The bells that keep sounding

The world

A morris team is called a side, and a side dances where people already gather: pub forecourts, market squares, folk festivals, and above all on the feast days that anchor its calendar.[9] Boxing Day and the dawn of May Day are the great fixtures, the second observed by dancing the sun up at first light.[9] The whole modern enterprise dates itself to Boxing Day 1899, when the folklorist Cecil Sharp watched the Headington Quarry men dance and began writing the steps down.[9] The tradition is older than that revival, with a first surviving mention in 1448 and a name borrowed from the Spanish morisco, though it has no known connection to the Moors.[9]

There is no single morris but a family of regional styles, and a dancer's fluency in the distinctions is itself a marker of belonging. Cotswold sides dance with handkerchiefs or sticks; Border sides, from the English-Welsh marches, dance looser and more vigorously in tattered coats; North West sides march in clogs to a style born in the mill towns; and there are the sword forms, rigid longsword from Yorkshire and flexible rapper from the northeastern coalfields.[9] Prestige inside a side is earned quietly, through clean stepping, through the willingness to dance a solo jig in front of a crowd, and through years of turning up.[9] The offices carry old names: the squire speaks for the side in public, the foreman teaches and trains the dancers, and the bagman keeps the bag, meaning the side's money and kit.[9][1]

The material culture is homely and load-bearing. Bell-pads are rectangles of leather cut into vertical straps, each hung with sixteen to twenty crotal bells, the little pellet bells also worn on jesters' caps, tied below the knee so the rhythm is doubled at each footfall.[7]

The rhythm of the steps is accentuated as the bells sound more loudly at each footfall; a blind fiddler could tell when a dancer started on the wrong foot.

Older pads carry a dozen tiny rosettes made from scraps of coloured cloth, a record at once of pride and of thrift.[7] Over the shirt goes a baldric, a sash crossed at the chest, and behind the dancers stands the melodeon, the button accordion that most often drives a side.[9] None of it is expensive to enter, which matters to how the scene sees itself.

Prices from trade suppliers.[8]

The schism

The trouble was built into the founding. In 1934 six revival sides instituted the Morris Ring, holding their inaugural meeting at Cecil Sharp House that October, and it was an association of men's teams from the start.[1][9] Its gatekeeping could be practical as well as social. The standard book of dance notation, Bacon's handbook, was sold only to members of the Ring, which in practice meant only to male-only teams.[1][9]

The exclusion sharpened as the folk revival grew. At the Sidmouth festival in 1971 a workshop leader barred women even from watching, and the compromise the following year was a separate Ladies Ritual Dance Workshop held off to the side.[4] The New Esperance side, one of the women's teams of that era, records that some men would teach women only after promises of anonymity, one of them reportedly instructing in a hood so he would not be recognised.[4] Whether that detail is exact or has hardened into lore, it captures how the era felt to the excluded.

Shut out, the women organised. In October 1975, led by Betty Reynolds and the Bath City Women, twelve teams founded a body to share dances, music and support; the name arrived half in jest.[2] The Women's Morris Federation held its first meeting at Bath, then broadened after long and heated argument, admitting mixed teams in 1980 and men in 1982, and dropping "Women's" from its name only in 1983.[2] Mixed sides that fit neither the men's Ring nor the then women-only Federation formed a third body in 1979, Open Morris, begun by dancers around the mixed Fenstanton side in East Anglia.[3][9] By the turn of the schism the tradition had one governing body for each answer to a single question.

The breaking point was demographic before it was constitutional. By 2020 the dancing population of roughly 13,600 was near-evenly split between men and women, and the largest of the three bodies was now the once-insurgent Federation.[9][5] In March 2018 the Morris Ring's annual meeting voted, by 87 percent, to strike the male-only clause from its constitution and admit any team whatever its make-up.[1][9] The cold war did not so much end as institutionalise into cooperation. The three now sit together as the Joint Morris Organisations, sharing public-liability insurance and a shared Day of Dance.[5] When a newer controversy arrived, over the full-face black makeup worn by some Border and molly sides, the bodies moved more or less in step in 2020, the Federation and the wider folk establishment urging change while the Ring insisted it was not a regulator and asked sides to be able to explain themselves in public.[6][10]

What the schism shows

It is tempting to file this as the usual story of an old club forced open, tradition yielding to inclusion on a fixed timetable. But the evidence does not fit that story. The men-only morris the Ring defended as ancient was largely a construction of the 1934 revival, not the deep practice it claimed to preserve: North West sides had included women for generations, and a fourteen-year-old girl danced the morris in William Kempe's celebrated account of 1600.[9] The purists, in other words, were guarding a young rule dressed as an old one. And the ending refuses the tidy shape of schism, because the rival bodies did not stay rivals; they became a committee that buys insurance together.[5] What looks like a scene breaking in two turns out to be a scene that tripled and then stitched most of itself back.