Libby Purves

Note: Libby's brother is Patrick Purves of Alford Morris Men, so she may be just a little influenced in her opinions .... Thanks Libby! JM

Mention some tastes in ordinary dullish company, and you will raise people's eyebrows and cause sharp intakes of breath from at least half the company. I always enjoy the frisson of irritation and disbelief I can cause by mentioning that one of my minor heroines is Mary Archer. But if you really want to start people scuttling away from you in alarm, tell them you like morris dancing. It's a sure way of cutting out inhibited, thinkalike bores from your social circle.

For morris dancing - and folklore in general - sorts out the sheep from the goats. Either you get it, or you don't. If you don't, then you think the whole thing is cringe-makingly nostalgic, false and pretentious. Personally I love it all, so there. Show me a maypole and I'm round it.

For my money, the best new university course in Britain in recent years is Newcastle University's Folk Music Degree, which causes marvellous droning harmonies to emit from otherwise dull lecture-rooms, and fiddles to resound around a staid campus building. Even dubious made-up pursuits like dwile flonking (chucking beer-soaked rags at a ring of dancers) hold my attention; and when it comes to genuine survivals like well-dressing or cheese-rolling I am a pushover. When the family were smaller we used to observe all sorts of daft things I found in books, like Pudding Thursday, and only the lack of open space to burn a model Viking ship prevented me from importing Up-Helly-Aa from Shetland to East Suffolk to brighten up the winter.

But morris is the king of them all. On a May bank holiday, just let me hear the wheezing, lilting sound of an accordion and the clashing of staves in the distance and I am off down the road, hotfoot towards whichever pub forecourt has been invaded by white-clad lads with a bladder on a stick. Generally, I have to admit, there is a small stampede of people coming the other way, fleeing from the acute embarrassment they feel at the sight of middle-aged men with flowers round their hats and bells on their knees. When you get there, the dancers are surrounded fascinated, mildly horrified drinkers standing round because their children won't let them go away. Children know a thing or two. They see the point of this exuberance.

I love morris dancing partly, I suppose, because I first met it in a pure, raw, genuine form when I lived in Oxford. The Headington Quarry Morris Men go back through genuine tradition to the earliest morris (it was referred to as "ancient" at the court of Henry VIII, features in a will of 1458, and 16th-century church records show accounts for morris bells and costumes). Some say it evolved from Druidic rites, others that it is a pastiche of a 12th-century Italian court dance, the moresca, which the crusaders brought home much as the New Zealand rugby team adopted the Maori "haka" as their own. The Puritans banned it in the 17th century, which is as good a reason as any to carry it on now; and in the rural Cotswolds it dallied for the next few centuries until it began to peter out in Victorian times.

But in 1899, the Headington Morris Men happened to dance a bit of morris on Boxing Day to a concertina played by young William Kimber, to raise a few pence for beer. Several of them by then were old, old men. They did "laudanum bunches" and some banging of sticks on the ground called "bean setting", and the folk-collector Cecil Sharp saw them and was transfixed. It looked right, it felt right; he sensed that these old patterns, however corrupted and ill-remembered, went back for centuries. Why would they pretend, anyway? The dancers did it because it felt right. They still do.

From the 1920s onward, William Kimber having become a great dancer and leader of the revival, the Headington men attached the old country dance to the university custom of keeping May Morning with a choir singing on Magdalen College Tower at 6am. And there on the bridge I saw them at dawn: leaping, banging wrist-thick s taves, great black boots thundering up and down, muscular thighs bulging above belled garters, representing the strings their ancestors on the farms had to bind round their trousers to stop the rats running up.

Morris dancing was banned by the Puritans, which is as good a reason as any for it to carry on

I saw it at that moment: morris is machismo. Not wimpy, not an effete hanky-waving display. For all its ribbons and flowers it is still bound up rather thrillingly with the soil, and fertility, and the ploughman's strength. The chaps with bells on could teach Mick Jagger a thing or two about male display. It takes a big agricultural woman to stand up to that lot.

So I went home and looked it up, trying to understand the strange power of the morris, and found some lines from a cross chap called Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses of 1583. This Stubbes was a Puritan who disapproved, at great length, of tight clothes, feathers on hats, ruffs, earrings, gambling, dancing, theatres, taverns, drinking, swearing, landlords, lawyers, hunting and singing. Morris dancers in particular drove him wild:

"They strike up the Devil's dance withall: then march this heathen company towards the church and churchyards, their pypers pyping, the drummers thundering, their stumpes dancing, their belles jyngling, their handkercheefes fluttering about their heads like madde men..."

I thought of this a few years later, when my middle brother became squire of the local morris, leading rackety nocturnal processions through the streets of his town with his concertina, streams of booted and clogged stampers following behind him with flaming brands held aloft. Devilish exciting. Next time you see some well-mannered chaps banging sticks outside your pub, raise a glass to them. They're far, far less respectable than they think.

Published with Permission. © Libby Purves & SAGA Magazine, Saga Publishing Ltd, The Saga Pavilion, Enbrook park, Folkstone, Kent CT20 3SE