“I come not from heaven but from Essex” (A Dream of John Ball)

I was present at a very special event this weekend – the Thaxted Centenary Ring Meeting. Yes, this is going to be a blog about Morris Dancing. But please don’t give up just yet.

Morris Men performing in Thaxted Town Street. Gustav Holst's house was the grey coloured building to the left in the background.

I admit to having mixed thoughts about Morris Dancing. But I am fascinated by the story of the Thaxted Morris, the origins of which are closely connected with Conrad Noel, the so-called ‘Red Vicar’ of Thaxted.  Dancing, song, folklore and music were integral to Noel’s Christian socialism, and it was Miriam, his wife, who established the Thaxted Morris and Folk Song Company in January 1911. What could seem to us now a sometimes cloyingly sentimental expression of tradition was, in its day, a radical gesture – an expression of spiritual joy and an attempt to create beauty in a country beset by poverty and oppression. Reg Groves’ 1967 book Conrad Noel and the Thaxted Movement has this to say about the earliest months of the Thaxted Morris:

“During those early months of the year 1911, the pulse of Thaxted was beating perceptibly faster. Many who were opposed to Noel’s ideas, found themselves carried along in the surge of activity and excitement; and many who might have hesitated and stood aside were moved by the enthusiasm of the young people and children to lend Noel their support. It was as though Thaxted was awakening from a long sleep, renewed and refreshed – and young again” (p.74)

“As the  Morris teams moved in the ancient and lovely patterns … they were recreating the vision of a green and pleasant England freed from grime, and poverty, and exploitation, the vision that had haunted England’s poets and dreamers and rebels down the centuries.” (p.90)

I tried to keep this in mind as I watched the proceedings unfold in Thaxted’s main public space, the Town Street in front of the Guildhall. The Thaxted Morris today is exclusively male (according to the brochure this was on the insistence of Conrad Noel himself, though in fact Miriam Noel’s earliest Morris teams were mixed). There’s a certain charm in the variety of dances and Morris sides – each with different costumes, colours, and methods of dancing – some with sticks, many with bells. But somewhere along the line the radical origins of the festival have been sidelined – instead, the festival is purely a celebration of ‘tradition’, in all its tankard-swilling glory.

However, the final dance of the day yesterday was well worth waiting for. A version of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance has been performed by the Thaxted Morris since 1926 - it became the finale to the Ring meeting from 1947. It is a weird, moving spectacle, involving the most senior of the Morris Men carrying carved deer heads and antlers, one man dressed as an old maid in black and with a parasol, a ‘Robin Hood’ figure carrying a bow and arrow, and a musician playing the haunting cyclical tune on a fiddle, accompanied by a boy playing the triangle. The dance begins and ends at Thaxted church – symbolising the theological origins of the Thaxted Morris. Steve Roud notes the dance has been interpreted as a fertility rite, or a ceremony to ensure successful hunting, or an assertion of common rights over the chase, but also that none of these claims has been substantiated. Instead the principal distinguishing feature of the dance is how different it is from those performed by the energetic Morris sides during the rest of the festival. The Abbots Bromley dance is sedate, measured, careful in its choreography, involving the hypnotic interweaving of the dancers as they criss cross one another, occasionally tilting their horns just so. One reporter in The Times in 1936 reported how:

“The whole thing is done unassumedly and with a quiet purposefulness which is the keynote of the whole proceedings. One feels they are not dancing for joy or self-expression, but going quietly about a task which must be accomplished without unnecessary fuss”. (Roud, p.395)

Last night’s performance was certainly in this tradition. The eerie quiet that descended on the crowd as the lights were dimmed and the procession from the church began was broken only by the sound of an exceptionally loud mobile phone ringtone going off. Its owner looked rather sheepish – as if he had broken a 100-year old spell that was being cast over this forgotten corner of Essex.