English Folk-Song and Dance

by Frank Kidson; Mary Neal

The following extract seems to link up our English Morris dance with the Moorish dance, so that whether we choose to derive the word “Morris” from the Keltic Mor-uiseil, or from the Moorish, or whether we think that the similarity of the two words made a confusion in the popular mind, and so the two kinds of dances came to be known by one name, we can still hold the belief that the English traditional dance which has come to us down the ages was originally a religious dance celebrating the return of the Sun-god and the sowing and the gathering of the crops on which man’s life depended.

Mr Addy asks:—“Has it (the Morris dance) descended to us from a dusky Iberian people, once a distinct caste in England, in whose magical powers and religion the dominant races believed? In his dictionary, Professor Skeat has concluded that a Morris dancer was a Moorish dancer. Assuming that such is the case, we may ask ourselves why these dances were so called. Are we to suppose that English peasants borrowed the dance from the Moors in historical times? Or are we to believe that it was handed down in England from an early period by the remnants of a dark-coloured Iberian people who, according to Tacitus, crossed over from Spain and were, in fact, Moors? In Yorkshire, a rude Christmas play known as the Peace Egg is performed. In that play the chief act is the slaughter by St George of England of a Black Prince of Paladine whom St George stigmatises as a ‘Black Morocco Dog.’ The play seems to represent an old feud between a light-haired and a dark-haired people once inhabiting England: and it may be that in popular speech the dark-haired people were once known as Moors. If this dramatised contest between St George of England and the ‘Black Morocco Dog’ does not point back to a time when conflicts existed in this country between a dusky race of Iberian or Moorish origin and a light-haired people which conquered and enslaved them, to what can we ascribe its origin? We can only say that this play is of historical or literary and not of traditional origin. But the form of the play renders an historical or literary origin impossible, and the whole performance seems to be nothing else but a rude and popular reminiscence of an ancient national feud.

“It seems relevant to mention here an old earthwork, extending for some miles in length near Sheffield, known in one part of its course as Barber Balk. The direction of the earthwork is from south-west to north-east, and the ditch is uniformly on the southern side, as if it had been intended as a defence against attack from that side. Some modern scholars identify the Barbars or Berbers, a people inhabiting the Saracen countries along the north coast of Africa, with the Iberians. Can it be that an invading Celtic people threw up this earthwork as a defence against a dusky Iberian foe coming from the south, and that the ancient name of the earthwork has been handed down from a remote time, thereby preserving its true history? And is it not possible that the Iberians, the Morris or Moor, the ‘Black Morocco Dog’ of the traditional play and the Barber are identical?

“A great authority on early Britain ‘has accepted and employed the theory advanced by ethnologists that the early inhabitants of this country were of Iberian origin.’”

The fact that the Morris dancers sometimes blackened their faces need not necessarily mean that they wish to represent the Moors, but that they were thought to represent Moors because their faces were blackened.

The Morris dance was called in some places the Northern lights and the Aurora Borealis because of its desultory movements, and it may have been this which inspired Milton to write—

“The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove, Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move.”

If, as I have tried to show, the traditional dance is part of an ancient religious ceremonial dating from pre-Christian days, we shall not be surprised to find that in Early Christian times the dance still found some place in the ceremonial of worship.

Sir Hubert Parry, in a chapter on dance rhythm in Grove’s Dictionary of Music, says:—“Dance rhythm and dance gestures have exerted the most powerful influence on music from prehistoric times until to-day. The analogy of a similar state of things among uncultivated races still existing confirms the inherent probability of the view that definiteness of any kind of music, whether of figure or phrase, was first arrived at through connection with dancing. The beating of some kind of noisy instrument as an accompaniment to gestures in the excitement of actual war or victory or other such exciting cause was the first type of rhythmic music, and the telling of tribal or national stories, of deeds of heroes in the indefinite chant consisting of a monotone slightly varying with occasional cadences which is met with among so many barbarous peoples, was the first type of vocal music.

“This vague approach to musical recitation must have received its first rhythmic arrangement when it came to be accompanied by rhythmic gestures and the two processes were thereby combined, while song and dance went on together as in mediæval times in Europe.