“With a noyse and a din, Comes the Maurice dancer in, With a fine linnen shirt, but a buckram skin. Oh! he treads out such a peale, From his paire of legs of veale.
The quarters are idols to him. Nor do those knaves inviron Their toes with so much iron, ’Twill ruin a smith to shoe him.”
The Morris dancers’ dress has fallen on somewhat evil days of late years. The best they can do is a white suit of duck or flannel with trousers, short knee breeches, or even ordinary dark cloth trousers with a white shirt. The shirt is decorated with ribbons and rosettes, and sometimes a double baldric is worn crossed on the chest and hanging down at the sides. The bells are sewn on to a pad, and a pair which I have is made of long bits of coloured cloth such as a sailor uses to make a hearthrug with, the bells sewn in between. This was got from a pawnshop in Oxford with a pipe and tabor, a pathetic sign of the decay of national gaiety!
The hat is sometimes a box hat, sometimes a bowler, sometimes a cap, but it must be gaily decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers, bits of feather, or anything that comes in handy. Mr Brookes, of Godley Hill, who came to London to teach the Lancashire dances, wore a bowler hat covered tightly with white calico, and over that a mass of flowers, and ribbons hanging down behind.
I confess that this curious mixture of a traditional ceremonial dress and the modern bowler hat does not attract me nor appeal to my sense of the fitness of things, but I think that for present-day performance one must either adopt the least objectionable form of present-day holiday dress, which is usually white flannel, add as much colour as possible in ribbons and sash, and leave it at that, or if any fancy dress is adopted I think it is best to adopt the Elizabethan peasants’ holiday dress and add the bells, ribbons, etc., as it was during her reign that the Morris dance was very usually danced at fairs and festivals.
The only woman’s dress described in old writers is that of Maid Marian, but as the character was taken by a man dressed as a woman, who was very grotesquely dressed, it is better to-day to adopt a very simple dress, such as a cotton frock and a sun bonnet, with a bunch of ribbons at the waist. Every girl should have a different colour, though the general style may be the same.