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Lancre Morris Men
For Peasant, and all those other Discworld fans out there.
Did you know the origin of the Lancre Morris Men in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels?
People seeking to recreate them often assume they’re Cotswold morris, but they aren’t, they’re actually North West.
Now, given that you poor benighted lot only include one morris dancer among you (wave a hand if there's another one out there), you won't know what I mean by North West Morris unless you're a long time reader of this blog with a good memory, so here is a good example of a North West morris team.
This is Saddleworth, a traditional all male North West morris team (for today, we'll gloss over the fact that many of the original NW teams were children and women's teams weren't unknown either), the correct image for the Lancre Morris Men is clogs, beards, testosterone and a feeling that something unstoppable is heading down the road towards you. You can HEAR a good NW morris team.
Part of the clue is in the name - the Kingdom of Lancre in the novels has a strong Lancastrian flavour. North West morris is mainly from Lancashire and Manchester.
People seeking to recreate them often assume they’re Cotswold morris, but they aren’t, they’re actually North West.
Now, given that you poor benighted lot only include one morris dancer among you (wave a hand if there's another one out there), you won't know what I mean by North West Morris unless you're a long time reader of this blog with a good memory, so here is a good example of a North West morris team.
This is Saddleworth, a traditional all male North West morris team (for today, we'll gloss over the fact that many of the original NW teams were children and women's teams weren't unknown either), the correct image for the Lancre Morris Men is clogs, beards, testosterone and a feeling that something unstoppable is heading down the road towards you. You can HEAR a good NW morris team.
Part of the clue is in the name - the Kingdom of Lancre in the novels has a strong Lancastrian flavour. North West morris is mainly from Lancashire and Manchester.
But there is more to it than that:
The style of the Lancre morris men has a lot in common with Bill Tidy's coming strip, The Cloggies
https://thecartoonmuseum.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/the-cloggies-by-bill-tidy/ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloggies).
Tidy derived part of his inspiration from watching the Garstang Morris Men perform near where he lived; later, Rosa, his wife, arranged for them to dance in the road outside Tidy’s house to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. He said that when the team were invited in after the dance, they drank the house dry.
If you look at the costumes Garstang are wearing in the video clip, you’ll instantly see the similarity to the Cloggies.
(Sadly, Garstang Morris no longer exists)
Somewhere around 2008, I was at a Discworld convention and asked Terry if I was right. Turned out that he was a fan of the comic strip and had indeed used the Cloggies as his inspiration. (Both the Cloggies and the Lancre morris men regard morris as something akin to a competitive martial art.)
The Lancre morris men - (https://morrisdancing.fandom.com/wiki/Terry_Pratchett_and_the_morris) are six-time champions of the Fifteen Mountains All-Comers tournament. The Ramtops style is rather more athletic and, perhaps, competitive, than many, and seems similar to Rugby in potential for injury. The Stick and Bucket Dance, particularly, has resulted in many long-term disabilities.
As one of their number said he once watched a bunch of cissy townsfolk trying it and there "wasn't even a groinin' in an hour", it seems that the whole point of the Lancre version is to triumph through the artistic application of fighting moves.
There are, naturally, many versions of the Stick and Bucket dance attempted by various Roundworld morris teams including the one here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mraGTSRQZ44 from the Chippenham 'stick and bucket' dance competition and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxK6OQY8X-8 from Belswagger Morris and one performed by Discworld fans (look out for Death walking casually past) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWkNHT7cP00
Now, of course, someone is going to ask: “What about the Dark Morris from Pratchett’s novel ‘Wintersmith’?”
I’ll cover that another day, because there’s more than one answer.
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Edited to add link to video of the Milltown cloggies with a couple of friends of mine performing, by way of antidote to that appalling Saddleworth bunch of arseholes (who are on record of having refused to perform at any festival where Milltown Cloggies or any other women's or mixed team were also intended to dance.)
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SAddleworth have relaxed a bit now. They don't yet allow women's teams in their Rushcart procession (though I know there are members of the team who are in favour of this, and I think it will happen eventually), but they do now go to events where women's teams perform.
It's hard to argue with history...
Go and listen to this song I wrote last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOFbtW5Gao0
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Though if you think the song charming, then I've probably failed to convey the sheer bitterness of the early fight for women's morris.
The greatest irony of it is that the first morris revival dancers were women -and then they got systematically written out of history.
I enjoy the fact that anyone can try morris. I love running workshops to teach people.
Have you ever tried it yourself? I'm always happy to put people in touch with a local team. (One of my readers here is now happily dancing with a very good North West team)
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I had some interesting conversations with one of the team in my role as as folk festival organiser, which is how I know that some of them have a much greater awareness of the history, and greater acceptance of women dancers, than others.
There were some men (don't know from which teams, but I know it did happen) who refused to share historical evidence of women dancing.
With the Internet, it's hard to argue with the flood of old photos now available.
Of course, the current acrimonious debate is about blackface morris. There are a couple of shocking abuses of history there - borrowing historical evidence from one form of morris, to justify blacking up in traditions that have no excuse at all.
But, of course, when modern teams began blacking up, the history was no widely known. They saw some old photos, thought 'that looks cool and different' and went with it - and it got a great public reaction too.
Now, most of them have gone for coloured face paint instead, but the hold outs abuse history more and more in an attempt to justify what they are doing.
My morris history facebook group (which bans all arguments about blackface) gained 50 members this week, as people flee the atmosphere in other facebook morris groups.
Another interesting shift to observe, is a much wider acceptance of carnival morris, which was almost totally unknown in the folk morris community until recently, in spite of being actively danced by large numbers of little girls.
I must write more about that some day. My own posts are very out of date - https://watervole.dreamwidth.org/tag/carnival+morris
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/15974550@N03/49984254273/