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What is Border Morris?

   This is an excerpt from Andy Anderson's booklet about Border Morris
   Dancing, published by the Morris Federation and available, in part, on
   Andy Anderson's web site. See also the Hounds brochure and the links to
   sources of dance notation at the end of this page.

   The term 'Border Morris' was probably first used by Dr E C Cawte in his
   article in the EFDSS Journal, "The Morris Dances of Shropshire,
   Herefordshire and Worcestershire". Today the term normally describes
   dances of a particular style, rather than just those which originated
   in the area. The dances are boisterous and energetic, primarily stick
   dances, relying to a great extent on the impact of the performance. The
   dancers may cover their faces with coloured make-up and the costumes
   are often decorated with many ribbons or strips of material, known as
   rags or tatters.
   Border Morris Map

The Collected Material

   There are many descriptions of morris dancing in Shropshire,
   Herefordshire and Worcestershire, a great number of them dating back
   hundreds of years. These early descriptions are very interesting, but
   unfortunately not a great deal of use for the derivation of dance
   notations. They divide broadly into two categories. Some are
   descriptions of the performance of morris dances as entertainment at
   fairs or in the big houses of the area. These tell us a great deal
   about the context of the performances and how the audience received
   them. Occasionally the material includes descriptions of the music and
   the costume of the dancers. Without fail, the authors ignore the actual
   form and structure of the dance.

   The remainder of the early material consists of records of morris
   dancers appearing before magistrates on charges of violent behaviour,
   drunkenness, unpaid bills or any combination of the three. Normally
   these records do not include descriptions of the dancing, which
   preceded the incident in question. It was not until the revival of
   interest in folk customs and traditions that anyone really recorded the
   form and structure of any type of folk dance, let alone the morris
   dances from the Welsh borders. Shortly before the end of the nineteenth
   century, collectors began to work in the border area and Ella Leather,
   Maud Karpeles and Cecil Sharp, amongst others, recorded dances and
   tunes from the area before the first world war. However, the collectors
   of the period generally ignored the morris dances of the Welsh borders:
   Cecil Sharp considered them a degenerate form of the morris, hardly
   worth recording.

   From the nineteen-thirties onwards, researchers started to make some
   real effort to record the dancing from the area. By then, however, the
   traditional teams, which had already started to decline well before the
   first world war, had almost completely died out. Collectors interested
   in the dances themselves were mostly forced to rely on second-hand
   information from people who had seen the dance, rather than from those
   who had actually performed them. This situation was probably made worse
   because morris dancing was a tradition associated with begging and
   people were reluctant to admit that they, or their friends or family,
   had been involved in it.

The Traditional Dances And Teams

The Teams

   The teams who were dancing at the end of the nineteenth and the
   beginning of the twentieth centuries performed mainly to raise money to
   supplement their income, although they probably spent a fair proportion
   of the collection in the local pub. Although the impression is that the
   dancers were an undisciplined, rowdy group, anything that impaired the
   performance also reduced the collection and such misdemeanours as
   turning up late or forgetting part of the costume were often subject to
   large fines. In the Welsh Border area, morris dancing traditionally
   happened around Christmas and the dancers could raise a substantial
   amount of extra money. In many cases this made the difference between a
   good Christmas and a poor one. It is open to conjecture whether the
   traditional association with Christmas came first, or whether it
   resulted from a particular need to raise extra money at that time of
   year.

   The team was normally chosen each year by the leader, who was either
   the person who taught the dance, or the musician. The members often
   included favoured members of the leader's family and close friends. The
   numbers often varied from year to year as members died or, more rarely,
   moved away and new people joined. There are a few descriptions of women
   dancing in the area, but these are all very early. Well before the
   start of the twentieth century all of the descriptions are of groups
   solely of men. It is not clear when this change occurred. It may have
   been at least partly due to the nineteenth-century view of women's
   place in society.

   The team would practise the dance a few times before starting to going
   out to perform, then toured the local area collecting money.
   Communications in the area were poor and in some places, notably the
   Clee Hills, they remain so today. It was possible to travel reasonably
   quickly on the rivers, particularly the River Severn, and the major
   roads, but across country ten miles travel could often take a complete
   day. This, coupled with the fact that the dancers were usually poor,
   meant that the teams normally did not travel very far in order to
   perform.

   Many teams blackened their faces, though a number of teams did not.
   'Blacking up' may have been as some form of disguise because the
   performers were begging. If so, this must have been a custom that saved
   face on the part of dancers and audience alike. In a relatively small
   and enclosed community, blackening faces rarely prevents recognition.
   It is equally possible that the performers borrowed the idea from the
   minstrel troupes which were popular during the last part of the
   nineteenth and start of the twentieth century.

   A number of teams wore costumes with numerous rags or ribbons attached
   to either the shirt or a jacket, but again this was by no means
   universal. There are also descriptions of teams wearing smocks, plain
   shirts and carnival costumes. The rule seems to have been that the
   teams wore whatever was readily available and made a show for the
   audience. Most of the teams wore bells, attached either to the shoes or
   to the costume.

The Dances

   Dr Cawte's article contains descriptions of many kinds of dances, some
   of which would not really be considered as morris dancing today. In
   terms of those performances that would today be considered morris, each
   team normally performed a single dance, with sticks. If there are
   descriptions of a second dance, this is another version of the same
   dance, with the sticking chorus replaced either by hand-clapping or by
   a chorus performed with handkerchiefs. Most teams with two dances had a
   hand-clapping chorus. Handkerchief dances were confined to a few teams,
   principally from the Vale of Evesham. These teams, incidentally, did
   not blacken their faces.

   In the far north-west of the area, close to the border with Wales, the
   dances are mostly for a small number of dancers and are relatively
   simple. It may be that the dances from this area are the closest in
   form to the original and that the other dances from the border area
   have been the subject of outside influences. It is, however, also true
   that this area of the Welsh border counties was relatively inaccessible
   to the early collectors. The collected dances date from later, when the
   dancing was already dying out.

   The north-east and central areas of the border counties was more urban
   and had better communications. Perhaps because of this, the dances tend
   to be for larger numbers and are more complex. This area adjoins what
   is considered to be the "North-West Morris" area of the Cheshire Plain
   and Lancashire and it is possible to see the influence of the urban,
   processional dances from that area on some of the "Border Morris"
   teams.

   In the south-east of the area, a separate, distinct group of dances
   occurs, confined to a group of towns and villages in the Vale of
   Evesham. This was a prosperous rural area and it adjoins the "Cotswold
   Morris" area. The dances form a distinctive group, which is unlike
   other dances in the "Border Morris" area. Some of them show clear
   influences from the "Cotswold" style. The spread of these dances in a
   local area along the River Severn may perhaps be due to one or two
   individuals involved with several of the teams.

The Music

   There is little collected music which can be tied to morris dancing in
   the Welsh Border counties with any degree of certainty. Folk collectors
   recorded tunes from musicians who played for dance teams, but these are
   popular country-dance tunes and it is not clear whether the musicians
   also used them for morris dancing. Most informants interviewed by the
   collectors said that there was no set tune. The musicians played tunes
   that they liked, or what they could manage. In cases where the dancers
   insisted that a particular tune was 'right', this was normally because
   a collector had already published a description of the dance
   accompanied by that tune. The only real evidence for the type of music
   being played comes from some of the descriptions of stick-tapping
   rhythms and some vague descriptions such as 'schottisches played rather
   slowly'.

   One tune that was used regularly is 'Not for Joe', or 'Om Si the Gom
   Si'. This started life as a minstrel song and either took its folk name
   from, or gave the name to, a particular style of Border Morris Dancing.
   Some of the versions of the words for this song would be considered
   mildly obscene even today and it is not surprising that the collectors
   did not print them, although they often recorded them in manuscript. In
   an area where few people travelled regularly to the large towns, being
   able to use the latest popular music-hall songs in a performance must
   have been somewhat akin to being able to use part of the latest
   blockbuster movie as an accompaniment to the dancing.

The Revival Of Border Morris

   The revival in Cotswold morris began early in the twentieth century. It
   was not until much later, well after the second world war, that some
   groups in the Welsh Border area began to become interested in
   performing their own local morris dances rather than dances 'imported'
   from the Cotswolds or from the North-West. By that time, the original
   teams had stopped dancing and there was no living example to follow.

   The first new 'Border Morris' teams drew on the previously collected
   material, notations and descriptions of the dances, together with
   descriptions obtained from old dancers and their relatives, to devise a
   style of performance. Where information was lacking, or where the end
   result was unsuitable for a contemporary audience, the dancers brought
   in new ideas. They based this additional material on their experience
   of other types of dancing with which they were familiar. In this way a
   style evolved, originated mainly by four teams: Ironmen, Paradise
   Islanders, Shropshire Bedlams, and Silurian.

   A traditional repertoire of just one dance would not be sufficient to
   maintain the interest of present day dancers, or indeed of the
   audience. As the teams developed, they added new dances. Some of these
   were based on descriptions or fragments of notations: some were
   completely new. Audiences who watched these Border Morris teams saw
   dancing which closely matched the descriptions of the early teams,
   without being exactly as those teams might have performed. The dances
   were vigorous, energetic yet controlled, giving the impression of power
   through the stepping and stick tapping. Performances included the
   originally collected dances alongside newly developed dances that are
   now considered as part of the 'standard' border morris repertoire.

   Inspired by those original teams a number of other new teams were
   formed, many outside the Welsh border area, and existing groups began
   to include some Border Morris in their repertoire. Many of these teams
   saw Border Morris as something new and challenging, where it was
   possible to develop new material within a more fluid framework than was
   possible within the Cotswold Morris tradition. The new teams set about
   developing their own material, basing their performances on the
   notations then available in print and on the style of the teams they
   had seen perform.

   In the past few years, much more information about Border Morris has
   been discovered and become widely available. Little, if any, of this
   has added anything to the available early notations or to an
   appreciation of the original style of the dancing. Taken together, the
   increasing number of available descriptions of performances improves
   the understanding of the type of performance that was taking place, but
   it is extremely unlikely that a complete notation or a detailed
   description of the stepping remains undiscovered in some library or
   private collection. Today, Border Morris can be considered a living
   tradition. Current teams watch each other perform and add new ideas.
   They draw on experience of many forms of dance, both from England and
   elsewhere. The best new ideas are copied, adapted and used in new
   settings until it becomes impossible to say with any certainty where
   they originated.

Where To Get More Information

   All of the material that directly relates to traditional Border Morris
   dance notations is available within the collection of The Morris
   Federation and The Morris Ring. Each of these organisations also has
   material developed by present day teams. Much of this is also available
   on request. When making enquiries, either about these notations or
   about anything else, remember that everyone you deal with is a
   volunteer, answering all of these queries and requests in their spare
   time. If you telephone, be considerate as to the time at which you do
   so. If you write, enclose a stamped addressed envelope or an address
   label and do not be surprised or frustrated if a reply takes some time
   to arrive. Both of these organisations and a third, Open Morris, also
   run occasional workshops and instructionals where you can learn the
   dances. Contact them for further details. Most of the 'traditional'
   dances and some descriptive material are included in a booklet by the
   late Dave Jones. This has been out of print but some copies are now
   available again from the Morris Ring. [See the Morris FAQs for contact
   information about these morris organizations.]

   There is a wealth of descriptive material on Border Morris in
   collections at the County Record Offices of Shropshire, Herefordshire
   and Worcestershire. There are also library collections amongst which
   are: the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. the Centre for English
   Cultural Tradition and Language, the manuscripts department at
   University College, London and the library of the Folklore Society.
   Descriptions also appear in periodicals of the period. Once again, the
   County Record Offices are good starting points, as is the collection in
   the British Library at Colindale.

Sources of Border Morris Dance Notation on the Web

     * Mike Miller's Hounds Dance Pages document our own dances as well as
       some that we've learned from other teams. See also the tune
       notation pages here on the Hounds web site.
     * Roy Dommett's Morris Notes - Nigel Sparkes has published on the
       extensive dance notations of Roy Dommett, a modern-day collector of
       morris dances on the web. Many of the notes have been published for
       workshops or lectures which Roy has given or attended. Roy's Border
       Morris notes are the most extensive collection of traditional and
       modern border dances.
     * Andy Anderson of Red Stags Morris, Southampton, Hampshire, England
       composed many of the dances and accompanying tunes in the Hounds'
       repertoire. Andy also is the author of a Morris Federation pamphlet
       about the history of border morris and exerpts are available on his
       website.
     * Hook Eagle Morris have dance notations of some of the more
       traditional border morris dances.
     * Welsh Border Morris Dances by Paul Millennas is divided into
       notation of Traditional Border Dances and Contemporary Border
       Dances.
     * MOTley Morris, a border side from the Boston area, draw some of
       their repertoire from the Hounds, the Connecticutt based Not For
       Joes, and have composed new dances of their own. They have a page
       of dance notations.

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   Last updated: April 29, 2009
   Webmaster: Tom Keays / Contact Me

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