Holmfirth 2006
I passed a pleasant hour or so this morning watching the excellent Way of the Morris, a documentary by Tim Plester ostensibly about the Adderbury Village Morris Men but, as with the best such films, resonating in all sorts of areas.
One of the areas that it focused on was Morris Dance as an expression of English identity, albeit that the European spread of similar dances was also drawn out. What is not usually commented on is the presence of Morris Dancing in Pre-Reformation Scotland.
That there was dancing of that name in Scotland is not in doubt. The earliest reference of which I know is in the Scots Treasury accounts for 1501-02 which records a payment
To the men that brocht in the morice dance, and to thair menstralis; 1501–2 Treas. Acc. II. 135.
And there are a number of similar references in accounts and occasionally in literature through to at least 1617. Unfortunately we have no evidence of what this dance entailed or how widespread it was. The fact that it is predominantly mentioned in Treasury Books has led to at least one suggestion (I can’t remember the source) that it was a predominantly courtly dance for pageants rather than more widespread. In my view a valid counter-argument is that they are the principal records to have survived (or even to have been kept) and hence the lack of other evidence is not itself testimony to anything other than the poverty of the materials available to us.
The Fool
Although we have no records of the dances the records are suggestive: the Edinburgh Accounts Books for 1590 record an event put on for Anne of Denmark at which it seems there were 12 dancers in white shoes and for whom 12 ‘hattis of flouris’ were provided. A record from 1508 suggests that ‘woman’ character–perhaps what we would now call a Dame or a Betty–seems to have been involved, as well as a fool. This may be viewing the past with a modern gloss however.
More generally, though, we can infer the existence of a lively set of communal traditions from the extensive efforts by the Post-Reformation Kirk to stamp them out! These traditions point to a Scottish past with greater tie in to the European mainstream than is generally realised (though as a seafaring trading nation it really should be no surprise).
Alas for the Reformation! As the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statuary, the Kirk and its counterparts destroyed and vandalised an ecclesiastical and secular artistic heritage with the attention to detail of a zealot and the absolutely certainty of the self-righteous. It is difficult to think of a more significant erasure of European life and culture until the First World War wreaked its madness (another theme of Way of the Morris).
It is a mark of the success of the Reformation that so little trace remains of Scottish heritage–at least in the Lowlands; the Highlands had their own scouring–to the extent that suggestions of the Morris in Scotland are routinely mocked and scoffed at, frequently abusively, today. It is an absurd irony that, in the attempts to forge a faux Celtic mythology for Scottish popular culture, its true richness is routinely ignored and denied.
Recent Comments