Judith Proctor's Journal

 For Peasant, and all those other Discworld fans out there.

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.

https://youtu.be/CBycUVT2S10

(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.

 This is the only photo I've ever seen of historical North West morris garland dancers.  It's from 1910 and Whitworth Rushcart procession.
You can see the Quayside Cloggies in my icon doing a hoop/garland dance, but this photo has all male dancers (as I'd have expected historically).

I've always assumed, but with very little evidence to back it up (which is why I'm rather glad I found this photo) that hoop/garland dances were tied in with the rushcarts as the churches were often decorated with garlands when the new rushes were laid on the floor.

It's rare now to see male dancers doing a hoop dance.






The guys in small skirts at the front are the Coconut Dancers - a dance that is, amazingly, still performed in the same costume today.
The Coconut dancers are  one of the many interesting quirks of morris history and no one is quite sure where the tradition came from, but it's a Lancashire dance just like North West Morris.



They have small wooden discs on their hands and knees, which is the sound you're hearing when they pass their hands over their knees.

Notice, that like all good Lancashire traditional dancers, they're wearing clogs.