morris dancing – Mick Canning

In February 1600 Will Kemp Morris-danced his way from London to Norwich, a distance of approximately a hundred miles.

Kemp (or Kempe), born around 1560 and died, probably of the plague. in 1603, was an actor, dancer and all-round clown. A member of Shakespeare’s company, Chamberlain’s Men, he regularly played the role of the clown in Shakespeare’s plays. He undertook his famous dance after some sort of disagreement within Shakespeare’s company as a result of which Kemp took his shares and left. Although we don’t know what form this disagreement took, it is widely assumed Kemp was very much a scene-stealer who was apt to improvise during a performance – possibly Shakespeare was alluding to Kemp when he has Hamlet declare ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’. Kemp also had a tendency to dance jigs at the end of a performance that critics declared ruined the mood of a tragic performance.

Afterwards he described his dance as a ‘nine daies wonder’ in a booklet he published, although it actually took him twenty eight days to accomplish as he rested up for a while between each day dancing,

By the time he had joined Chamberlain’s Men, he was already famous for his acting and dancing. He had toured the Low Countries (now referred to as Benelux) and Denmark 1585-86 as a performer with the Earl of Leicester’s Men, performed frequently as a solo dancer and actor – usually performing clownish parts – and his improvised jigs were renowned for being frequently both ridiculous and lewd, which might go some way to explaining the rift with Shakespeare’s company, who by then were attempting to attract a more refined audience.

The dance from London to Norwich was performed as a publicity stunt and also as a way for Kemp to raise money by betting on himself to complete the journey. He was accompanied by a Thomas Slye, who played both the tabor (a small drum) and a fife to accompany the dance steps, and George Spratt who acted as overseer to the spectacle. Kemp wore a feathered cap, a slashed doublet with streamers attached to the shoulders, slashed breeches, and with clusters of jingle bells around his ankles and calves. A large crowd assembled to watch him set off from London at seven in the morning on February 10th 1600, and he continued to attract great crowds the length of his journey, which he completed on March 9th. He wrote the booklet later, as a riposte to those who doubted he had completed the journey.

This isn’t the origin of the phrase nine days wonder, incidentally, that goes back to at least the early thirteen hundreds.

The tune Kemp’s Jig appears in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master of 1651 and is attributed to John Dowland, but it is known that Kemp himself composed some jigs – four examples survive today. Whether Dowland (if it were he) wrote the jig to honour this journey, however, or whether it was a more generic tribute, we don’t know.

The journey, though, was quite an achievement.

I know this is all a bit niche, but having bought myself a sweatshirt featuring the image, I decided to learn a bit more about Mr Kemp and this is the result of that. I already knew about his dancing from London to Norwich, but I knew little about him beyond that.

In the town I used to live in, there was once a pub called the Hooden Horse, sadly now renamed to something much less interesting. I was reminded of this at an exhibition at Maidstone museum on Hooden Horses. Hooden Horses? Well, briefly…

Hoodening is a rural folk tradition unique to East Kent, England. Going back a few hundred years, in the week or so running up to Christmas, groups of farm labourers would dress up as various characters and go from door to door requesting money, cake and beer. One of the characters would be the Hooden Horse, which was an artificial horse’s head made of wood, with a jaw operated by string, on a wooden pole, held by one of the performers with his body covered in cloth – usually sacking. A sort of play was then performed in rhyme, a mixture of plot and satire, usually featuring a few local characters who would be well known to the watchers and might be the butt of jokes and scorn, as well as stock characters such as Molly, a waggoner, and the Mayor. And of course the horse (him)self, invariably called Dobbin. There would also be music performed on whatever might be available – accordions, fiddles, drums or whistles.

The relationship to Morris dancing and Mummers is hard to avoid and, like these traditions, has been revived in modern times by enthusiastic traditionalists.

A photo from the early twentieth century

A modern Hooden Horse

Another early twentieth century photo.

There are many other traditions in Britain involving what is known as ‘animal guising’, where men or women take the guise of an animal, the Padstow ‘obby ‘oss being perhaps the best known of these. The performance on May Day in Padstow, Cornwall, invariably draws large crowds.

On the left, a Hooden horse, and on the right a Mari Lwyd, the ‘skull horse’ of Welsh tradition. Although unconnected (as far as I know) the Welsh had a similar tradition, also taking place around Christmas and New Year. Skull horses are to be found in other parts of England, however, including Yorkshire.

Stag guising is another old tradition – possibly older than horse guising. It was certainly in existence during medieval times and survives today in the form of the Abbots Bromley Horn dancers, Staffordshire, who perform carrying reindeer antlers on poles on the Monday following ‘Wakes Sunday’ in September. Wakes Week became a tradition in industrial Northern England when factories and mills closed down for a week for maintenance giving the workers a holiday. This began in the early nineteenth century, but before this the ritual presumably took place at a different time of year.

The exhibition is on until 17th July 2023 and there is a link to their site here.