Lords and Ladies

20

There are Morris dances that use sticks, but according to my sources there aren’t any that use buckets. Jason’s reluctance to do this dance has its parallels in real world Morris dancing: at least in one area (upstate New York), a dance called the Webley Twizzle has a reputation for being hazardous to one’s health, which is perhaps why it’s hardly ever danced. It has even been claimed that someone broke his leg doing it, although no one seems to know any details. Of course, the reluctance of the Lancre Morris Men to perform the ‘Stick and Bucket’ may also have to do with the fact that the name of the dance very probably indicates another ‘mettyfor’ along the lines of maypoles and broomsticks.

When you mention ‘Discworld’ and ‘dance’ in the same breath, you can only be talking about one thing: Morris Dancing, a subject that most non-Brits will be almost completely in the dark about. Brewer has this to say on the subject:

Morris Dance: brought to England in the reign of Edward III, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain. In the dance, bells were jingled, and staves or swords clashed. It was a military dance of the Moors or Moriscos, in which five men and a boy engaged; the boy wore a ‘morione’ or head-piece, and was called Mad Morion.

Which is interesting, but doesn’t really explain anything in a 20th century context. Luckily, a newsgroup like alt.fan.pratchett attracts contemporary Morris Dancers like flies, and for the rest of this section I will give the floor to Rich Holmes:

“In a number of books (including Strata, Guards! Guards! Reaper Man, and Lords and Ladies) Pratchett refers to morris dancing. These allusions may be lost on the typical American reader. Picture, then, six men in white shirts and trousers, decorated with ribbons, wearing bells on their legs, in a two-by-three formation — the men, not the bells. To a tune played on fiddle or squeezebox, they dance up and down, back and forth, gesturing with big white handkerchiefs in their hands — or, maybe, clashing yard-long willow sticks with one another. That’s morris dancing, or at least the species of morris dancing that was done in the late 19th century in the Cotswolds region of England.

It’s also done today, throughout the English-speaking world (though in America it’s not exactly an everyday sight), these days by women’s teams and mixed teams as well as by men. There are several hundred morris teams in England as well as 170 or so in the US and Canada and God knows how many in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and other odd places.

As for where it came from, and when, and what it all means, no one really knows. Some of its roots seem to go back to the European continent sometime in or before the 15th century. Similar, possibly related dances were and are found in Europe and even as far away as India. For a while in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were commonly claimed by folklorists to be a remnant of a pre-Christian fertility rite performed by a male priesthood; there’s really no hard evidence to support such a theory, though.

Terry Pratchett tells us he’s “never waved a hankie in anger” nor knows any morris dancers personally, but that he finds the morris dance kind of fascinating.