English Ethnicity and Culture in North America

David T. Gleeson, David T. Gleeson

• Verlag: University of South Carolina Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781611177879
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire du 20ème siècle

Ten scholars examine English identity, what makes it distinct, and its role in shaping American culture

To many, English immigrants contributed nothing substantial to the varied palette of ethnicity in North America. While there is wide recognition of German American, French American, African American, and Native American cultures, discussion of English Americans as a distinct ethnic group is rare. Yet the historians writing in English Ethnicity and Culture in North America show that the English were clearly immigrants too in a strange land, adding their own hues to the American and Canadian characters.

In this collection, editor David T. Gleeson and other contributors explore some of the continued links between England, its people, and its culture with North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These essays challenge the established view of the English having no "ethnicity, " highlighting the vibrancy of the English and their culture in North America. The selections also challenge the prevailing notion of the English as "invisible immigrants." Recognizing the English as a distinct ethnic group, similar to the Irish, Scots, and Germans, also has implications for understanding American identity by providing a clearer picture of how Americans often have defined themselves in the context of Old World cultural traditions.

Several contributors to English Ethnicity and Culture in North America track the English in North America from Episcopal pulpits to cricket fields and dance floors. For example Donald M. MacRaild and Tanja Bueltmann explore the role of St. George societies before and after the American Revolution in asserting a separate English identity across class boundaries. In addition Kathryn Lamontagne looks at English ethnicity in the working-class culture and labor union activities of workers in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ultimately all the work included here challenges the idea of a coherent, comfortable Anglo-cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be English in North America.

MIKE SUTTON

The Morris Diaspora

Transplanting an Old English Tradition or Inventing a New American One?

The history of any leisure pursuit may illuminate changing patterns of sociability in the wider community, as happened, for example, with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.¹ America’s morris dance groups seem as worthy of study as her bowling leagues, and an activity with such deep English roots and extensive American branches surely deserves its niche in the diaspora project. This brief study cannot offer a comprehensive history of American morris.² Its more limited aim is to reveal how the ethos and techniques of morris reached America and what became of them there. Its conclusions rest on the analysis of primary and secondary sources, on responses to a lengthy questionnaire, and on participant observations with American morris clubs, or “sides” [“Side” is the standard term for a group of Morris dancers who practice and perform regularly, and have designated officers such as a secretary, treasurer, etc].

Most traditional dances are either social or ceremonial. Social dances usually involve equal numbers of men and women, are often associated with courtship or flirtation, and are generally performed throughout the year in everyday dress. Ceremonial dances often celebrate specific seasons—sometimes particular days—and frequently involve single-gender groups wearing distinctive costumes. Morris is England’s ceremonial dance. For centuries it offered villagers occasional respite from their annual round of drudgery and deference, but as their material circumstances altered, their recreations changed. In the early 1900s, when morris had almost disappeared, folklorists attempted to document and conserve what remained. They secured a niche for it in England and introduced it to North America despite the absence of a vernacular morris tradition there.

Much cultural baggage carried by English-speaking migrants survived the Atlantic crossing. Robin Hood ballads circulated alongside tributes to Jesse James, while English country dances remained popular—even if the folk dance Sir Roger de Coverley was rebranded as the Virginia reel.³ Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition allegedly brought “Musike in good variety not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horses, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people.”⁴ Yet morris never took root; though a few nineteenth-century American publications mentioned it briefly as a novelty item in theatrical productions.⁵ Twentieth-century English visitors launched what some call the American morris revival, although one participant firmly rejected that label, stating that “the vast majority of these men and women now dancing in the US have never been to England to watch Morris dancing. They do it because it seems to fill a place in their lives rather than because it comes from England. They are not reviving anything [emphasis added].”⁶

But if not a “revival,” what is it? Any definition raises difficulties since the term “morris” is an umbrella covering numerous activities and controversies. For the moment, therefore, internal differences will be disregarded while an attempt is made to locate the movement on a wider historical canvas. In many cultures people wearing unusual costumes occasionally invade public spaces to indulge in exuberant behavior.⁷ Events such as the Rio Carnival or the New Orleans Mardi Gras are familiar to global audiences.⁸ Others, for example the Palio in Siena or Bonfire Night in Lewes, arouse intense passions locally while remaining relatively unknown elsewhere.⁹ It seems that their roots reach far into our collective past. Written and pictorial sources covering a considerable span of time and space recorded festivities or rituals in which humans wore animal masks, skins, or horns.¹⁰ Such behavior seems to have been common throughout medieval Europe, and despite hostility from the clergy, it continued into the modern era.¹¹

The blurring of boundaries between animal and humankind occurs in carnival costumes worldwide, while Dick Whittington’s cat and Idle Jack’s cow still feature in Britain’s Christmas pantomimes alongside the “Dame” and her foolish son, who preserve parallel traditions of festive transgression.¹² Beyond our theater walls, civic spaces become playgrounds for eccentrically dressed revelers celebrating “stag” (bachelor) and “hen”(bachelorette) nights. Also visible there are morris dancers, often accompanied by a hobbyhorse or similar man-animal figure. “Horse-play” has been a term for disorderly behavior since 1590.¹³ Such activities appear to express a fundamental need. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga suggested that we should call our species homo ludens, or the animal that plays, and described dancing as “pure play, the most perfect form of play that exists.”¹⁴ More recently Barbara Ehrenreich argued, “To submit, bodily, to the music through dance is to be incorporated into the community in a way far deeper than shared myth or common custom.”¹⁵ The archaeologist Steven Mithen claimed that dancing contributed significantly to our ancestors’ mental and social development after they adopted bipedalism.¹⁶ It is against this background that the history of morris should be examined.

THE RISE AND FALL OF MORRIS: FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE GREAT WAR

In 1448 London’s Company of Goldsmiths paid “moryssh daunsers” to entertain at their feast. Although no earlier references survive, this was probably not the debut performance of England’s first morris side. Similarly a will dated 1458 mentioned a silver cup decorated with a “moreys daunce,” but the cup has been lost, and we have no idea when it was made.¹⁷ The earliest sources did not describe the dance. A stained-glass window, probably made after 1550, is informative about costume—the bells are clearly visible—but reveals little about choreography. A painting from around 1620 is more helpful but leaves some questions unanswered.¹⁸ The origins of morris therefore remain obscure. Some thought that this English dance copied older Spanish ones featuring mock combats between Christians and Moors, perhaps arriving via Italy, France, the Netherlands, or Germany, where variants—Moresca, Mourisque, Moresk, Mohrentanz, respectively—were known. Others have argued that an indigenous English dance became known as “Moorish” because its performers sometimes disguised their faces with soot or ash.¹⁹

Contemporaries would have been sensitive to this resemblance. Until the mid-1600s Corsairs frequently raided English coastal villages and carried off residents to slavery in North Africa.²⁰ However, although actors representing Moors appeared in court masques, they seem to have had no direct link with morris.²¹ The “blacking up” revived by some modern morris sides may be a nineteenth-century addition, borrowed from the May Day dances of English chimney sweeps or from American minstrel troupes. Some early twentieth-century folklorists believed that morris was a vestige of an ancient pagan rite; this thesis has been demolished by recent scholarship, although it is still popular with modern pagans.²² It is probably safest to say that while most cultures have niches where people can fool about in fancy dress, we have no idea why the English chose morris dancing to occupy theirs.

Whatever its origins, the dance was often performed before Henry VII and Henry VIII between the 1490s and the 1520s. Thereafter it lost favor at court but still appeared in civic pageants and entertainments at wealthy households.²³ By the 1590s it was a feature of village festivities, and authors of Shakespeare’s era associated it with rustic merrymaking.²⁴ The dancers often had one or more eccentric companions, such as a clown (the ‘Fool’), a hobbyhorse, or a man in woman’s clothing, all of whom featured in other seasonal festive customs involving role reversal and “misrule.”²⁵ Puritans condemned such activities as disorderly and ungodly, suppressing them wherever they could.²⁶ When the “Merry Monarch” Charles II returned to England in May 1660, Maypoles and morris dancing were prominent in the celebrations.²⁷

English laborers performed morris dances throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several regional variants appeared, including the handkerchief-waving and stick-clashing dances of the South Midlands (Cotswold Morris); the processional and garland dances of Lancashire and Cheshire (North-West Morris); the “Bedlam” dances of Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire (Border Morris); and the “Molly” dances of East Anglia. The sword dances of Northumberland, Durham, and North Yorkshire are generally included in the morris family, for though their origins may be different, the cultural niche they occupy is similar. The more recent “Carnival” morris dances of North West England too are regarded by some as a valid offshoot of the tradition, while oddities such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance from Staffordshire and the wood-gathering dance of Groveley Forest in Wiltshire are usually lumped with morris. Together they form a complex and occasionally contentious family.²⁸

These dances were frequently associated with specific festivals such as New Year, Plough Monday, May Day, or Whitsun but might have been performed to earn money whenever paid work was scarce. They disappeared from many communities between 1850 and 1900, as rural depopulation reduced the pool of potential dancers while clergy and magistrates condemned the drinking and disorderly behavior that often accompanied the dancing.²⁹ Twentieth-century enthusiasts began collecting and performing the surviving dances, and in 1911 they acquired an institutional base when Cecil Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS).³⁰ Morris was featured in celebrations for the coronation of George V and in Stratford-upon-Avon on Shakespeare’s birthday.³¹ By 1914 it was also, rather surprisingly, gaining support in America.

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