A few days ago I was looking at some writings by Keith Chandler and noticed there was one I hadn’t paid much attention to before, about morris dancing in the Forest of Dean. It occurred to me that this was something I knew nothing at all about, so I started reading. A friend of mine sent me a copy of an article by Russell Wortley, and I found articles by Roy Dommett and Michael Heaney, and other resources, online.

The Forest of Dean is basically the southwest corner of Gloucestershire, between the rivers Wye and Severn with Herefordshire to the north. The morris dancing that was done there was its own style, a different morris style than Cotswold or border or northwest or anything else. I knew nothing about it, but there isn’t very much to know. There was morris dancing there up until the mid to late 19th century, but it died off completely only a couple of decades before Sharp started collecting morris. Sharp did get a little information from old dancers and musicians, and the Travelling Morrice, after two tours in the Forest of Dean between the wars in which they didn’t make contact with any dancers, did encounter three octogenarians from Ruardean in the 1940s. They learned some things from them, but not a lot.

What’s kind of funny and kind of annoying is how, even with as little information as there is, a fair amount of it is inconsistent.

“Inconsistent” not necessarily meaning one source was right and another was wrong; it may be they just did things differently in one locality than another.

So for instance, in Mayhill, there were no stick or hankie dances, just handclap dances. Likewise in Clifford’s Mesne: Sticks no, handclap yes. In Ruardean there also were no stick dances, and there were handclap dances, but there also were hankie dances. And just one of several Ruardean informants said in some dances the dancers carried little flags, like semaphore flags but smaller. (Apparently in Yorkshire there are reports of traditional dances also using such flags, and the revival team Flag and Bone Gang does flag dances based on those sources.) No other mention of such flags elsewhere in the Forest, though. And in Chepstow in the 1880s there was a dance display in which they had sticks. And in Framilow they carried sticks shaped like miniature shepherds’ crooks, bent over at the end, with flowers tied to the crooks. The sources don’t say what they did with the sticks in either place. I wonder if they didn’t just flourish them in Framilow — I’d think the risk of hooking them together, not to mention bashing the flowers into a pulp, would argue against clashing them.

There’s almost no information on the stepping, but the old Ruardean dancers said it was very different from what the Travelling Morrice was doing (i.e. Cotswold morris), and it was not a heel-and-toe step. Evidently a description of what it was was elusive, but at least we know what it wasn’t.

Except that in that Chepstow display they were all doing a standard Cotswold double step.

And as for the dances, well, from a Clifford’s Mesne fiddler Sharp collected three tunes, one for a processional, one for a calling on, and one for a dancing off. What did they do between the calling on and dancing off? The lambada? No one knows. Four tunes from Ruardean were collected; one was for a processional, two were for handclap dances, and one was for, uh. A dance of some kind. For one of the handclap dances we’re told it began with rounds and ended with a hey. Other than that they said the dances were “the same as country dances but with more going in and out”. Okay then.

There’s a team in that area called Forest of Dean Morris, and they dance… mostly Cotswold dances. But they do have a few dances they’ve invented based on the Forest of Dean morris (lowercase) information. You can find two on YouTube. They use sticks, hankies, and a double step. Interesting, though if I were to try to work up a re-imagining of this extinct style (and I do not plan to) I think I’d go in a rather different direction with it.

Bibliography

  1. “Stephen Baldwin, ‘Here‘s One You‘ll Like, I Think’”, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/baldwin.htm .
  2. “Tunes for Morris Dances and Other Dances from the Forest of Dean”, https://glostrad.com/tunes-for-morris-dances-and-other-dances-from-the-forest-of-dean/ .
  3. K. Chandler, “Morris Dancing in the Forest of Dean”, Musical Traditions Supplement No. 3 (CD-ROM), 2002.
  4. R. Dommett, “The tradition in the Forest of Dean”, Morris Matters vol. 5, no. 2 , 1981, 4–6.
  5. R. Dommett, “The Travelling Morrice & The Forest of Dean Morris”, The Morris Dancer, vol. 1, no. 13 , 1982, 14–16.
  6. E. M. Hartland, Letter to Cecil Sharp (30 Aug 1913), in Maud Karpeles Papers Box 7, MK/7/6 .
  7. M. Heaney, “The Dean Forest Traditions”, The Morris Dancer, vol. 1, no. 12 , 11–16.
  8. Hobbs, “Forest of Dean”, in Maud Karpeles Papers Box 7, MK/7/7 .
  9. C. Sharp, “Folk Dance Notes Vol. 1”, https://archives.vwml.org/records/CJS2/11/1 , pp. 86–87 , 88–89 , 188 , 189 .
  10. C. Sharp, “Folk tunes”, https://archives.vwml.org/records/CJS2/10 , items CJS2/10/2323 , CJS2/10/2324 , CJS2/10/2502 , CJS2/10/2503 , CJS2/10/2504 .
  11. R. Wortley, “The Morris of Dean Forest, glimpses of an extinct tradition”, English Dance and Song vol. 42, No. 1, 16–17; also reprinted in Russell Wortley, Cambridge Morris Men: 1980, 31–33.

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