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The first thing I'm going to talk about is the background to Morris. Those of you who were at the arena yesterday heard the standard spiel about the Cotswold Morris being very English. That's very true of course; because you'll see things that look like Morris teams but don't look anything like our dances at all. People talk about Morris going back to pre-Christian origins. I've been doing Morris for 25 years, and 25 years ago nobody thought of going round saying that it had been `pre-Christian'. In fact, that had somewhat unpleasant associations with witches and the devil and things like this - the Other Religion. Suddenly it's become fashionable; and I notice that as I keep brochures from sides over the years, it has changed from "it might be" to "perhaps" to "almost certainly" or, as at the arena yesterday: "it has" pre-Christian origins.

It's rather like the story about Bampton. At the turn of the century, the Morris had been revived in London at the Esperence Club. The Bampton Morris men wrote in 1908 in the local paper (well, in a national paper actually), that there had been Morris dancing in Bampton for 200 years. Now that means 1708, which is quite a usual claim and probably an accurate folk memory. But by the time they got to 1940 it had already gone up to 300 years and you may have noticed this year's claim, I can't remember if it's 500 or 700. Whichever it was, it's gone up in 80 years by a factor of 2.5 at least which is almost the rate of inflation.

There's a great tendency to exaggerate the past. We understand why this is. In fact, I wouldn't like any Morris side in its spiel in front of the public to be hindered by the truth at all. The licence of the fool in Morris, as you know, is to say exactly what he likes and get away with it and I think the licence for the Morris is to tell the tale. Like selling the cake to put under your pillow to dream of your lover (which might be embarrassing for a Morris man). All these thing are part of the spiel and nobody expects a fair deal; it's the same as the fairground barker.

When you're producing a handout or when you are talking seriously to the press (perhaps not your local press who don't print what they're told) I think you've got to have a little bit of scholarship in what you say. You mustn't just make idle speculation. You must accept that speculation on origins is speculation. There is no evidence to support the very ancient origin for Morris (or for most things really).

Let me give you an example. I don't know if you know Violet Orford's book "Sword Dance and Drama". An excellent book describing that type of ritual. She produces a very comprehensive list of all the various references to the sword dance throughout Europe and shows a structural relationship between it all, how it developed and about how the Morisco came to the states of France and Italy and how it interacted with the sword. She makes an assumption of what she calls the folklorist's gap. She says the earliest reference to the sword dance is 13 something (at the end of the 14th century). Therefore, there must have been 1000 years plus in which the sword dance went on without any reference to it at all.

She does a very interesting correlation between all the known sites of Sword dance and all known sites of prehistoric mines and gets a good match between the two, not perfect of course. She comes up with the theory that the sword dance derives from prehistoric miners (I mean prehistoric in the sense of before records). So, it's a sort of Trade dance that remained unchanged for ten centuries.

Now there's one flaw in this really (for the evidence she's got is the evidence). The German folklorists, the serious ones, I don't mean the dancers who dabble in reading books second-hand (people like me), show that the sword dance started at a time when the German metal industry got going. I don't know if anyone saw James Burke's "Connections" on TV. They were very good in giving the facts of the start of mediaeval industry. There was this very interesting period when they discovered silver in the Alps. I think it was Edward, or one of our Kings anyhow, who reneged on the northern Italian financiers. They all went bankrupt and the German alliance came in and spent lots of money to finance the work. The Germans, at that time, became the mining engineers of the world in the same way in the last century the Cornish were. You know you find the Cornish all over - Lancashire, Shropshire, Canada, New Zealand. This was in the 1200 to 1400s. The Germans took their structure of Trade fraternities with them. If you take Violet Orford's actual data, the earliest reference to sword dance is in Nuremberg and from there it spread out for the next 150 years and reached the rest of Europe. It actually reached England last of all in the 1600s and first appeared in Lancashire.

You mustn't assume that because some things can be traced back a very long way that all things can be traced back a very long way. The professional folklorists of recent years have realised that every custom has its own unique history. It's like a pin ball machine, it rattles between all the influences that could be, but it's all unique. One of the big problems we're suffering from is Fraser and "The Golden Bough", which contains the great generalisation trying to convince everybody that there is an ancient explanation for everything. I'll stop that thought there.

I think the problem is that the average person in the folk world is conditioned to think that today is just a little bit of a relic of the past and if you went farther back more and more customs would emerge; more and more dances; more and more songs. Until you get back to the golden age where everybody (and when I say everybody, I mean a million or so people, not 52 million) spent their entire 24 hours every day eating, sleeping, drinking, dancing and singing. They never really had any time to plough the fields, there were too many fertility customs. They never had time to propagate the species, they were too busy singing about it. Personally, I think it's only a phenomenon of today. It's the folk festivals which have caused the drop in the birth rate.

Has anyone here been to Great Wishford, near Salisbury, on Oak Apple Day? I almost hesitate to recommend people to go to it, because if outsiders go, it almost spoils it as a village custom. It occurs on 29th May, Oak Apple Day. Of course, the customs are absolutely nothing to do with Charles II or oak apples. It just so happens that in the 17th century everyone got terribly patriotic over the Restoration and they moved all the local celebrations, or most of them, to Oak Apple Day rather than Mayday.

You may have noticed that when they changed the calendar, Mayday got 13 days earlier and so May is never out for garlands. It tended to be bloody cold and the mayday gambolling in the woods were not so interesting. You realise why there weren't any fertility customs at Christmas - too cold.

When the Saxons settled in this country, and most of our culture comes from the Saxons not the Celts (the Celts are the Welsh, let's be honest about it). Forests were established for keeping game so that there was fresh meat during the winter (that's deer and things like this).

When the royal forests were set up by William the Conqueror, even he couldn't just get a forest by saying "all this is mine - keep out", you need someone to look after it. `Looking after it' means rooting out all the bushes and trees that are not very useful for cover or for feeding anything. Anything that produces nuts and berries, you keep, anything that doesn't, you rip up.

Things like the New Forest, for example, are not natural forest; they are looked-after forest. To persuade idiots to do it, you had to give something in return. The Lord of the Manor couldn't say "look after my forest" because if you did, they'd burn it down or something like that. But you did arrange that they could go up in the summer to take their cattle and sheep or pigs (well, not so much sheep as pigs) to have the benefit of the forest tradition. In return they would have the right to collect timber up to a certain quantity and to be given a deer or two (because if they stopped deer poaching they had to give them one). It didn't use to work with swans at Fleet but that's another story.

In Great Wishford, the foresters had to graze the forest. The two parishes on either side who were given the job of looking after the forest had to be given customary rights. The customs of any old manor are the things they had to do for the Lord of the Manor, not what you do on Mayday. These included the right to go up on Mayday to collect timber. Now, why would they want to collect timber? When the swineherds or goatherds took the animals up, they lived in the woods and this gave them the right to use timber to reconstruct the bowers (the summer accommodation for people looking after the animals). This was the start of the tradition of collecting branches. Of course, as the countryside got more developed, with more infilling, more local ownership, the reason for taking animals up disappeared. People kept the custom up because it was very nice to have the timber. You could use it for other things, like in the garden, rebuilding the house and things like that; so they kept the old custom alive.

It was also very common up at Wishford that each village should be given a deer and this deer was hunted. In the area of Wychwood forest they kept the custom which involved 18 parishes. They could go and collect the deer themselves but they had to catch it. These were the dog-sized deer not reindeer, which I doubt anyone could catch. The whole village would set out to catch its deer and hold it down while someone actually had the pleasure of it, as it were. They would carry the deer back in triumph and this is the origin, in some places, of having an animal carried through a sword; being a convenient way of carrying it in procession.

When the custom dropped, as it did during mediaeval times as the enclosures started and Lords of the Manor became more landlords than people who ran the community, these things tended to die out or be commuted for money but the idea of doing the thing managed to persist.

One of the problems with any custom is when the reason for it is forgotten, people then invent a story (what the folklorists call a `just so story'). It doesn't actually help understanding but just explains things. It's a nice way of explaining it, but there's no historical, archaeological evidence to support it. The custom didn't arise that way.

There are other places where forest law origins occur. Wychwood forest was one of the great royal forests established by Henry the Second and it covered most of what I would call the core of the Morris area from Woodstock all the way across to Stow. It wasn't all forest of course, but it was governed by forest laws and the royal forest at Woodstock was usually part of the dowry of the Queen of England. So, you used to get royal families in that area as frequently as the locality could support. I think you will appreciate that when court used to go round they only stayed for a limited time at each place eating and drinking it dry. They needed the forest to supply deer and the people had to supply food tithes and so on. It was very closely integrated. Now come the Civil War, or perhaps a bit before. Let's talk about how we see the Morris coming into it.

The very first reference to Morris is 11 something in Spain, a year or two after they turfed the Moors out of one of the Spanish cities, they had a morisco which was a performance. The unique element of that is they almost invented two lines of people dancing opposite each other. Two lines, processionals, pairs was almost a Roman form of dance but all mediaeval dancing was essentially lines, chains. The idea of having two mimicking lines was new and it caught on like wildfire. Its a bit of a pantomime and in some places it's got more and more realistic. There are survivals in Spain where they still dress up as Moors and Christians and hack away at each other with swords. A custom that's been going 800 or 900 years tends to diverge a bit in different places.

The first idea of this dancing in lines of mimicking movements was invented about this sort of time. All these things have to have an origin, they can't all go back to the mists of time, they can't all have someone in the year 5000 BC who invented Stonehenge and everything else. These things start.

It spread very rapidly through Spain as it was being conquered. If you know the history of Spain you find it wasn't a bloody ejection of the Moors. It all seemed a very friendly sort of affair with half the Moors on the Christian's side and half the Christians on the other side. It was all matter of political manoeuvring for who actually controlled the country and got the money out of it (not really going around killing each other). Also remember that Spain had been the intellectual centre of Europe at that time.

Now, the old Encyclopaedia Britannica talks about the old theory of John O'Gaunt bringing the Morris back to England but it's been laughed at since the turn of the century. But John O'Gaunt did have ambitions in Spain and he did spend a long time with an army there. He tried to establish himself as king. They did have to get rid of him in the end because he looted the country of all things artistic and they gave him a large sum of money as an annual pension to keep out of the country. There was a strong link at that time, but be that as it may, the first reference to Morris in this country is about 1500 which is about 150 years after John O'Gaunt came back.

I only mention this because there was a direct link. Before it reached England there was an interesting change, because in France they formed these so called `companies of fools'. These were professional people often working in the Lord's courts. They were trained people who offered a semi-professional service by providing Maying, the Morris, fooling, revels, masquerades, masques and things like this. It's this operating in the masque area that was copied by Henry VII; and as I said, the very first references to Morris in this country are in the courts of Henry VII. Over 50 years it became commoner in towns which the Court went to, and gradually spread into the smaller towns and then into the villages.

While I talk about villages – you know we talk about Cotswold Morris surviving in the Cotswold villages. You only have to talk to someone in Bampton, Chipping Campden, Abingdon or Brackley about them living in a village to find that places with 1000 odd people are thought of as towns - Morris survived as much in towns as in villages. Still, you have this spread out into the country side, reasonably well documented. A characteristic was that nobody blacked their faces. Everybody wore fairly elaborate costumes; they (towns or villages) often hired the costumes. We have the very interesting situation where the Earl of Berkley had a group players (some of the records of whom exist) who were paid to bring in May in Gloucester and places, like professionals do, and they also received money for performing the Morris.

This early Morris was professional or semi-professional. The earliest reference to Morris in Abingdon is 1554 and in 1556, the Earl of Berkeley’s players were actually paid for doing the Morris. So, it is likely that the earliest Morris in Abingdon was done by Gloucester men.

What we know as `Morris' - the Cotswold Morris - can't have any real connection with this Morris of 400 years ago that I'm talking about. This is people mainly dressed in white, although so often when you see foreign teams in their Morris, in fact they not are dressed in white. They're just doing a show, it's an attitude, the way they do it. There are no earlier references to Morris than about 1800, 1780 - that's about the earliest you can trace back. In fact, the heyday of Cotswold Morris is about 1800 and not much earlier.

James I issued a book of games `A book of sports' I think it's called, to encourage people to revive archery. I'm sure you all learned that at school. It was doing the same thing with Morris dancing. Morris dancing had died out so much it had to be encouraged after the Puritan's time, in which we complain about the suppression of things (in fact very few people complained of being suppressed they had suppressed themselves - it was really justifying the status quo).

In 1660, there was the first revival (we're now in about the third or fourth revival of things `Folk'). At the first revival they brought out all the old customs with bonfires and Morris dancing, the Mayday customs, the maying (which was a custom which came to us from France, it's not a British one). We had an upsurge in 1660 - 1700 of things which were rather consciously done and what we see in Cotswold Morris is the relic of another 100 years of that conscious revival. Tomorrow, I'll talk about the Cotswold sides that we know of, their early history and what we do know of who started them and how they run themselves.

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