I want to talk today about what we know about traditional Cotswold sides. It's surprisingly little, of course. The collectors, when they started talking to people, it was after 1908, which is effectively 40 or 50 years after many of the sides had stopped dancing. Those sides which were still active all had a rather chequered and rather different sort of career and therefore there are unique histories of the sides.
The earliest references to anything one can believe in as Cotswold Morris are late eighteenth century and they don't tell us anything about the dancing at all. The earliest reference to Bampton, for example, is in a book about 1804. It says that the Morris men were doing their usual round of the villages. Also, that year is the year that Ilmington was founded. Now, Ilmington has a particularly interesting history and, in a way, it illustrates what happened to traditional sides.
A chap called George Arthur (a master mason) came to live in the village in 1804 and started a workshop. He was a pipe and tabor player and a Morris dancer from somewhere or other, I don't know where (though there is someone researching through census papers into where people come from so we might know eventually). He brought the Morris there and raised a side from the stone masons who worked for him. They did a tradition much like the normal Cotswold with galleys, corner dances, and that sort of thing. It went on for a few years. When George Arthur got too old to play, his son Tom took over and Joseph Johnson married his daughter and became foreman.
They stopped when the Dover's Games stopped in the area. After a few years they wanted to dance again, so they got a side together but at that stage already they'd changed the Morris a fair bit. What Sharp published in the Morris book was the reconstruction of how Michael Johnson (who was the son of the old Foreman) said they did it when he was a young man. Because it was several revivals later, it had changed the dance significantly. So, in a sense, it's a reconstruction. Sharp made no pretence about it being a reconstruction and actually wrote to the Morning Post about Ilmington and this recovery of an old tradition and the need to sit down and work out with the man how the figures went and how the dances were put together.
This side ran on for a few years and then the story goes that they did a tour. They went to Shipston-on-Stour flower show and thought they'd do a tour and walk over to Brailes. Which is a fair number of miles if you know the Cotswolds, (but people used to walk 6 or 12 miles between spots). Can you imagine that nowadays? Can you imagine a Ring meeting where you make everybody walk 6 miles between stands? When they got to Brailes, the local Morris side was there and took exception to them dancing. A bit of a fight ensued and the foreman Joseph Johnson got a bit of a bad time of it. Apparently he ran all the way back to Shipston. The people of the village teased him about to such an extent that he emigrated to Birmingham. Of course, Morris stopped at that point.
In 1887, for the Jubilee, they got the side together again. This time with Tom Arthur, grandson of the old Tom Arthur, as pipe and tabor player. Several new people came and they got Joseph Johnson back from Birmingham (by this time he was about 80) to lead the dancing. These dances were the first Ilmington dances that Sharp collected. Already the dances, as they were then performed, were significantly different in the structure of the dance from the way they were reconstructed for the previous revival of the Morris. They had run figures together and so on. They went on for a year or two and died down. One thing that had happened was that Sam Bennett, as a teenager, had learnt to play the tunes on his fiddle from Tom Arthur. As Tom gradually lost all his teeth and so found it more and more difficult to play the pipe and tabor. I believe it's impossible to play when you're down to one tooth.
In 1897, the next Jubilee, they got together again. This time Sam played with a new influx of people. The people running the side were considered to be poor dancers by the people of the village, and the dances had changed yet again.
Darcy Ferrars had got the side at Bidford going in 1886 and did a tour all round the big towns in this country. The Chipping Campden men had been revived in 1902 by the Guild of Handicrafts. Following this revival of interest in Morris elsewhere, Ilmington got the side together in 1906 with Sam Bennett, now as the fiddler and the hobby horse, doing all the teaching. Again the dances were all changed, reflecting the different ideas of the people doing it.
In many ways, the dances of that period are reflected by the way England's Glory do the dances now. There was a complaint made because Sam, of course, wrote to the national papers advertising his side. I've met some of the old dancers, David Westbury for example, who never admitted it was Sam Bennett's side because Sam Bennett wasn't a villager really. He owned a big house and all the carter's business and all fruit orchards. He ran the village to suit himself. It was always considered the team belonged to the bloke who actually taught them.
Still, Sam wrote to the press and he was invited up to London with the side, to dance. Sharp wrote to the national press saying "don't take any notice of this Ilmington, it's bloody awful, it's not traditional, they've changed everything." This upset Sam Bennett amongst others, as you can well imagine. Sam went back to talk and settle the differences with the other men and really Ilmington then got hold of an agreed way of doing it which he then proceeded to teach in the village. The trouble being it was Sam Bennett, so no one took any notice of him. It was collected from him by Kenworthy Schofield just after the last war and that form of dance is one of the five or six forms you will find in Lionel Bacon's Black Book.
Ilmington is very interesting because it is one of the few places where we can see the stopping and starting that you would expect of something where you have to keep handing the tradition on. Various local things, like lack of interest, or the stopping and starting of huge gatherings, caused the thing to die down for a while. But there was enough interest to keep picking up as soon as some special occasion arises.
There is an Ilmington side at the moment, I hope some of you have seen it. I think it dances very well. It's had the problem of trying to get away from the Sam Bennett connotation in what it does. It's looked very hard at the way the Morris was done about 1887 before Sam Bennett got involved. That is still not so far away that there aren't people in the village, families, who can offer small bits of advice. They have got information on how to do bumpers and things like this from the Handy family who were involved in quite a few village revivals. So, they had a link with the tradition.
Hinton was collected from a man called Stutsbury who had been a Brackley dancer. There really wasn't an independent Hinton tradition. There were quite a few villages that supplied dancers but this is the usual Cotswold business that when you raised a side you got together the six best dancers that you knew. If they came from your village that was good but if they came from outside and they wanted to dance with you. Well, you got them from outside.
I think the Hinton man was a shopkeeper, at least he was a shopkeeper when he lived in Hinton and he told Sharp, well, sorry.... When Sharp first went to Brackley in 1910, he met the Howards who ran the side at the time. They weren't terribly musical and he had trouble getting tunes and hence getting dances that he'd believe. They referred him to this man in Hinton as someone who was still active who danced with their father. The chap told Sharp that he'd danced with their father in Brackley.
The dances they turned out are completely different from Brackley and this reflects the difference between 1870 when he'd danced in Brackley and 1922 when Sharp finally collected Brackley and published it. Now, you've got 50 years of development. This was at a time when sides didn't meet each other so there was no need to conform, I won't say there were no pressures but people could go their own way without reference to other people. You weren't constantly exposed to other people.
What did keep the old sides going? We know so much about the death of Cotswold Morris, why it stopped, the bad harvests, the decline in support. People started thinking of the Morris as begging and they weren't prepared to sponsor it, weren't prepared the have the Morris dance in their gardens, things like this. It also had a reputation for drunkenness and rowdiness.
Are you aware that nearly every traditional function, particularly dance, has this legend that they stopped because coming home from a Morris tour on one occasion they stopped someone and after a bit of a fight they killed him and it was all hushed up in the village in return for the Morris stopping? It's a very common story, not just in Cotswolds, it occurs with Mummers, it occurs up in the North West and so on, and yet no amount of searching has ever found any evidence for it.
It might have happened once or perhaps it's just a bit of the mythology of the Morris. The Morris stopped and there must be a good explanation for it, other than that people got sick of doing it. So they trot out this standard story in the same way that Oliver Cromwell knocked down all the castles and buildings of England from 1500 to 1900.
There are several things which kept the Morris together. I think the most important things were the Ales which were run in the various villages, not necessarily annually, though some of them were. At Finstock Ale in Wychwood forest, the Duke of Marlborough allowed them to cut down an oak tree each year which was then stuck up on the village green in Finstock and allowed to mature for a year. They financed the Ale with the proceeds of the sale of the timber. Woodstock had a very famous Ale, I think every seven years. Charlbury was every few years.
Some places had an Ale on the spur of the moment when they felt like it, and typically it went like this. You'd decide you were having an Ale and tell all the Town Criers who announced at the various markets there was going to be an Ale. At the same time, you started to build yourself a dancing area; a marquee or with branches to cover an area to dance. You'd elect a King and Queen of the Ale. The King or Lord of the Ale's job was to act as M.C. and the Queen or Lady of the Ale's was just to be pretty. The King was always given a sum of money to cover his expenses to organise it and the Lady usually, besides having some money for a dress, had the concession to sell ribbons and favours. The usual way people made money was not passing the hat around so much as having something they could sell (like Great Western and their book).
On the appointed day, people would turn up in the village that was having the Ale; the Morris team plus friends and supporters. There was the usual arrangement, everybody but the Morris men paid to come in and this covered your food and drink. The Morris men just danced, usually separately, and usually there was a prize for the best side (a cake or ribbons). It's rather funny people don't like competitive Morris and yet competitive Morris did exist in certain circumstances. They didn't see anything wrong when a lot of sides got together and danced, in admitting that one actually danced better than the rest, and that these can actually be given a round of applause and a set of ribbons.
So, having arrived, the Lord and Lady of the Ale would take the people around to have a look at the so-called antiquities which were a series of things, mostly crude, like `my lord's organ' being a flail, or having a stuffed owl. You had to guess what they were, and if you guessed wrong you paid a forfeit. The problem was, you didn't call them what they obviously were. My lady's parrot was probably what you called the stuffed owl, for example, so the object was to make you pay a forfeit. These were various, money was an obvious one if you were a coward. Jumping over a fifteen foot stream was another good one, the one at Woodstock was unjumpable but they still made them jump it. Another forfeit was being carried around on the hobby horse.
The Cotswold hobby horse has no connection with the hobby horses we have nowadays. It all derives from the Bentley window and the mediaeval tourney horse. The Cotswold hobby horse was just like a gymnasium horse, it had four legs or arms for carrying and was a pole. In the army, it was a instrument of punishment. It had metal ridge along the top and if you were `punished to the horse', you were carried astride this with your legs weighted with cannon balls and just bounced around the parade ground for a hour or two. You usually didn't do it twice.
In the Cotswold Ales, you'd be carried around on this. Either, the tradition would be a rough ride, they'd bounce you and give you a really rough time of it; or, what apparently was meant to be worse, they'd stick you behind the Lady of the Ale and you'd be forced to publicly kiss her all the way round the Ale. Which for the average ploughboy was the biggest embarrassment of all. This sort of thing started to fall apart once the students at Oxford got to know about it, they didn't see that sort of behaviour as a forfeit at all.
Another sort of forfeit was having a mock marriage. One of the Lady's attendants was the ugliest or fattest girl they could find, and you'd go through a mock ceremony. This would include being stuck up the backside with a three pronged fork several times and having your face ceremoniously washed with a greasy dish cloth. A lot of rather rustic, crude, vulgar fun was had by all. Of course, one of the reasons that most of these Ales were stopped was the growing influence of the bourgeois middle class, to use the phrase of a friend of mine, who thought this really wasn't good enough - it was the sort of thing for which Morris teams ought to be suspended.
By the time you get to 1850, social conditions were changing, football, cricket, flower shows, activities of that sort which didn't involve drinking and rowdyism on the street were getting more and more popular. The Morris sides, first of all, found it difficult to get people to do it at all; and secondly, to get any sort of support from the community for what they did. The big Ales, which of course were the worst example of all, a sort of Sidmouth gone wild, disappeared in a very short period from 1840 to 1860.
There were one or two special ones. One was Dover's Games back of Chipping Campden. You must have heard of Dover's hill, a huge place about four miles long. It became the centre of things from the Restoration onwards because it was long enough to have steeplechases (horse races) and all the really big functions had their support from the horses.
The gentry would come from miles around. It was not uncommon to have crowds of many thousands, even before the times of railway trains. By the time the railway lines opened from Wolverhampton into Evesham, they were getting crowds of ten thousand plus and running excursions out of Birmingham for people to get to the Dover's Games. The Games included all sorts of sports and activities. It was also noted for being completely lawless and for big gangs of roughs who would just go round the place knocking the tents over and generally roughing people up.
There are several written accounts of Dover's Games. The Morris is mentioned but the Morris was not an important part of it. It wasn't the sort of place all the Morris teams congregated. The Morris teams, in fact, competed at Stow for, I won't say the honour, but the side who was fit to go on the hill. The last year of all, 1854, Longborough won the competition and was the side that danced on the hill. They weren't allowed to collect but they sold yellow rosettes which were know as Dover's favours, Dover's colour being yellow, they sold these as the way of making their profit. The previous year there was no meeting, the year before that it was another village near Stow. The people who collected between the wars there found that most people remembered that there was a year when their team won at Stow and danced on Dover's hill.
Kirtlington is another one which is well known (although it wasn't a particularly great Morris get-together) because of the ceremony of taking the lamb around leading the procession. The Lamb Ale still runs on in a somewhat limited form - it never really stopped in the same way that although Dover's Games were stopped. All it did was transfer the occasion down into the town itself, into Chipping Campden; where the Scuttlebrook Wakes still continues the Saturday after the Spring Bank Holiday. You can still see the Chipping Campden Morris Men dance and the May Queen and all the normal goings on. The Lamb Ale is the Monday after Bank Holiday week, I think. It's Bampton, Chipping Campden and Kirklington I think, in that order.
Some of these things die very hard. Probably the most famous at the time was the forest fair in Wychwood forest itself. Cornbury House(?), rather ancient, mediaeval in foundation, had been bought by one of the roundhead generals and fenced in, then bought by the Duke of Marlborough (I imagine the first one) for his son Lord Churchill and it became the house of heir of the family. Somewhere towards the end of the 18th century they started. It was all started, I understand, by the Methodists from Witney going to have teetotal picnic. Within three or four years, in fact, it was anything but teetotal and anything but a picnic.
It got to the stage as a fair of having four streets of booths, one street entirely of boxing booths. It became traditional, as it were, to settle your differences at the forest fair because at the forest fair you not only had a ring but a time keeper and a referee; you didn't have boxing gloves of course. There was an occasion where Fieldtown fell out with Ramsden and they had a fight. They paired off foreman to foreman and so on all the way down the side. Fieldtown lost, six-nil, (Fieldtown were funny, they were run by Mr. Steptoe ... and his son).
They had all these boxing booths because boxing was still the thing that stirred people's hearts. It used to when I was young, at least my parent's generation. It seems to have dropped out of interest nowadays, but people used to like a fight. They also had several menageries, they also brought the dance floor from one of the dance areas in London, a platform with 500 coloured lights, for general dancing. There was also a paddle steamer on the lake. I can't imagine it was a very big steamer, it's not a very big lake. This was one of the first occasion we've heard of selling sandwiches which were invented about that time. (Sandwiches cost 30/- at a time when the average wage was 15/- per week)
The whole fair was opened by a procession of carriages led by the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Churchill and all the rest. It went on for something like three days. A lot of local Morris sides went there and danced among the crowds. Again, when the railway line entered the Oxford area, excursions were run from London. I've seen posters for the forest fair at Cornbury House. It's amazing really, because the nearest station itself was about 8 or 9 miles away, so having got there you still had to walk. People just stayed for the fair and slept under the hedges, or in cottages for miles around. All the locals, of course, would turf the family out into the yard and give their bed over to whoever was prepared to pay. It was a great jamboree.
It like all the others was stopped. People got a bit fed up, or at least the Churchills did, and somewhere in the middle of the 19th century they decided to stop it. So they dug big trenches across the roads. All the people did, was come up and chop the woods down to fill the trenches up and proceed to actually have their fair even though there were no booths. They still saw it as a sort of right they thought they had. Although the fair itself only went for 80 or 90 years altogether.
Once these big things, which I suppose were the natural focuses for the Morris, dropped, the Morris itself seemed to die away. There are very few places, funnily enough the competitions at Stow were so popular that they went on for another 20 years after the reason for them had ceased. The last competition was about 1880 even though the last ones to gain anything from it were a long time before.
The competitions - how were they judged? For a long time it was a problem finding any evidence because there weren't many Bledington or Longborough men who attended Morris functions before the war and talked about it. I couldn't find people who could remember much of what they said. It came down to one or two common things. First of all, starting foot was considered very important, it was the recognised way - you started on the left foot and did the second half of things on the right foot. The direction of turn was recognised - you turned out. Everyone knew what that meant, so no matter how you fudged the stepping and so on, they could tell if you turned the wrong way. The other thing was that the judge used to listen to the bells and you could tell if false steps were being made because you got extra chinks in the bells.
Under the Sharp guidance, wherever you got problems of changing step, Sharp always opted for an extra step to change feet. Traditionally, it couldn't have been like that. Traditionally, it was the other way round, you changed the step. If one-two-three-hop left you on the wrong foot you did one-two-three-four or one-hop-two-hop, so that you ended up on the right foot and didn't put the extra step in.
When the Travelling Morrice started going round the Cotswolds, they were very much criticised for the feint step - putting the extra movement in. Dancers didn't like the extra things in just to get right. It was considered bad dancing if a man couldn't sort it out and had to put an extra step in to get himself right at the last minute. (They thought they weren't very good). They also complained about Charlie Marsh for not getting off the ground enough, not sweating enough, all the things that one could well imagine.
However the society's side, and the Cambridge men were by any standards extremely athletic; but athletic in a gymnastic sense rather than in a Morris sense. Their leaps were great but their ability to dance to the music wasn't all that marvellous. For those who like historical precedents, the second Travelling Morrice tour of the Cotswolds did have a lady musician. They had a lady musician because all the other musicians could only play from written music and on occasion they had to cycle back to the previous spot because they forgot the music stand.
Well, for those who want to come tomorrow, I'm going to talk about the revival, where it started and who did what. I want to get away from this thought in one of the Morris brochures I read this year, which said that Mr Sharp discovered the Headington Morris. If you think about it, Mr Sharp was at his Aunt's cottage and Headington Quarry Morris discovered Mr Sharp and he devoted the rest of his life to collecting Morris.
He didn't actually, not for another nine years. That's what I want to go through tomorrow, how the revival started, who was actually involved, and try and get Sharp's contribution in particular, which is probably larger than you appreciate, into perspective. Collecting, if you've ever tried it, is bloody difficult. How you can cycle into a village, find a dancer and collect the tradition and go out again before lunch, I shall never know. The man was an absolute genius at certain things but he also didn't do all the things that people say he did. He was actually a much more normal person than you imagine. I'll talk about that, Mary Neal and Sharp and the early days of the society tomorrow.