Morris dancing is a form of English folk dance. It is based on rhythmic stepping and sequences of choreographed movement by a group of dancers in costume, usually wearing bell pads on their shins, their shoes or both. A band or single musician, also costumed, will accompany them. Sticks, swords, handkerchiefs, and a variety of other implements may be used as accessories by the dancers.
Morris dancing first appeared in England in the 15th century. Its earliest surviving mention dates to 1448 and records the payment of seven shillings to Morris dancers by the Goldsmiths' Company in London.
Three prominent groups organise and support Morris dancing in England: Morris Ring, Morris Federation and Open Morris; all three organisations have members from other countries as well.
There are around 150 Morris sides (or teams) in the United States. English immigrants form a large part of the Morris tradition in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong. There are relatively isolated groups in other countries, for example those in Utrecht and Helmond, Netherlands; the Arctic Morris Group of Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden; as well as in Cyprus, St Petersburg, Russia, and in the Alsace-Basel region at the border of France and Switzerland.
Name and origins Morris dancing was imported from village festivities into popular entertainment after the invention of the court masque by Henry VIII. The word Morris apparently derived from morisco, meaning 'Moorish'. Cecil Sharp, whose collecting of Morris dances preserved many from extinction, suggested that it might have arisen from the dancers' blacking their faces as part of the necessary ritual disguise.
The name is first recorded in English in the mid-15th century as , , , i.e. 'Moorish dance'. The term entered English via Flemish . Comparable terms in other languages include German (also from the 15th century), French , Croatian , and , or in Italy and Spain. The modern spelling Morris-dance first appeared in the 17th century.OED, s.v. "morris dance" and "Morisk". D. Arnold, The New Oxford Companion to Music, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 1203. In Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words, first published in 1658, the term morisco was referenced as both "a Moor" and "the Morris dance, as it were the Moorish dance", while John Bullokar defined it in 1695 as "a certain dance used among the Moors; whence our Morris dance".
It is unclear how the dance came to be referred to as Moorish, "unless in reference to fantastic dancing or costumes", i.e. the deliberately "exotic" flavour of the performance.OED, etymonline.com. The English dance thus apparently arose as part of a wider 15th-century European fashion for supposedly "Moorish" spectacle, which also left traces in Spanish and Italian folk dance. The means and chronology of the transmission of this fashion is now difficult to trace; the London Chronicle recorded "spangled Spanish dancers" performed an energetic dance before King Henry VII at Christmas in 1494, but Heron's accounts also mention "" four days earlier, and the attestation of the English term from the mid-15th century establishes that there was a "Moorish dance" performed in England decades prior to 1494.
An alternative derivation from the Latin , (custom and usage) has also been suggested.The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1913 / 1994) Oxford University Press, Oxford.
It has been suggested that the tradition of rural English dancers blackening their faces may be a form of disguise, or a reference either to the Moors or to miners; the origins of the practice remain unclear and are the subject of ongoing debate. In June 2020 the Joint Morris Organisation called for the use of black makeup to be discontinued, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Groups that used face paint changed to blue, green, or yellow and black stripes.
History in England
The earliest (15th-century) references place the Morris dance in a courtly setting. The dance became part of performances for the lower classes by the later 16th century. Henry VIII owned a gold salt cellar which depicted a Morris dance with five dancers and a "tabrett". A "tabret" is a small tabor drum.Francis Palgrave, Antient Kalendars of the Exchequer, vol. 2 (London, 1836), pp. 286-7 On 4 January 1552, George Ferrers, the Lord of Misrule of Edward VI, put on a show in London which included "mores danse, dansyng with a tabret".Clare Sponsler, 'Morris Dance and Theatre History', Thomas Postlewait, Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa, 2010), p. 96: John Gough Nichols, Diary of Henry Machyn (London: Camden Society, 1848), p. 13 In 1600, the Shakespearean actor William Kempe Morris danced from London to Norwich, an event chronicled in his Nine Daies Wonder (1600).
Almost nothing is known about the folk dances of England before the mid-17th century.the first description of such dances was John Playford's The English Dancing Master, published in 1651. While it is possible to speculate on the transition of "Morris dancing" from the courtly to a rural setting (it may have acquired elements of pre-Elizabethan (medieval) folk dance), such proposals will always be based on an argument from silence as there is no direct record of what such elements would have looked like. In the Elizabethan era, there was significant cultural contact between Italy and England, and it has been suggested that much of what is now considered traditional English folk dance, and especially English country dance, is descended from Italian dances imported in the 16th century.M. Dougal MacFinlay & M. Sion Andreas o Wynedd, To Tame a Pretty Conceit, volume 4 of the Letter of Dance (1996).
By the mid-17th century, the working peasantry took part in Morris dances, especially at Whitsun. A pamphlet acquired by Horsham Museum, created by Thomas Munn, known as Tom the Smuggler, that was given to his gaoler on the morning of his execution in 1750, describes how he got a group of young fellows to go Morris dancing.
Morris dancing continued in popularity until the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying social changes. Four teams claim a continuous lineage of tradition within their village or town: Abingdon (their Morris team was kept going by the Hemmings family), Bampton, Headington Quarry, and Chipping Campden.Chipping Campden Morris Men | Homepage Other villages have revived their own traditions, and hundreds of other teams across the globe have adopted (and adapted) these traditions, or have created their own styles from the basic building blocks of Morris stepping and figures.
By the late 19th century, and in the West Country at least, Morris dancing was fast becoming more a local memory than an activity. D'Arcy Ferris (or de Ferrars), a Cheltenham-based singer, music teacher and organiser of pageants, became intrigued by the tradition and sought to revive it. He first encountered Morris in Bidford and organised its revival. Over the following years he took the side to several places in the West Country, from Malvern to Bicester and from Redditch to Moreton in Marsh. By 1910, he and Cecil Sharp were in correspondence on the subject.
Several English folklorists were responsible for recording and reviving the tradition in the early 20th century, often from a bare handful of surviving members of mid-19th-century village sides. Among these, the most notable are Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal.
Revival Boxing Day 1899 is widely regarded as the starting point for the Morris revival. Cecil Sharp was visiting a friend's house in Headington, near Oxford, when the Headington Quarry Morris side arrived to perform. Sharp was intrigued by the music and collected several tunes from the side's musician, William Kimber, including "Country Gardens". A decade later he began collecting the dances, spurred and at first assisted by Mary Neal, a founder of the Espérance Club (a dressmaking co-operative and club for young working women in London), and Herbert MacIlwaine, musical director of the Espérance Club. Neal was looking for dances for her girls to perform, and so the first revival performance was by young women in London.
Organisations
In the first few decades of the 20th century, several men's sides were formed, and in 1934 the Morris Ring was founded by six revival sides:
Cambridge Morris Men Letchworth Morris Thaxted Morris Men East Surrey Morris Men Greensleeves Morris Men (based in Wimbledon) Oxford Morris (which was not at the initial ring meeting at Thaxted but was influential in the creation of the Ring's constitution).
In the 1950s and especially the 1960s, there was an explosion of new dance teams, some of them women's or mixed sides. At the time, there was often heated debate over the propriety and even legitimacy of women dancing the Morris, even though there is evidence as far back as the 16th century that there were female Morris dancers.William Kempe, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1600) :"At Chelmsford, a Mayde not passing foureteene yeares of age, dwelling with one Sudley, my kinde friend, made request to her Master and Dame that she might daunce the Morrice with me in a great large roome. They being intreated, I was soone wonne to fit her with bels; besides she would haue the olde fashion, with napkins on her armes; and to our iumps we fell. A whole houre she held out; but then being ready to lye downe I left her off; but thus much in her praise, I would haue challenged the strongest man in Chelmsford, and amongst many I thinke few would haue done so much". There are now male, female and mixed sides to be found.
Partly because women's and mixed sides were not eligible for full membership of the Morris Ring (this has now changed), two other national (and international) bodies were formed, the Morris Federation and Open Morris. All three bodies provide communication, advice, insurance, instructionals (teaching sessions) and social and dancing opportunities to their members. The three bodies co-operate on some issues, while maintaining their distinct identities. An umbrella body that includes all three, the Joint Morris Organisation, organises joint events and discusses issues that affect all members, such as access to both public liability and personal insurance cover.
Morris dancing in Wales
Traditional Welsh dance experienced a revival in the early twentieth century, and while these dances were commonly performed as progressive longways display dances, Lois Blake noted that the Llanover Dances displayed "the influence of the Morris, both in form and movements".The Real Cardiff Morris. Myweb.tiscali.co.uk. Retrieved on 2011-09-27.
While these traditions that had been recorded by Ceinwen Thomas and Catherine Margretta Thomas were not specifically Morris dances as recognised today, they were interpreted in new ways by Morris men. While one dance, Y Gaseg Eira would become a central part of the Welsh morris.
The revival saw the reinvention of a living tradition in Wales, with new dances such as Y Derwydd, Hela'r Sgwarnog, Ty Coch Caerdydd and Y Goron becoming recognised to be just as much a part of the Nantgarw tradition as the original dance.
Morris dancing in the United States Morris dancing has been practised in the United States since at least 1908, although an article published by the Country Dance and Song Society points to 1910 as the year Morris dancing truly took off in America. The primary organization supporting Morris Dance in the US is the North American Morris Dance Organization, which is affiliated with the Country Dance and Song Society as well as the Morris Ring, Morris Federation, and Open Morris. British-American musician and folklorist Tony Barrand was key in developing and documenting Morris history in the US, including founding the Marlboro Morris Men as well as the Marlboro Morris Ale.