page_title: Morris dance
section_title: Border
hierarchical_section_title: Morris dance / Styles / Border
caption_attribution_description: English: A morris dancer with painted disguise, traditional along the border with Wales.
context_page_description: Morris dancing is a form of English folk dance usually accompanied by music. It is based on rhythmic stepping and the execution of choreographed figures by a group of dancers, usually wearing bell pads on their shins. Implements such as sticks, swords and handkerchiefs may also be wielded by the dancers. In a small number of dances for one or two people, steps are near and across a pair of clay tobacco pipes laid one across the other on the floor. They clap their sticks, swords, or handkerchiefs together to match with the dance.
  The earliest known and surviving English written mention of Morris dance is dated to 1448 and records the payment of seven shillings to Morris dancers by the Goldsmiths' Company in London. Further mentions of Morris dancing occur in the late 15th century, and there are also early records such as bishops' "Visitation Articles" mentioning sword dancing, guising and other dancing activities, as well as mumming plays.
  While the earliest records invariably mention "Morys" in a court setting, and a little later in the Lord Mayors' Processions in London, it had assumed the nature of a folk dance performed in the parishes by the mid 17th century.
context_section_description: The term "Border Morris" was first used by E. C. Cawte in a 1963 article on the Morris dance traditions of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire: counties along the border with Wales. Characteristics of the tradition as practised in the 19th and early 20th centuries include: blackface (in some areas), use of either a small strip of bells (in some areas) or no bells at all (in others), costume often consisting of ordinary clothes decorated with ribbons, strips of cloth, or pieces of coloured paper; or sometimes "fancy dress", small numbers of traditional dances in the team repertoire, often only one and rarely more than two, highly variable number of dancers in the set and configurations of the set (some sides had different versions of a dance for different numbers of dancers), and an emphasis on stick dances almost to the exclusion of hankie dances.
caption: A Morris dancer with coloured disguise which was often used by dancers from the borders of Wales and England
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