing of the rushcart, as a ceremony, to be towed by Morris dancers was probably late 18th, early 19th century. The Morris as a show dance didn't really get going until rushcarts stopped and the Morris found itself without a purpose, about 1880. Then the Morris took off and started pinching ideas and almost every pub had its own side and so on so you got masses and masses of teams. The interesting thing about the Northwest is that some people like Julian Pilling who we all know for his anti-women’s Morris letters has a collection of photographs which we looked at a few years ago, of sides dancing before the First World War. It has a slight preponderance of women’s sides over men’s sides, pre 1914. How he can say in print, as he has done, that before 1914 women didn't do it, when he had some 80 photographs of women’s sides, I find incredible.

One can understand the Victorians being fussy about it. There's a lovely story about Buxton which describes how they got a team of girls to do the Morris. After a few years they thought it unseemly for a team of developing girls to dance in public so they brought in a team of youths from somewhere else. That's not uncommon in Victorian times for women or mixed activities to be thought unsuitable for the women to be doing it and they were pushed out of it.

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