The History of Morris Dancing: 1458-1750

Folklore, April, 2002 by Stephen D. Corrsin

By John Forrest. (Studies in Early English Drama, 5) Cambridge: James Clarke; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. xviii 439 pp. 28 B/W illus., 12 tables, 23 maps. 45 [pounds sterling] (hbk), 17.50 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 0-22767943-1 (hbk), 0-2276-7944-X (pbk)

For many years, English-language studies of the "folk dance revival," including morris dancing and related topics, languished in a scholarly wasteland. Academic historians and social scientists avoided the field. In recent years this has finally changed, as a number of university-trained scholars have ventured into the field. Major monographs by Georgina Boyes on the context and politics of the larger "revival," Keith Chandler on south Midlands morris, Stephen Corrsin on Continental and British sword dance styles, and Roy Judge on the Jack-in-the-Green (a revised edition), have all appeared and done a great deal to advance our knowledge. This excellent and exciting monograph by John Forrest, who has already published a number of shorter, methodologically and conceptually innovative works on morris dancing, is the most far-reaching in terms of the scope of its ideas and methods.

Forrest acknowledges the importance of the collaboration he undertook with Michael Heaney, which resulted in their Annals of Early Morris, co-published by CECTAL and the Morris Ring in 1991. In their introduction to that work, the authors state:

   The present work derives from the Early Morris project, a joint venture of
   the authors to establish an archive of primary sources that refer to
   morris, and a database derived from this archive that codes, in tabular
   format, the presence of key variables in the texts in the archive. The
   archive and database cover the period 1458 to 1750 (p. 1).

The archive "attempts to list all references to morris, and all morris-dancing events, to the year 1750." In the History, Forrest adds that "the archive is comprehensive enough to begin the task of creating a developmental history of morris dancing that is founded on a solid base of primary materials, and not, as in the past, dependent more on imagination than on empirical substance" (p. xvii).

Forrest and Heaney's Annals and Forrest's History represent the first truly systematic, scholarly studies of the various English performance styles referred to by "morris" or related terms up to 1750. Earlier efforts at systematic compilation and preliminary analysis suffered most from the compilers' inability to free themselves from the peculiarities of the "ancient ritual survival" approach which was elaborated by E. K. Chambers, Cecil Sharp and their followers.

Forrest begins by rejecting the "search for origins" approach which has consumed so many researchers. Essentially, the question of origins for such popular customs as morris dancing is unanswerable; and more important, it severely distorts clear historical thinking by focusing on finding an imagined single point of origin for complex and multifaceted social and cultural phenomena. Forrest prefers "the much more interesting study of how morris dances have evolved and developed over the centuries" (p. xv).

An important feature of Forrest's approach is that "events," or contexts, are more important for analysis than the particular dance elements upon which many "revival" writers have fastened. He writes:

   What I attempt in this work is to build a set of images of types of dance
   events, piece by piece out of fragmentary data ... The aim is to find
   pattern in types of dance events, beginning with context as a foundation
   and working out from there. Occasionally it is possible to glimpse
   evolutionary process at work, but the initial and primary goal is the
   taxonomic description of types of dance-in-context wholes ... Using this
   method the following will be abundantly clear:

* morris has no single origin point

* morris is not and never has been a single or simple phenomenon

* morris has evolved continuously throughout its documented history

* morris is not especially "folk" or rural

* styles of morris from different contexts have had a constant evolutionary influence on one another (pp. 26-7).

The main contexts of the "events" which he presents, as chapters, are: Royal Court; Urban Streets; Church Property; Church Proscription and Prosecution; Public Stage; Rural Locations; Assemblies and the Country Dance Hall; and Private Premises.

The author's clarity of presentation, and particularly his skilled handling of the diverse methodologies which he employs, rank among the most impressive aspects of this work. His approach is a historical analysis using a range of social science techniques, rather than a chronological, descriptive narrative.

For his concluding chapter, Forrest proposes to "step back and see if any evolutionary process emerges from the described patterns, and try to extract the mechanism whereby this evolutionary development occurs" (p. 26). He proposes a dialectical approach, but of a particularly sophisticated and subtle sort: