Folk traditions are back, with bells on
Morris dancing, folk music and other English traditions are making a comeback. And the new followers are a diverse bunch
When Morris dancing took centre stage at the Brit Awards earlier this year, the moment arguably became real. Cool Britannia was toast. Merrie England had taken over.
The signs are everywhere, not just on the village green and in Ye Olde Timbered Inn, way out in the sticks. At the Brits, the all-girl Boss Morris troupe of Morris Dancers accompanied Grammy-winning indie band Wet Leg in mini-dresses. Up and down the land, nearly 14,000 other Morris dancers cavort most weekends with energy and abandon.
Countless wassails are being held. That ancient English ritual involves mulled cider or ale, and songs that implore the pagan gods for bountiful harvests. There are riotous “Jack in the Green” spring parades. The one in Hastings, south-east England, attracted its largest audience last year in nearly half a century. Mummers plays, traditional Christmas-time dramas, themed around death and resurrection, tour villages in Oxfordshire and further afield. Even the National Trust heritage conservation body is putting these on.
Plough pudding, heavy with suet and sausage meat from Norfolk recipes hundreds of years old, feature on the Sainsbury’s website. English Heritage, the charity that manages more than 400 historic sites to bring “the story of England to life”, has more paid members today than at any time in its history.
A weighty 530-page tome on Morris dance is published on March 30.
And the UK recently got its first exhibition of local folk costume, which will move to London next year from Compton Verney, a Georgian mansion in rural Warwickshire.
“Diverse groups of people are participating in English folk traditions and we’re very, very excited about that,” says Eliza Carthy, head of the non-profit English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), which champions the traditional arts. Carthy, often described as the uncrowned queen of English folk, is the daughter of iconic folk musicians Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy. Her father influenced Bob Dylan and taught Paul Simon to play Scarborough Fair. Having joined the Goathland Plough Stots, a century-old northern Yorkshire side (the correct term for a Morris troupe) aged 13, Carthy says she is excited by the current “wonderful surge” in the popularity of the dance. Back in the late 1980s, the Stots had eight dancers and two musicians, one of whom was Carthy; now it has at least 30 dancers and 12 musicians. Now president of the EFDSS and a professional touring musician, Carthy says she is witness to the “upsurge across the country in all forms of Morris dancing, with lots of young people joining. This isn’t just a post-Covid thing, let’s be clear about that.”
Ronald Hutton, one of Britain’s foremost historians, agrees that there has been a boom in some English folk customs over the past five to 10 years. “When I wrote a book in the 1990s, there were only three places left in Britain that wassailed,” he remembers. “There are now scores advertised on the internet alone.”
Read on here.
Originally published in The New European
