Is morris dancing a fertility dance? Who dances around the Maypole? Who are the Moorish? What is a Morris? Does England have a traditional dance? What are morris men in England?
Is maypole dancing banned? Is maypole dancing Pagan? Who brought maypole to Jamaica? What is English dancing? How many morris dancers are there in the UK? Which dance has Austrian Bavarian origins? What does Morris dancing Symbolise? What is maypole day? In mediaeval and Renaissance England, the churches brewed and sold ales, including wassail.
These ales were sold for many occasions, both seasonal and sacramental - there were christening ales, bride's ales, clerk, wake and Whitsun ales - and were an important means of fund-raising for churches. Later in the century the morris became attached to village fetes, and the May Day revels; Shakespeare says "as fit as a morris for May Day" and "a Whitsun morris dance. William Kemp danced a solo morris from London to Norwich in Morris Dancing was popular in Tudor times.
However under Cromwell it fell out of favour and was actively discouraged by many Puritans. The ales were suppressed by the Puritan authorities in the seventeenth century and, when some reappeared in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they usually had associated dancing. By the mid 18th century in the South Midlands region, morris dancing was a fixture of the Whitsun ales. Morris Dancing was now in the hands of common folk who couldn't afford the fancy costumes of a couple centuries earlier, and they were resorting to ordinary clothing decorated with ribbons and flowers.
There was a separate variety of morris, called bedlam morris, being done in a swath from the Welsh border counties through Warwickshire and Northamptonshire down to Buckinghamshire; the bedlam morris seems to have been mainly or exclusively done with sticks.
During the nineteenth century Morris Dancing declined rapidly. New forms of entertainment, rapid social change and its association with an older unfashionable culture were all contributing factors. It was inspired by the death of Oldham's "surrogate father" Donald McGregor Campbell, a former morris man who showed the thenyear-old from the Surrey stockbroker belt the ways of the bells when he took him in after his parents moved to Australia. Oldham recalls how his adopted parent regularly used to enliven family gatherings by knocking out a Sweet Jenny Jones or Constant Billy with morris-loving friends.
In the end it is a nice film about good people. But convincing the distributors there was a market for it was another matter. But there are thousands of morris dancers out there," says Oldham. One champion of morris who rode to the rescue was Cat Moore of Bicester, Oxfordshire. Having seen an internet trailer and heard favourable reports from friends who had been to some of the sold-out village hall screenings in the South West she was so disappointed at the prospect of it not going nationwide that she set up a petition.
Within a few weeks some 8, people had signed up, demanding A Life With Bells On be given a wider airing with the result that the Picturehouse chain agreed to put it on 50 screens later this month. Life With Bells On is indeed funny. But it is also touching.
Take the opening scene — shot with reckless expense for a low-budget film from the air above the rolling hills of Dorset — revealing the isolated figure of Twist dancing beside a chalk man, concentration fiercely etched across his face. We know that morris dancing, in some parts of the country at least, is facing a protracted death. There is a shortage of new recruits who, reared on the airbrushed sirens of music TV, are too embarrassed to join in, whilst the increasingly-aged profile of existing dancers prompted the real-life Morris Ring no relation to the fictional Morris Circle , which represents all-male troupes, to warn earlier this year that in a mere two decades there could be no one left to keep the traditions alive.
But it is not the first time that morris has teetered on the verge of extinction. As Victorian Britain enjoyed the pinnacle of its imperial and industrial greatness, the customs of an earlier agrarian age were being all but forgotten. Many dances and their accompanying tunes existed only in the folk memory of a few elders. A working-class population on the cusp of modernity derided such retrogressive practices with their half-remembered allusions to bountiful harvests and fertility rites and their antler-clad predilection for animistic ritual and pre-Christian folklore.
The upper classes and the Church, needless to say deplored the morris men's penchant for what today we would call "binge drinking" on the feast days of May Day and Whitsun. Indeed one celebrated team's philosophy was summarised as "dance until the sweat comes down and then drink until the water comes down" — repeating the process over and over again. An unlikely saviour of morris appeared in the guise of Cecil Sharp, an Oxbridge-educated professional musician who on Boxing Day came across a performance of the Headington Quarry morris team.
This was the time of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the middle classes were responding to the machine age by looking backwards towards a period of greater "authenticity". Not that morris was always popular. The first dances are thought to have arrived in England around the time of the Tudors — an adaptation of the Spanish pageant known as the Moresca, which celebrated the defeat of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula.
Shakespearean actor William Kempe morris danced all the way from London to Norwich chronicling his achievement in the book Nine Days Wonder, published in while John Milton introduced the dancers to a wider audience in his celebrated masque Comus. But the Puritans had little love for the morris men or their traditions — as attested to by the observations of Stubbs — and the "ungodly" sound of jingling bells in the village greens and market squares of Cromwell's Commonwealth was systematically repressed along with most other forms of public enjoyment.
Manning identified dancers in the photograph and got some of them together, with other of their colleagues, to put on a performance of the dances at the Corn Exchange in Oxford now the Old Fire Station, in George Street in March The performance was well received and the team continued to dance on its own initiative throughout On one of these occasions, on Boxing Day , they were seen by Cecil Sharp, who noted down the music. However, Sharp did not become further involved with morris dancing until when Mary Neal asked him if he knew of English dances to complement the English folk songs which he was publishing.
Sharp unearthed the details of William Kimber, the musician from whom he had noted the tunes in Headington, and Neal brought Kimber to London to teach her girls. In , therefore, any activity was part of the aftermath of the local revival by Percy Manning three years previously.
The fact that morris dancing was included in the planned festivities is a sign of the growing middle-class interest in 'Merrie England' and antiquarian revival, which was to come to fruition under the leadership of Sharp and Neal a few years later.
The colour of the ribbon -- green -- is not a colour normally associated with the Headington Quarry dancers whose colours are red and blue, see item The bells - together with the handkerchiefs and sticks - are probably what identify morris dancers to the average spectator. Bell pads generally consist of rectangular pieces of leather or braid, cut with joins top and bottom into vertical strips, with small crotals pellet bells of the kind also associated with jesters' caps attached to the strips.
Each pad is decorated with a combination of any of strips of ribbon or braid, often with small rosettes or bows. They are tied around the leg just below the knee by longer strips of braid extending horizontally in each direction from the top and bottom of the pad.
At Bampton, Oxfordshire the pads are called 'ruggles'. The smallest bells are about 15 mm in diameter. These are found on the older sets of bells. Later bells are about 20 mm in diameter. They are sometimes known as treble and tenor bells. The largest bells may reach 30 cm.
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