Morris Dancing Sides

The earliest surviving English record of Morris dancing is a 1448 payment: the Goldsmiths' Company in London gave seven shillings to Morris dancers. It began as courtly and civic entertainment in the fifteenth century, spread into parish and village life, then thinned badly through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the old occasions for it faded. The revival that saved it is usually dated to Boxing Day 1899, when the folk-song collector Cecil Sharp watched the Headington Quarry side dance near Oxford and began writing the tradition down. That collecting work, side by side with living village teams that never fully stopped, seeded the hundreds of sides dancing today.

Your first practice is mostly watching, then joining the back of a set where a wrong turn costs nothing, because the whole point of winter is that everyone was a beginner in the same hall not long ago. Expect to learn the stepping before the figures and to be handed a spare set of sticks or a borrowed hankie rather than a full kit; the bells, the whites and the side's own sash come once you are actually dancing out. Nobody expects grace on night one, and the evening almost always ends the way the tradition intends, at the bar.