Robin Hood and Friar Tuck also appear occasionally in historic accounts, but I have never heard of either character as part of the “sides” now existing.
The musician, once a player on pipe and tabor, later on the fiddle, and to-day sometimes on the concertina, was of course indispensable, and I was told at Headington of one old fiddler for that “side,” who played until he was so old that he had to be carried from place to place and deposited on the roadside when the dancers halted for the dance, and I heard of another who rode a donkey when too old to accompany the dancers on foot.
The Treasurer who carried the collecting box is also important. Most “sides” of Morris men had a “sword-bearer,” who carried round a gaily decorated sword on which was impaled a cake, specially made for the occasion by some lady who undertook the duty year by year, though of late (as at Bampton) the cake is just an ordinary shop-made one. A small knife is stuck in the cake, and the sword-bearer hands it round to the spectators, who each ceremonially take a piece. The “treasurer” follows with a box into which one is expected to put a donation to compensate the dancers “for their trouble.”
Whit-Monday at Bampton-in-the-Bush, Oxon.
The effect of the ceremony is quite extraordinary. To go from the London of to-day to a quiet village and take part in this old ritual is to know the link which binds the ornate Catholic ritual of to-day to the most primitive ritual evolved by the folk to express the truths of incarnation, of sacrifice, of death, and of resurrection. To go from Kirtlington, where in the traditional tales of the oldest inhabitants there are still traces of the human sacrifice, and later of a lamb sacrificed as a substitute, and to go on to Bampton, where the cake alone typifies the ancient sacrificial rite, is to realise the power inherent in the human race to lay aside in each generation some cruelty, some horror, and to rise by slow degrees into a higher state of evolution. The study of folk-dance and of the legend and ceremonial which surround it opens up a great field of interest to all who would learn the secrets of human development.