A short history of morris dancing.

The first records

The earliest documented mentions of morris dancing in England go back to the fifteenth century - paid performances in royal courts, then village dances. Whether the form is older than that is genuinely uncertain. It may be very old indeed.

In 1600, the actor William Kempe famously morris-danced from London to Norwich. He took nine days. He wrote a small book about it.

The near-disappearance

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries morris dancing was widespread in English villages, tied to feast days, May games, ceremonial occasions and the rhythms of agricultural life. The Industrial Revolution moved people into cities and broke many of those rhythms; by the late nineteenth century morris was on its last legs in most parts of England.

The Edwardian revival

In 1899, the composer Cecil Sharp watched the Headington Quarry side dance on Boxing Day. He had been collecting folk songs; this was his introduction to folk dance. He went on to track down the last village dancers in the Cotswolds and to record what they did. Without his obsessive, sometimes patrician work the form might have gone.

The English Folk Dance Society (later the English Folk Dance and Song Society) was founded in 1911. New "revival" sides began forming in towns and cities. Many of the sides dancing today trace back to that revival; some have been going continuously since the 1920s.

What changed in the late twentieth century

Border morris - looser, rougher, with sticks and tatter coats - was largely revived from the 1960s onward, often by people who had grown up in cities and were curious about the unpolished cousin of the Cotswold style.

Women's sides became established from the 1970s onward. The Morris Federation, founded in 1975, was originally formed to represent women's sides; today it represents most mixed and women's sides nationally. The Morris Ring (men's sides) and Open Morris (mixed-policy sides) complete the three umbrella organisations.

The use of blackface in some Border sides - a contested practice with disputed origins - has largely been replaced over the past decade by coloured face paint or none. Border dancing is alive and well; the visual has just modernised.

The present

There are several hundred active sides across the British Isles and a growing scene abroad - particularly in North America, Australia and parts of Europe. Most sides are mixed; many actively recruit. The age range is wide. The mood is friendly.

If you are reading this thinking "I wonder if it's for me" - it almost certainly is. Read about what happens at your first practice, see sides we know, or just come along on a Friday night.