English Folk-Song and Dance

by Frank Kidson; Mary Neal

INTRODUCTION

Before the year 1905 few people knew that England possessed a traditional folk-dance of her own, and fewer still realised that the national dances were still practised on certain festival occasions in several villages and country towns, for the most part in the Midland and Northern counties. The word “folk” when used to describe a dance may be interpreted in two ways. It may be used to signify a dance (either traditional or not) at one time popular amongst the people, or its meaning may be limited to those dances whose origin is lost in antiquity and which have been passed on from generation to generation by unlettered folk without the aid of written music or written instruction as to steps or evolutions. That this book may be of more use to those who wish either to study the available English dances or to pass them on to the present generation, the wider meaning of the word “folk” will be understood.

But a very marked distinction must be drawn between the two classes of folk-dance, between those recorded in books and still danced by peasant folk as a merely social dance, with no special significance beyond being an occasion for the display of gallantry, coquetry, and the courtesies of social intercourse; and those dances, until lately unrecorded, which are religious in origin and are the expression in rhythm of primitive beliefs and magical ceremonial.

In the former are included the country dances and certain popular court dances. The latter include the Sword dances, Morris dances, the Furry dance, and Horn dance. As the origin of all dancing may be directly or indirectly traced to the ceremonial of primitive religions, it will be well first of all to give some account of those traditional dances still lingering in English villages which give unmistakable signs of their origin.

The primitive forms of the traditional dance can only be guessed at by the student of to-day, for probably every epoch, every generation, and every individual dancer has added to, modified, or taken from the original dance, but enough is still with us to make the study an intensely interesting one both from the archæological and from the social point of view.

The most important surviving traditional dance in England to-day is undoubtedly the Morris dance, both because of the far greater number of Morris dances still in existence and because of the greater differences between the individual dances. But very closely allied to, if not identical with, the Morris is the Sword dance, and again allied to both is the Mummers’ play.

My own experience in talking to country dancers coincides with that of Mr Cecil Sharp, who says that if you ask a sword dancer of Grenoside or Earsdon, he will insist that he is a Morris dancer, and that one is often sent after a Morris dance, only to find traces of a Mummers’ play. He adds, “In due course it will dawn upon him (the collector) that the sword dancer of Northern England, the Morris dancer of the Midlands and the South, and the Mummer of all England and Scotland are in the popular view as one and pass under the same name.” And it is the word “Morris” which gives the clue to the origin and nature of the dance, whatever the precise form which it takes.

With one exception the dictionaries and glossaries I have consulted derive the word “Morris” from “Moorish.” Mr Cecil Sharp says that the weight of testimony must be held to show Morocco as the fount and origin of the dance,[1] but Mr John Graham and Mr Kidson throw doubt on its Moorish origin. The fact that the Morisco, supposed to be the counterpart of the English Morris, was a solo dance performed with castanets, and the fact that amongst Orientals only women danced, whilst the Morris is essentially a man’s dance, seems to me to put the Morris definitely into an entirely different category from the Morisco, although both words are used for the same dance.

Eventually I found what I believe to be the true derivation of the word in the Glossary of C. Mackay, LL.D., published in 1887. He says that the word “Morris” is probably of Keltic origin, and comes from “Mor,” great, and “uasal,” noble and dignified. The final syllable was dropped in the course of ages, when Mor-uasal and Mor-uiseil became Moruis, great, noble, stately, dignified, solemn. Dr Mackay connects the dance with the Druidical Festival of Beltane (from Bal or Bael, the Sun-god), and he says that all traditions of the Druids show the solemn importance which they attached to May Day, or Beltane. Multitudes of devotees preceded by three orders of the priesthood—priests, bards, and prophets—marched in solemn procession to the top of a high hill to watch the kindling of a fire on May the first by the direct agency of the sun. The solemn and mysterious dance around the fire thus kindled appears to have been the origin of the Morris or Mor-uiseil dance.