There's a need to remind you that the breadth of the British tradition, or English tradition anyhow, is wider than just the Cotswold Morris. Just to remind you, the Cotswold Morris is not all over the Cotswolds. There's no tradition of Morris in Bath or there wasn't, although there is one reference in a newspaper to a side visiting Bath in the 19th century. It only just overflowed into Gloucestershire and it only just got into Northants. It isn't all over Oxfordshire, it's a very small part of the country. Now, one asks what happened in the rest of the country? First thing is, that when you're looking elsewhere you're not necessarily looking for a dance tradition. All the country was covered by begging or good luck visiting (the two things are synonymous) customs.
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.....sometimes associated with animals, sometimes with dancing, sometimes with straight forward visiting and singing. It's quite usual in any part of the country that it had a tradition of good luck visiting of it's own, it didn't necessarily overlap with others. The one exception is the Mummers, which seem almost universal in various types of play occurring at Christmas.
Now, let's go round the country, starting in East Anglia, about as far away as we can get. The main tradition of dancing is the Molly dance and we have seen an exponent of it, the Seven Champions who probably don't dance Molly dancing like Molly dancing was done. Though I could say that about anybody else who's tried to do Molly dancing, because we don't really know how the old sides danced. Anybody who is doing Molly dances that were collected is on their own. The only surviving sides, or sides who have survived into living memory were so, I won't use the word degenerate about any custom, but they had simplified what they did so much that they were doing couple dances, tangos and things like this, with a man and a man dressed as a woman, very simple material.
It's a common characteristic of any tradition of good luck visiting, it's about as complicated as the society wishes or needs. So, people get away with as simple a dance, as simple a costume, as simple music, as they can. You usually find a reasonable show has got to be done and, of course, when you have a reasonable show, it then tends to get called Morris. Morris is a generic word for a big show, if you get up and dress up and do country dances people call you Morris, not because of the dances you do but because of the show you're making. Molly dancers had reasonable music, reasonable costume but very simple dances so the occasion had to compensate for it. They used to do, well typically, the villagers used to do farms but really spent the day heading towards the big town, Cambridge or Ely, places like that. The teams would congregate on the right day in the season, usually Mayday and dance together. At this point, they would bring in wives and sweethearts, so the dancing was basically mixed, but doing the same dances in a mixed situation. I think there's something like 90 known villages which had teams at one time or another in East Anglia, so it was a very common tradition, again in a small area. It flourished in the 19th century then died out all of a sudden. Nobody has any real idea why, one can postulate as one can all over the country generalised reasons, emigration, bad harvests, pauperisation of the proletariat; all these phrases.
The fact is, no one explanation fits everywhere, but usually one explanation fits one place and you've got to have another explanation for the next place. In Kent, we're not aware really of surviving dance customs, certainly things called Morris cropped up all over the country in the 16th and 17th century but we don't know what it was. All that we know about this, is verbal descriptions of costumes and numbers of people, but no good indication of the form of the dance. Whether it was a dance, or whether it was a play or things like this, so you can't really talk about that period of time in Kent. But, of course, there's the Hooden Horse that you're aware of.
Now, animal customs are extremely varied, it's very easy to lump them all together and say it's a disguise like Cawle(?) has done in his book. But the difference between an animal you wear, or an animal on a pole, or an animal that's part of a play, or an animal that's meant to terrify, is quite enormous. Usually these things occur in very small areas. There's the Hooden Horse in Kent. There's an animal on the Gloucester-Worcester border which was a bull's head carried on a stick and the party went round with a doggerel song which they'd do in each place and they'd hammer away at the door until you answered, they wouldn't take no lights as an answer - the usual business - and they had the usual nice little tricks like dropping a dead skunk down the well if you didn't provide them with food and drink. Well, probably not a skunk in this country, but something that had gone nice and rotten. In the same way as the plough stots up North, if you didn't treat them right, they thought they had the right to plough up your drive or your path or your front garden. People didn't normally upset them of course, it was generally the newcomers to the village who didn't understand the custom who had this sort of treatment.
Well, there's no dance custom in that part of the country I've just mentioned, the Wilts/Gloucs border, but there was this animal went round. A very similar sort of custom, but they made hullabaloo and they used to do it in the small hours of the morning as much as the rest of the day. In the South in general, the references I've come across to Morris imply there was something called Morris but it was more solo dancing. Lucy Broadwood who you know of, folk song collector of Horsham, when she was very young can remember a man coming up dressed in ribbons and bells, solo, and doing a solo performance at the house jigging and capering around. She realised years afterwards that she'd probably seen the last of the Sussex Morris dancers.
At Putnam near Guildford, in the early 19th century, there was a tradition of Morris dancing and there are quite a few stories surviving of various dancers going up to London (they used to take cartloads of carrots) and entering competitions in London pubs which were common. Again, all in terms of individuals. Incidentally, the Morris died out at Putnam because the last dancer insisted on being buried in his bells, and that was the last set of bells from the village, so nobody else could take it up, so they used to say. There are Morris dancers at Arlesford, the other side of Orton, the stories seem exactly the same, it's all in terms of individuals who used to dance, no suggestion of a team.
The first team we meet is at Salisbury. Now, Salisbury, as you probably know, I think it's Salisbury and Chester are the last survivors of mediaeval guild, Animals and Giants. It has a giant called St. Christopher nowadays, it used to have a black face but it's been painted pink this century due to racial prejudice. It's 14 foot high, weighs 2 cwt. and is carried by one man around the processions. It didn't have a annual perambulation time not since 1485. It came out on the major celebrations in the country, like thanking for the recovery of George who used to go periodically mad, marriages of members of the royal family, the Prince of Wales and so on. On the whole, it came out about once every five years. This meant very little continuity in the dance as far as one can gather. They seemed to have any dance they got together each time they came out, based on contemporary social dance. The fascinating thing about it was the balance between the complexity and the need to make a show. They had a fife and drum for music in all the known photographs from 1880 onward, so the music was very simple but the costumes were incredible. It was six men in the dying years anyhow, and they'd have three men dressed in breeches, all flowery material, and the other three men were wearing crinolines. So, you can guess the sort of Morris they did. In the last year in 1911, which was the coronation of George V, the side consisted of two men dressed as men, two men dressed as women and two men dressed as Red Indians complete with feathered head-dress.
The tradition is full of surprises. In fact, to me, one of the laughs about people in the revival who say you couldn't do this, you couldn't do that, it wouldn't be traditional. Yet the tradition itself doesn't give a damn about that, and introduces the oddest things, like coconut halves for hand clapping, which the average Morris man would draw the line at, I think.
The Salisbury thing was, as I said, irregular, rather elaborate in gear. It had a giant, the giant had a knob on a pole, a sword and other bits of regalia, so that it made a huge impression in the procession and they had the simple dance, presumably social dance. The tune, the last few times they turned out, was a version of Oyster Girl, very simple.
Very close to Salisbury is Great Wishford and I've mentioned the Wishford custom earlier. At Wishford, they had this charter because they had an argument with Lord Pembroke about their rights to get wood and have access to the forest. So, when the Charter was put down, one of the obligations on the villagers was to go to the Cathedral to have the charter read and then to do their customary dance. From 1604, at least, they were required to do a dance at the Cathedral. Also, for many years, they used to have a procession all the way from the village to Salisbury, about six and a half miles. They were accompanied by a band and there was a reasonable amount of dancing on the way, besides stopping at the hostelries, of course, all the way along.
If you go to Wishford today, well, not exactly today, but on 29th May each year, you will see a tremendous village celebration which starts early in the morning, about 3 o'clock, by them going round making rough music about the village until each house shows a light indoors, then they go on to the next house. Then they go up to the woods to collect boughs, there's a competition for the largest hand-carried bough. They then bring the wood back and decorate the cottages. Then at nine o'clock they catch a bus into Salisbury. Bus, you notice, there's no longer walking, and a few minutes before 10 o'clock, they dance, normally outside the Cathedral, the four women, and they read the charter inside. They shout "grovely, grovely, strength and unity" at the top of their voices and leave the Cathedral. What's delightful is, that this whole thing is not mentioned in the order of activities in the Cathedral and the Cathedral staff do their best to ignore it. They go back to the village and at 12 noon a brass band sets off from town end, which is a big tree, and they do what I would call beating the bounds. They go round the lanes around the edge of the village and stop at the four corners and blow their hearts out on the trumpets and they are accompanied by the Oak Apple Club.
This is a lovely thing, the custom has nothing to do with Oak Apple day. In the sense that it's not celebrating Charles II at all. But they've transferred the custom like a lot of other people did, to Oak Apple day. Over the years they formed a society to keep it going, they called themselves the Oak Apple Club because it was on Oak Apple day, rather than it having anything to do with Charles II.
Well, they have this procession, all the club have banners and the rest of the village have fancy dress, so when you go there you see a typical carnival procession, except there's nobody watching it because all the village is actually in the procession, and it occurs in the middle of whatever day the May 29th is. Which is, as you know, mostly a midweek day, and the local villages don't bother to come for the Great Wishford shindig. They dance again in the middle of the village and they have races, a beer tent, a marquee in which the Oak Apple Club have their dinner. They then have a maypole, they've had a maypole with kids dancing round it since 1880 something or other, it's one of the longest surviving maypoles in the country for ribbon dancing.
At about half past six, they exhaust all they things you can possibly do in the village celebration, so it stops and they go for a quiet drink in a pub. Again that's another delightful thing about it, it all happens when the pubs are shut.
Shaftesbury, moving round a bit, it had a delightful custom, do you know Shaftesbury at all? Which arose out of the fact that it's on this plateau with all the springs at the bottom of the hill and unfortunately the bottom of the hill is owned by the Lord of the next manor. So they had to pay a rent each year. This rent was a sum of money, a pair of gloves and a purse, this sort of thing. In fact, a fairly standard sort of rent for things in the past, gloves being expensive.
So what they used to do, was to kill an animal, a pig or calf, mount its head raw on a platter, shove the gloves and money in its mouth, they also had a thing called a besom(?) which nearly defies description. It's that tall, it looks like a pineapple gone mad, sort of pineapple shape with spikes and lots of flowery bits, all trailing, so you get a sort of thing, this huge size. Then they decorated it with everything shiny, money in particular, little bits of glass, jewellery and watches and things like this. They used to reckon that in its last few years at the end of the 19th century that there was about £2000 worth of stuff, jewellery and money attached to this besom. Now, that's £2000 in early Victorian currency terms, so it was rather valuable.
They used to march down, the whole procession, led by the Mayor and the Aldermen and a band followed by the people of the town, used to dance down the hill as a celebration, then arrived at the stewards of the next door manor and say "Which do you want? This bloody head and the gloves and five guineas or this?" and traditionally he always took the first thing. They then, with a sigh of relief, danced all the way back up the hill, which was much more of a feat. Then they had a banquet on the rates. The reason it stopped was that the cost of the feast and the dance afterwards exceeded the rateable value of the town. The Marquis of Winchester just had to put a stop to it by saying "I don't need the rent". Funnily enough, when they stopped, it didn't stop the dancing and for several years they went down. Then they converted this to what we would call a carnival procession.
I don't know if you've seen the Padstow notices which have all the funny names on them, all the characters involved in dancing are given comic names. Well, they had these long strips, had their 100th celebration 2 years ago did Shaftesbury, for their procession, and they had a set of these posters right from the beginning. All the comic names for all the floats and so on, and they claim, and probably quite rightly, to be the oldest procession with floats in the country. It arose straight out of stopping the old dance custom in the same way that Chipping Campden, when Dover's games were stopped, they transferred the celebration `The Scuttlebrook Wake' into Chipping Campden itself. The locals were not going to be denied having their fun even though the reason was taken away from it, and it got to a different level of cost, I suppose.
Across the South and one or two places in the Midlands there are these isolated customs. I've mentioned Shaftesbury, you all know about Padstow, you all know about Helston, one knows about Lichfield, everyone unique in its character and origin, in the reason it started, why it kept going, the reasons it stopped or reached the form it was, and being the shindig or whatever phrase you like for the area. The catchment area being at least the distance you could walk, which would be about 12 miles. I think it was one of the Henrys who said market towns had got to be at least 8 miles apart. Wherever you lived, you had to have at least one market within walking distance. It was all to do with maximising his intake, although I don't think he'd have used those phrases, but they worked out, without the advantage of linear mathematics, that there was a certain distance apart that market towns had to be to maximise the amount of tolls and rents that you could get from people.(Chrystaller's central place theorem)
We are all beginning to be aware of Border Morris. It's a term concocted a few years ago, really, by Dr. Corfe, who wrote an article for EFDSS journal. He used it to cover from Flint all the way down to Gloucester and, in fact, odd dances done at places like Headington which is in Oxford, and Steeple Claydon which is in Buckinghamshire. It's a generic word to cover Christmas Morris, I think, as distinct from the Cotswold or Spring Morris. It does come in quite distinct elements, there always was an underlay of Christmas dancing in the Midlands and even through the Cotswold area. The simple stepping and reel type dance, is a really old form of English dancing both ritual (I can't use that word, I'll say ceremonial then) and social dancing. Well, there was always that and where one hears of men dancing in the South in terms of `the dancing of the reels' is the phrase used down at Old Woking and Old Farnborough down on the Hampshire/Surrey border. There's that underlay and then there's what I would call Worcestershire Morris. Where each village tends to have the classic one stick dance and one handkerchief dance and, as we heard yesterday, that, in fact, meant one dance which you either did as a stick dance or as a handkerchief dance literally.
The characteristic of it was that the side goes round each year as was necessary, usually done by a trade, stonemasons, bricklayers, or people who worked in gravel pits. Therefore, it was only initiated each year if they were already frozen out. If the weather was good then they didn't bother to go out, but if it was an early winter they did. In the Birmingham area, that end of Worcestershire, teams were of bricklayers who actually used trowels to dance with rather than sticks.
So, the characteristic, as I was saying, is it was something worked up at the last minute; therefore, you had one or two rather simple dances, very simple traditional costumes, the ultimate simplicity. Turn your clothes inside out and stitch bits of rag all over, so you have a rag coat which is stitched into the lining of your ordinary jacket. But compensated by large numbers; ten, twelve, fourteen was more typical than four or six, although they arranged dances so that four or even three could do them, if that was all you could get. But normally large numbers and normally a large band with a large percussion element, so you made a tremendous noise and a tremendous sense of occasion out of that sort of thing.
That was the characteristic of the what I call Worcester Morris. Further north, in Shropshire, you got into the more wild type of performance, where the dances were a lot simpler but the whole thing was more terrifying than enjoyable, shouting, coming in late at night, things like this.
Having drifted up the Welsh border, there are references to Morris in Wales, it is of two sorts. The North Wales Morris is much related to the processional dance, the early form of North West Morris and into Wales itself, there are many accounts of good luck visiting involving dancing but unfortunately with no real indication of what they did. The Welsh Morris, like the southern Morris, died out too early for collectors to actually get the dances. One gets the impression it was not Cotswold-like, white clothes, ribbons, carrying a may-bush garland or having a tree, a birch tree to dance with, I don't think one can say very much about it. One of the troubles is that Welsh customs tend to look like English ones. But they are far enough away from the corresponding English ones to possibly have a different origin and purpose and we just see the superficial similarity.
Some of the things in Wales, like Maying – going out on Mayday as a party to sing, carrying a big garland - that is known to have spread into Wales from England, as it is known to have spread into England from France. The whole concept of Maying - and varying local historians in the South are most bitter about this introduction, this alien custom which, what was it, "will enervate the British people - men", a phrase like that, "British men from manly things like archery and Morris dancing". Of course, the trouble with Maying, you see, is that, if you've got mixed sex it got everybody worked up. Why they got upset at Aylsford is that the dance, the late night extra of the time, slowly disappeared as everybody grabbed themselves a girl and went off for a so called walk in the woods. At Hurstbourne Tarrant on the other side of Hampshire at St Mary Bourne, it got particularly bad there, they even detect a correlation of births with Mayday celebration.
Let's come up to the Northwest, which is the last area I want to talk about. The origin of Northwest Morris is not simple, it comes from a variety of sources. There's more that one type of dance in the area as well. Rush-bearing was an important element but the rush-bearing ceremonies were not on the Cheshire plain. They were up in middle Lancashire, north of Manchester. This was a time when churches, I think, didn't have pews and just every so often put new rushes over the old ones to keep the place smelling fresh and people just stood around for services. They made a great deal of this and had a large cart for the rushes and made a decorative thing of it. It was then very heavy so it needed a lot of people to pull it and this used to be a special day. It would attract the village band and then the dancers. In one or two places, the Morris dancers themselves actually pulled the rushcart but in many others they didn't so one assumes that it was just local circumstances.
The Morris was something very simple, basically the dressing up and the huge show to do a simple processional dance with no set figures and no set pattern. It wasn't until the rushcart stopped, as it were, that the dancers didn't want to and with the growth of holidays, Wakes, which were the formal thing, and beginning to get to the seaside. Once people started to get around a bit, we then had period where the Northwest teams converted from what we now call the rogue dance, the processional thing, to having set pieces, stage dances, they were called for while. This sort of thing happened in the rushcart area.
At the same time, we had a sort of spring custom on the Cheshire plain stretching down into Staffordshire and this seemed to attract the same sort of thing. The procession of church or club is much stronger concept up North than it now is in the South. Although at one time, every village had its one or two friendly societies which would have a procession around. Up north, there seemed to be a much stronger tradition, I often think they still are, that easily attracted dancers. So, besides the rushcart which tended to be later in the year, they had a spring village walk which would attract the dancers.
On the vexed question of "Did women do the Northwest Morris?" The earliest reference I came across was at Buxton Well dressing. The whole idea of well dressing is a celebration, you might think it was terribly ancient, which might be true if it weren't for the fact that the wells being dressed aren't very old. Buxton is one of the oldest, 1840 and the first celebration, there's a poster illustrating this, they had a team of young women doing the Morris. After a few years, it was thought unseemly that "young women should disport themselves in public or display" was the phrase used, and they got in a team of young men from a neighbouring town to replace them. I've seen a collection of photographs of Northwest Morris, particularly thinking of pre-First World War, and going through these, there's marginally more photographs of women's sides than there are of men. So, although it's conventionally said that Northwest Morris is a male tradition, which after the First World War, men took women's sides and men's sides that it could get together. So that it changed sex, as it were, I don't think the available evidence supports that too well, there were a lot of women's sides as well as men's sides.
Certainly, there's no doubt about the evidence that women's sides were formed by men after the First World War and there are some very good photographs of women's sides wearing clogs and jockey caps. In fact, looking at the pictures of Royton(?), they actually dressed up in male-like costumes. These were sides that had been raised by old men's sides in the image of the Morris as they knew it.
Other things which developed over a period of time, early references to the Morris, suggest that the implement which was an integral part of the dance was probably small branches of greenery rather than the waver. The waver seems to be a development from sticks, to a few ribbons, to lots of ribbons, then ribbons at both ends, then masses of bells, until it grew into the common carnival waver you find in the Carnival Morris troupe, which are a thick bundle of tissue paper. Funnily enough, that sort of thing, the pom-poms, as they are called in the States, you see, it's got onto the US scene as well, they have ([Blank Tape])
…early sides did dances which are recognisably Northwest Morris.
Now, what do I mean by recognisable Northwest Morris? You can't say this because it's got a one-two-three-hop type step because the Carnival Morris still have that. They still have the high knee raising step of the Cheshire Plain Morris. The Morris in Lancashire had a characteristic structure, it had a stepping up-and-back or back-and-forward type movement and a step-and-turn type movement with figures in between. That's the characteristic structure. Many dances collected from women's sides between the wars had that sort of structure and we say if they are not old dances, at least they are derived directly from it. My understanding is that Carnival Morris dances that you see today are very slow moving because there are no points for the dance. In the competition, you get nothing for content, it's all for appearance. About a quarter of the marks are for coming on, how well you come on. You also get a lot of marks for the exit as well. They judge you on the quality of the costume. I remember talking to a judge at the Bellevue finals and saying: "how do you judge between one side and another?" They said "well we see how well the bells are polished" and things like this. They are all so perfect.
The other thing is, the typical show lasts almost a quarter of a hour. Nowadays, they tend to do it to records, the record is turned over two or three times during a performance. By the end of it, the girls are beginning to wilt, a lot of mistakes are made in the exit because the girls are physically exhausted. The step is this high knee step, which is very tiring. In practices, they have a very simple sort of step.
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They practice the routines, getting the patterns right, having a very simple, as it were, analogue of the step. It's something you ought to remember, particularly where you are trying to get patterns. Get people to do things in slow motion to get the pattern habit right, trying to get the pattern in your mind before worrying about the steps. There's no doubt if something's physically exhausting, you will be concentrating on how you are going to get through it, rather than on what you are supposed to do.
The Carnival Morris troop is the surviving folk dance in this country. There are four Carnival associations in the Northwest. The Carnival association is something which, if you want a carnival, it can provide everything from hot dogs stalls to wavers to sell along the street. It organises your Morris Dance competition by telling people to turn up. All the details can be organised through a Carnival association. The sides register with one or other of them and because they got fed up with the good sides going round the little carnivals and mopping up the prizes. They've done what the brass band world has had to do. That is, give people fixtures. A balanced set of fixtures, so if you were a good side, you had to meet some good sides occasionally as well. By writing to them, most of these Carnival association have over 100 clubs registered with them. Three or four hundred teams exist and some of these clubs have more than one troop because there are various age groups; and therefore there could be three or of these troupes in a club. So, the number of teenage girls doing it runs into the many thousands. They are usually organised with a sort of chaperone, a mum that looks after the gear and collects the wavers after performances and during practices. As far as I can gather from the ones I've met, the dances get composed by themselves. They are organised and disciplined by themselves, or at least one of the older dancers acts as a conductor with them. It meets all the criteria I can think of for a living folk tradition, it's a tradition locally, like children’s games are a tradition, nobody can deny that, they teach it on from child to child, how do you do it, what to do, they're innovative (perhaps that doesn't come into children's games). This shows they're on the way to growing up but it is a living folk art. You may not like it, if you go along to see it, although I did. It's actually a marvellous way of wasting the day watching the girls dance. It depends what you're interested in.
I like taking films, I advise people when taking films, you take a film of a women's side like any other Morris, if they're not very good, you home in on the pretty ones, if you can't find any pretty ones, you look for well endowed ones, if there aren't any, well, the dance is over anyhow.