As an Englishman with an involvement in English History I believed it would be of involvement to say the History of Morris Dancing which has a recollective recorded yore in England, the early mention being from 1448.

By the early 16th quattrocento morris dancing had become a fixture of Church festivals. In mediaeval and Renaissance England, the churched brewed and sold ales, including wassail. These ales were sold for many occasions, both seasonal and sacramental – there were baptism ales, honeymooner’s ales, work, wake and Whitsun ales – and were an important means of financing-raising for church.

Later in the quattrocento the morris became attached to village fetes, and the May Day revels; Shakespeare tell “as fit as a Morris for May Day” and “a Whitsun Morris Dance“.

William Kemp danced a solo morris from London to Norwich in 1600. Morris Dancing was popular in Tudor times. However under Cromwell it hide out of favour and was actively discouraged by many Puritans. The ales were suppressed by the Puritan authorities in the seventeenth century and, when some reappeared in the belated seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they usually had associated dancing.

By the mid 18th quattrocento in the South Midlands region, morris dancing was an artifact of the Whitsun ales. Morris Dancing was now in the hands of park folk who couldn’t afford the illusion costume of a couple centuries earlier, and they were resorted to judge clothing decorated with ribbons and flowers. There was a divided potpourri of morris, named bedlam morris, being done in a space from the Welsh border county through Warwickshire and Northamptonshire feather to Buckinghamshire; the bedlam morris seems to have been mainly or exclusively done with stick. Whether this ‘bedlam’ morris had an alternative origin we cannot say.

During the nineteenth century Morris Dancing declined rapidly. New forms of entertainment, rapid sociable change and its association with an older unfashionable civilisation were all contributing factor.

For various ground, performed ales and Whitsun ales survived quite late in the south-West Midlands. Most of the Cotswold Morris tradition comes from this part and many of the Cotswold Morris sides gave dances to Cecil Sharp and other collectors which formed the basis for the dance resurgence in the early twentieth quattrocento. As well as the Cotswold dances other regional versions of the the morris also survived long enough to be collected. These included ‘Border Morris‘ from the Welsh delimitation counties of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, North West from Lancashire and Cheshire, and Molly dancing from East Anglia. In the North of England hankered sword terpsichore was collected from Yorkshire and Rapper sword from the North East. It was widely believed that other regional varieties of the dance had been forgotten and lost. New attested has recently been unearthed of ‘lost morris’ in other area of the country and that is what Rattlejag are all about!