Morris dance

Morris dancing is a form of English folk dance. It is based on rhythmic stepping and the execution of choreographed figures by a group of dancers in costume, usually wearing bell pads on their shins, their shoes or both. A band or single musician, also costumed, will accompany them. Sticks, swords, handkerchiefs, and a variety of other implements may be wielded by the dancers.

Morris dancing first appeared in England in the 15th century. Its earliest surviving mention dates to 1448 and records the payment of seven shillings to Morris dancers by the Goldsmiths' Company in London. The term Morris derives from the Spanish term morisco, although Morris dancing has no known historical connection to the Moors.

Three prominent groups organise and support Morris in England: Morris Ring, Morris Federation and Open Morris; all three organisations have members from other countries as well.

There are around 150 Morris sides (or teams) in the United States. English immigrants form a large part of the Morris tradition in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong. There are relatively isolated groups in other countries, for example those in Utrecht and Helmond, Netherlands; the Arctic Morris Group of Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden; as well as in Cyprus and St Petersburg, Russia.

Throughout its history, the Morris seems to have been common. It was imported from village festivities into popular entertainment after the invention of the court masque by Henry VIII. The word Morris apparently derived from morisco, meaning 'Moorish'. Cecil Sharp, whose collecting of Morris dances preserved many from extinction, suggested that it might have arisen from the dancers' blacking their faces as part of the necessary ritual disguise.

The name is first recorded in English in the mid-15th century as Morisk dance, moreys daunce, morisse daunce, i.e. 'Moorish dance'. The term entered English via Flemish mooriske danse. Comparable terms in other languages include German Moriskentanz (also from the 15th century), French morisques, Croatian moreška, and moresco, moresca or morisca in Italy and Spain. The modern spelling Morris-dance first appeared in the 17th century. In Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words, first published in 1658, the term morisco was referenced as both "a Moor" and "the Morris dance, as it were the Moorish dance", while John Bullokar defined it in 1695 as "a certain dance used among the Moors; whence our Morris dance".

It is unclear how the dance came to be referred to as Moorish, "unless in reference to fantastic dancing or costumes", i.e. the deliberately "exotic" flavour of the performance. The English dance thus apparently arose as part of a wider 15th-century European fashion for supposedly "Moorish" spectacle, which also left traces in Spanish and Italian folk dance. The means and chronology of the transmission of this fashion is now difficult to trace; the London Chronicle recorded "spangled Spanish dancers" performed an energetic dance before King Henry VII at Christmas in 1494, but Heron's accounts also mention "pleying of the mourice dance" four days earlier, and the attestation of the English term from the mid-15th century establishes that there was a "Moorish dance" performed in England decades prior to 1494.

An alternative derivation from the Latin mōs, mōris (custom and usage) has also been suggested.