Who May Wear the Bells

The world

A Morris team is a side, and a side is run by three officers whose titles have barely changed since the 1930s. The squire leads the dancing and speaks for the side in public. The foreman, sometimes just the fore, teaches the dances and guards how they are done. The bagman keeps the bag, meaning the money and the correspondence, the way a secretary-treasurer would.[7]

The kit, meaning the uniform, carries most of a side’s identity. Cotswold dancers, from the villages of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, wear white with bell-pads strapped below the knee and a baldric, a sash crossed over the chest.[7] They dance in sets of six or eight, waving handkerchiefs or clashing short sticks.[7]

Beyond the Cotswold sides lie whole other grammars. Border Morris, from the counties along the Welsh border, is louder and rougher, built on vigorous stepping and stick-clashing.[7] North West Morris, from the Lancashire and Cheshire mill towns, is danced in clogs with irons nailed to the soles.[7] Rapper, from the Durham and Northumberland coalfield, sends five dancers spinning while linked by flexible steel swords, and it is the fastest and most gymnastic of all.[7]

The year has a shape. Many sides dance up the dawn on May morning, tour the pubs through summer, and gather in winter for an ale, a private feast of dancing and drink that doubles as a side’s most important social rite.[7] Prestige here is not won with trophies, because there are none. It is won by keeping a tradition well, by the standard of a side’s dancing, and by the authority of its officers.[7]

The community is careful, now, about its own origin story. Morris is often called ancient, even pagan, a survival of some pre-Christian fertility rite. The Morris Ring’s own history rejects that, noting the idea came from Victorian folklorists like Frazer and that the earliest firm records place Morris in the courts of around 1500, not the forests of prehistory.[1] The documented revival is Edwardian. On Boxing Day 1899 the collector Cecil Sharp watched the Headington Quarry men dance and wrote down their tunes from their musician William Kimber, and the twentieth-century Morris revival grew from that meeting.[6]

The schism

When the revival’s men organised themselves, they organised as men. The Morris Ring was founded in 1934 by six sides meeting at Cecil Sharp House, an association for men’s teams only.[8] The reasoning was stated plainly. A 1978 Morris Ring pamphlet declared that all varieties of Morris ritual are by tradition wholly masculine.[5]

Women were dancing anyway, and being told they should not. Objectors said the steps were not elegant on women, that public dancing should be left to the men, that women made the Morris look soppy.[5] One recurring worry was that women would undermine the effort to present male dancers as normal, healthy blokes rather than figures of fun.[5]

So the women built their own institution. The idea took shape at a 1973 gathering in Cheltenham, where women dancers noted they had no formal way to network.[5] The Women’s Morris Federation held its inaugural meeting in October 1975 at the University of Bath, with thirteen sides and Betty Reynolds as its first president.[5] A third body, Open Morris, followed in 1979 for the mixed sides that fit neither the men-only Ring nor the then women-only Federation.[10]

The women’s body did not stay women-only. After years of debate it voted to admit men’s and mixed sides, and in 1983 it dropped the ‘Women’s’ from its name to become simply the Morris Federation.[5] It is now the largest of the three, with roughly 500 teams to the Ring’s 160 and Open Morris’s 130.[3]

The Ring held its line for another generation. It began admitting women musicians only in 2011.[11] Then on 12 March 2018 its Annual Representatives Meeting voted to scrap the male-only rule from its constitution, and the motion carried with 87 percent support.[8] After eighty-four years, any side could join regardless of who danced in it.

Not everyone read the vote as a triumph. Critics within the wider Morris world argued it looked less like a change of heart than an old club choosing survival over its convictions, and that opening a door is not the same as welcoming people through it.[11]

A second and separate fight was already underway, over faces rather than membership. Some Border sides had long danced with full-face black make-up, explained within the tradition as disguise.[7] Read from outside the tradition it looked like blackface, and the objection grew loud enough to force a response.[4] On 3 July 2020 the three organisations issued a joint statement asking sides to stop, warning that teams keeping full black or skin-tone make-up would find themselves no longer part of the mainstream Morris community, and outside the shared public-liability insurance and events.[4] The Ring’s own officers put it flatly, writing that the fact some feel the practice to be racist should be enough to realise it is wrong when alternatives exist.[2]

What it reveals

Strip away the bells and Morris is a working model of how amateur cultures govern themselves without money. Authority flows from named offices, the squire and the foreman and the bagman, and from the claim to keep a tradition correctly.[7] Because authenticity is the currency, nearly every dispute becomes a dispute about tradition. The men-only rule was defended as tradition; the women answered with sixteenth-century evidence of female dancers; the black make-up was defended as tradition and then abandoned once the tradition’s cost became visible.[5][4]

The resolution was federal, not unified. The three bodies did not merge. They learned to cooperate through a Joint Morris Organisations committee that runs shared insurance and a joint Day of Dance while each keeps its own membership.[3] A schism, handled this way, need not end in a winner.

It is tempting to read all this as a tidy parable of an old institution bending to a more inclusive age, the men’s club that finally let women in. The analogy breaks on the direction of growth. The inclusive body did not stay a protest against the men. It broadened first, dropped ‘Women’s’ from its own name in 1983, and became the largest organisation in the Morris world, while the men-only body it had formed against spent the next thirty-five years as the shrinking exception.[5][3] The breakaway did not win by joining the establishment. It won by becoming the establishment, then waiting for the establishment to come to it.