English Folk-Song and Dance

by Frank Kidson; Mary Neal

The following tune is taken from Miss A. G. Gilchrist’s Manuscript Collection, and was noted and sent to her by Mr Smith Williamson, bandmaster of Moston, W. Manchester, in 1907. Miss Gilchrist thinks it interesting in connection with the tune of this Carol, as it is called “My love, my love,” and was played as a Morris dance at the Rush-Cart ceremony at Moston up to forty-five or fifty years ago.

The following account of the sacred all-night dance written by Philo (about a.d. 26) is quoted by Mr Mead in Quest, October 1910, and is interesting because the dance described is curiously like the surviving processional dances which have intervals in the processional when a set dance is performed.

“After the banquet they kept the sacred all-night festival. And this is how they keep it. They all stand up in a body, and in the middle of the banqueting-place they first form the Choroi, one of men and the other of women, and a leader and conductor is chosen for each, the one whose reputation is greatest for a knowledge of music: they then chant hymns composed in God’s honour in many metres and melodies, sometimes singing together, sometimes one chorus beating the measure with their hands for the antiphonal chanting of the other, now dancing to the measure and now inspiring it, at times dancing in procession, at times set dances, and then circle-dances right and left.” The latter part of this description might almost have been taken down from some of the Morris dances danced to-day.

In Anglo-Saxon times the sword dance was in great repute, and Saxon nobles kept dancers to amuse their guests. There is mention of Morris dancing in Edward III.’s reign, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain, but few, if any, vestiges of it can be traced in writers beyond the reign of Henry VII.: about which time, and particularly in that of Henry VIII., the Churchwarden’s accounts in several parishes show that the Morris dance made a very considerable figure in the parochial festivals. Some of the accounts of the May Games of Robin Hood include a Morris dance, but it is doubtful if the Morris was an intrinsic part of the Robin Hood pageant, as it was very often danced on separate occasions altogether. I am inclined to think that both are fragments of much older dances and dramas, and that it is almost impossible to say what was their exact relation to one another. By the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, when references to the Morris dance are very frequent, all idea of its religious significance had disappeared, and it represented the characteristics of the English peasant in a holiday mood in the days when life was a big adventure, and revelry and sport were rude and boisterous. It is a little difficult to realise, as one watches the few remaining traditional dancers to-day, either that their dancing has represented all that mankind knew of primitive religious aspiration and ceremonial, or later that it embodied all the frolic and revel of the rollicking days of Queen Elizabeth.

Although there is only one written record of steps and figures, there are so many general descriptions of the dances in the writers of that time that it is a little difficult, in the short space at my disposal, to choose which will give the best idea of the dance as then performed. I have chosen a few descriptions which seem best to fulfil this purpose.

But first there are four pictures of Morris dancing which may be here described.

The first is a painted glass window at Betley, in Staffordshire. It exhibits in all probability the most curious as well as the oldest representation of an English May game and Morris dance that is anywhere to be found. The dresses look as if they belong to the reign of Edward IV., but the owner, Tollet, thought they were in the time of Henry VIII.

Another early representation of a Morris dance is a copy of a very scarce engraving on copper by Israhel Van Meckenem (died 1503), so named from the place of his nativity, a German village in the confines of Flanders, in which latter country this artist appears chiefly to have resided, and therefore in most of his prints we may observe the Flemish costume of his time. From the pointed shoes that we see in one of the figures it must have been executed between the years 1460 and 1470, about which latter period the broad-toed shoes came into fashion in France and Flanders. It seems to have been intended as a pattern for goldsmith’s work, probably a cup or tankard.

And thirdly, there is in the old Town Hall at Munich a series of ten figures of Morris dancers, carved in wood by Erasmus Schnitznar in 1480. All these figures have bells, and one has long streamers to his sleeves.

There is a fourth described by Walpole in his Catalogue of English Engravers, under the name of Peter Stent. It is a painting at Lord Fitzwilliam’s on Richmond Green, which came out of the old neighbouring palace. It was executed by Vinckenkroom about the end of the reign of James I., and exhibits a view of the above palace. A Morris dance is introduced, consisting of seven figures, viz.:—A fool, hobby-horse, piper, Maid Marian, and three dancers, the rest of the figures being spectators.