Yup - quite correct. This is not done to 'protect anyone's feelings', but to hurt the white English. 'Destroy everything so that we can rule over the rubble.' - the motto of the left.
I'm Irish and what comes with that is a considerable suspicion of all things English. But I'll tell you what, the English should protect Morris dancing with all their hearts. It's part of their culture and their folk history. In Ireland we protect that with everything we have, I don't see why the English can't do that as well, just because of our history.
@@bppmurphyit's a Celtic tradition, it should definitely be protected, it's part of your history. In Portugal there is a similar dance. Search for "Pauliteiros de Miranda" we still practice and it is protected as Cultural Heritage! Cheers ❤
There is a theory that Morris'Moorish Dancing in the Courts was introduced to England by John of Gaunt via his Spanish wife. Probably not about blacking up, but as the presenter says, sticking is a stylised sword fighting technique from the Moors. There are similar dances in Spain and the Basque country. They look very much like Cotswold Morris (in white) but the Spanish wear Turbans and the Basques flat caps! I just wish people would oppose real racism and leave Morris Dancers alone.
@@suelane3628 Yeah. That is interesting about the Basques. Morris dancing struck me as something that was a Pre Indio European, Pre Celtic tradition. Something that the waves of migration adopted from much older tradition/people's. This is especially if the Basque are doing it.
It's very important that people of english ancestors learn and enjoy their cultural practises.The Anglosphere has lost so much ,replaced by commercialism ,and tv.
Great! I'm glad I could introduce you to this old English practice :D Thank you very much, I will leave this up after all and make a few more videos about European Culture and traditions because it is under serious threat from the modern PC Culture which is a great shame because if anything we should all be able to celebrate our past and heritage, no matter where we come from or look like :/
Terry Pratchett made great use of the Morris Dancing, especially in "Wintersmith" the Black Morris Dancers are mentioned with awe and fear... also, in "Lords and Ladies" when a hardy band of men dance the Bucket Dance, thus fending off the evil Fairies. The Black Morris dancers in your clip are definitely weird, like Pratchett's Black Morris dancers. Definitely not cheezy! And we must ignore the silly people who honk away about racism at the silliest opportunity.
Love a bit of Pratchett! Though I must admit I haven't read Wintersmith, though by your description of the Morris Dancer's role in it it does sound like one I should read. Oh certainly, but I find that the weird, rather strange things are those that best connect us to the past, to our ancestors. I totally agree with you there, moral busybodies are really the ones cause divisions in our society. Thank you for watching :)
I agree, too long English culture has been suppressed by those fearful that it is one and the same with extreme-right, white supremacy (which is total nonsense). To be fair it's not entirely the Scottish's fault that their culture has been exported world wide.
Just visit Scotland, to see a culture being exploited by The Man. Look at the Tartanry and bagpiping that goes on in the Royal Mile of Edinburgh. There's also Orangery with flutes and drums, mainly in the West, but we keep quiet about that.
Thank you for your video. I play music for a Morris side and was astounded to hear that there are people who are offended and think it's racist. The origins of this type of dancing are so obscure.There are a few theories about it and there are interesting videos on TH-cam.😊
The reason that Morris dancers in the welsh border regions traditionally blacked up is because at the time Morris dancing was seen as a begging (which was illegal at the time) and so they would put the ash and smear their faces so that they weren't recognised by law enforcement or employers
That's 100% correct. It was used as a disguise. You could be flogged for 'begging'. I think the word Morris dancing just became the word for English folk dancing.
As a Morris Dancer of many years standing I can confirm that the blackface was a disguise used by the dancers in the border region. This is well known in the Morris Dance community.
My brother was a dancer with a Welsh border Morris team who danced in blackface. The tradition that all the guys were delighted to relate was that, some long time prior to that time ('70's) , the people of that area had a really oppressive landlord who owned all the land around, and was a very tyrannical landlord and made his tenant's lives a complete misery, to the point where the local men got so annoyed with him that they disguised themselves by rubbing soot over their faces and lying in wait for the landlord as he came out of the pub one night, whereupon, they jumped him and beat the absolute crap out of him; and, of course, with their faces blacked up, there was no way he could identify them. And then, after that, they commemorated the occasion by rubbing soot on their faces to do their Morris dancing .....
@@YorkyOne Yes ..... well ...... who knows? All the guys in the team were pretty convinced of it and they were all very ordinary guys from rural and semi-rural England; not the sort of people who would make up a story for "marketing purposes" or to disguise some latent racism. I didn't dance with them but I knew them all. My impression was the story was real ......
@@chriselliott368 Sorry, I came over as a bit of a prat. Just reading Michael Heaney's 'The Ancient English Morris Dance' and it's clear that blacking up only occurs following the arrival of the blackface minstrel troupes of the early/mid 1800's. The revival sides of the 70's took to blacking up as it was visually striking. In the case of John Kirkpatrick (Shropshire Bedlams) because 'I like to look frightening'. But there was a lack of understanding as to the origins with stories of disguise, miners, poachers etc - an assumption that it was 'traditional'. Which is where I believe your story originated.
@@YorkyOne That's all good. Thanks for getting back and for the interesting info. The side I mentioned were from Ledbury area and were one of the revival sides (I just realised, reading what you wrote), and the story of the blackface originated in Victorian times, if I remember right, so only vaguely traditional. All very fascinating. I just wish our woke friends had a bit of discernment and could leave these things alone. Thanks again
@@YorkyOne Cecil Sharp asked a morris dancer why they used blackened faces and was told it was for "disguise", which is the key to Morris dance culture's adoption of it in certain genres. Blackening faces with soot or charred cork has a very long history of disguise for beggars and mischief makers, including dancers and in folk dramas, going way back into history before 19thC minstrel shows appeared. In Lincolnshire they also used "coloured clays" i.e. they used what was available. An MA study on blackened faces in Morris dance and work by the renowned writer on morris dance, Roy Dommett, have not been able to make a direct connection with minstrel shows and my own brief survey of minstrel shows in Lincolnshire indicates they happened in higher population areas than the rural ones where morris dancing & mumming originated. In theatre studies Moors in early dramas were regarded as exotic and finely dressed, so not necessarily negatively presented. All a bit earlier than the 1970s, so you are wrong there.
Since Morris dancing is obviously a dance to practice fighting, I mean it's pretty obvious, would the blacking of the face not be about camouflage in battle? Native Americans, in this part of the country anyway, Cherokees, and Seminoles, do the same blacking on their face for some dances. Especially the ones to do with a fight. Or grass dancers. Both are pretty fun.
Morris dancing is a subset of English country folk dance, and there are many other traditions. I had the privilege of being one of the antlered "deer" in an Abbots Bromley Horn Dance at an event in the US. The work of John Playford in publishing the music and dance instructions left a large corpus. The revival of Morris was stimulated by the great English folklorist Cecil Sharpe. Let's keep these customs alive. I love playing the dance tunes including Morris ones
Until this video, this American had never heard of Morris Dancing. Thanks for the education! So, as an outsider looking in, I find it odd that anyone would think that the blackface of this dance is african in origin. The Moors, while from Africa, were fair skinned. The Moors came from Berbers and Arabs, not sub-saharan africans. And, still, even if the practice was of that origin, it is part of this History, and if we start banning History just because it upsets us, then we lose all meaning to History itself. And, also, History is written by the Winners. (which is why I keep looking for outlets such as this channel, that attempts to find "the other side" and tell that History as well. Thanks, again.
Hey I'm glad I could introduce you to this merry old English tradition :D No problem at all, it's what I live for :) Exactly right, the way I phrase it in the video was a tad misleading in that only a few of the Moors in Spain were actually black rather than Arabic. You absolutely hit the nail on the head here Rick, it's not like the Emirs of Al Andalus are going to be feeling ridiculed by this :P That's very true, and to the quote that history is written by the victors I would also add that it is written by those who write - something essential for understanding our modern view of the Viking Age. Thank you for your continued support and addition to the discussion!
In the USA red faces are banned! A Welsh Border Morris side called 'Ragged Robins' was formed for a Festival in Anchorage. Naturally they wanted to redden their faces to fit with their theme. (Welsh Border Traditionally blacken their faces as they were begging.)
The word Moor absolutely means Black. It was used to described the Black Africans who conquered Spain and Portugal along with lighter skinned Arabs who were called Saracins. They were both Muslims from Africa.
Formorians predated Islam and Moors were in Britain as original settlers. The Moors were in America pre Columbus and when they were being driven out of Britain and Europe they settled in America. Blackface is a mockery of the noble Moors as their descendants are Afro Americans. Morris dance, square dance was also called Negro dance. The Morris dance recorded in 1448 but the Moors were run out until 1610. Queen Elizabeth did not want "blackamoors" in her realm, they were sent directly to Virginia and Barbados. Keep the Morris dance to retain their memory.
If the Moors were fair skinned then why the need for the phrase 'tawny moors', 🥱🥱🥱😴😴 too many Caucasians keep reading the same whitewashed history and then regurgitating the same BS, Moors were Africanoid. Imitation is the best form of flattery. Just shows you how many Caucasians hate black people deep down. Will accept anything about history as long as it's not black but if its Arab or Asian then that's fine, just not black. I don't blame you guys though, whitewashing is so global most people don't understand. Black people were called Moor back in the day, not black. Black/blac/blæc/blak/blake/blanc/blank/bleak/bleach - it was Caucasians who we're called this and then reversed identities with the Moors as is the law of polarity. Look up the meaning of the word blake. Most Caucasian people know whitewashing exists but choose to pick which they comfortable with admitting or accepting. I guess you think Ancient Egyptians were also caucasian and if not that then Arab hut as long as they are not negro then it's all good huh, GTFOH. People are waking up to the truth....
Newspaper article Tuesday 20 January 1920, page 2 MORRIS DANCE. The Morris' dance, originally a military dance of the Moors, was 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.
Excellently done, mate. I actually wasn't aware of Morris dancing before now. Thank you for introducing me to it. Such a shame so many innocent traditions are being ridiculed because of the smallest similarities to others that aren't so innocent. Your parents are direct from the Netherlands? That explains how you know Dutch so well. Sadly I don't know the language as well as I'd like, despite my paternal line being heavily Dutch (hence my surname). I actually know Irish better.
Thank you very much Ethan, I'm so glad I could inform you about this lovely English tradition! It really is beyond stupid in my opinion, I highly doubt this kind of fuss would be made with a non-European tradition where the highest effort is made to conserve their culture and traditions. I think we need to save as much of the culture and the traditions of these different groups as we can, whether in Europe or anywhere else. Yes indeed they are :) I balance out because I was born and raised in England but also in Dutch culture with Dutch blood and frequent trips back to the Low Countries ;) I was already wondering about your name actually, although my guess was German but pleasant surprise to see that you are a (sort of) compatriot :D Irish is a completely different kettle of fish, but also a people with a great history!
I doubt the fuss would be there either. I find traditions of all kinds to be equally worthy of love, no matter where they're from. Hehe, yep. As far as I know, I'm not German in the slightest. I'm equal parts English and Irish, Dutch enough to warrant a surname, there was a great grandfather named Wallace, and I even had a great, great grandfather who was Seneca. My family actually always pronounced our name "skenk" as opposed to the usual "shenk." I only recently learned this was because, as you know, the ch in the name in a Voiceless Uvular Fricative, so the would have just Anglicized it to a "k" sound. I still prefer to go by "shenk" for obvious reasons.
I agree, unless those traditions be something vile like stoning women to death or cutting off their genitals :) But I agree with the sentiment, I just don't want to see repeated what happened to so many Native American peoples over the last 3 centuries. That's a very interesting ancestry though, plenty to be proud of there :D Yes it would have been because otherwise it'd be too difficult for the modern Americans to pronounce. Yeah haha I do not blame you for choosing that pronunciation :D
History With Hilbert Of course, naturally, I simply didn't want to bring up such terrible subjects like that. I have no problem seeing traditions like that replaced. Yeah, I quite like my ancestry. I've mostly identified with the Irish side since my family's always indulged in it, but I'm starting to get more into the English as well, and I've always been interested in the Netherlands. My mother's maiden name is actually Donnelly, and her father is the most Irish American person you'll ever meet, though he's only been to Ireland once. Can't wait to see it for myself. My usage of the alternate pronunciation of of Schenck annoys my mother to no end. My father doesn't mind at all, but one time when I used it she said, "Are you going to tell your grandfather that you've changed you name now?" No mom, I am simply using the pronunciation less likely to make people laugh. Can't wait to get to the Netherlands so that I can use the proper Dutch pronunciation without people saying "What...?"
Ethan I also thought that was a German surname. I have strong Dutch heritage, but also have a German surname, which is strategically hidden on the Internet haha. My Dutch is... Like a baby's
Well done. Rather than racist, I see Morris dancers with blackface as a celebration of and homage to another culture. As a former Morris dancer in the US I am presently studying a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of Antwerp, the Cripples. Painted in 1568, I am convinced it is of Morris dancers, albeit crippled from the effects of ergotism. There are also carved wood sculptures of Moriskentanzer from 1480 in the Munich State Museum, one of which is painted as a black person. I even found a video of a side in Ecuador replete with pipe, drum, wood swords and bells. Unlike most sides that are reviving an old tradition, this side is clearly carrying out a dance on a feast day in a tradition that never died. The dance may have been brought by conquistadors in the sixteenth century. You can catch all the links at my blogsite, if interested. Kathy kellapitter.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/a-new-look-at-an-old-painting/
I would totally agree with you here, I see nothing at all derogatory or any type of promotion of hate at all so I find those in opposition to it pathetic. Is there much of a Morris-Dancing scene in the US? Also, thank you for watching my video on the subject: I'm honoured! I saw it whilst I was doing my research for this video actually, but it's a good point to bring up :) That is an interesting thought! I shall have a look at your blog, I'm very much interested to read it. Thank you very much for your insight here Kathy!
Thanks Hilbert. I thought you might enjoy seeing Morris dancers from the middle ages in Flanders, given your Dutch background, and some pre-slave trade references. Morris Dancing in the US is not huge, but continues to thrive in the northeast part of the country. I was in a women's side back in the 80's. Still have my bells and banners. In all my research on the internet I have yet to find anyone who has linked the Bruegel painting with Morris. How wild to have it discovered by myself, a former Morris Dancer. Guess it takes one to know one. Would you say this is a Morris side in the painting?
@@historywithhilbert this dance and tradition must be very old because it is in other parts of Europe too. I post here three TH-cam videolinks one after the other. First is from UK, second and third from Romania, for comparison: th-cam.com/video/0ionTgFxPgg/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/VM7lTvNWH8o/w-d-xo.html (old video) th-cam.com/video/wJy8mkgbUy8/w-d-xo.html (new video) "Calus", "calusul", "calusar", "dansul calusarilor".
@@kathykellapitter1256 Why do you believe the group of beggars/cripples in the Bruegel painting are morris dancers (or more accurately ex-morris dancers)? I assume the bells strapped to one of the beggar's legs is your clue. But they are lepers and the bells would be both a warning to strangers of their presence and also an advertisement - they want charity from those strangers. The man at the front has a wooden clapper attached to his belt for exactly the same reason. The fox tails attached to their clothing was linked to leprosy and also signified fools. This is from an online analysis of the painting: 'Stechow describes the foxtail as an “emblem of lepers, displayed during their customary procession on the Monday after Twelfth Night and the days of Carnival.” Stechow, 1990, 124. The association of foxtails with fools and jesters is antique. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Robert of Cicyle (1370) 57: “The fole Roberd with hym went, Clad in a fulle sympulle gar- ment, With foxe tayles to renne abowte.”'
Morris dancing was resurected in a little villiage in Essex. I grew up there just 100 yards from the garden they held their first meeting. Still occupied by the son of one of the founders (as I was growing up). The Morris ring still come together there each year. Morris dancing is both old and new being an eclectic mix of revived elements from anywhere they could be found. They perform in public and raise essential funds that ..........they like to spend on "refreshments" over the bar. You have read far too much into the historical narative.
Another point about the moors in Spain: they murdered and raped, they opressed the "Spanish" (rather the visgoths), but they also brought new technology and enriched the culture. I want to say: nobody is a saint, nobody is the devil. All cultures have comitted sins. Cultural appropriation is what everybody since the dawn of man does. Thats the cool thing about culture! It can change! Great video!!! Can you do one about swarte piet?
I would absolutely agree with you here Jonas, I mean, have you seen the Grand Mosque of Cordoba?!? It's one of the places I very much want to visit in the near future. It's also a fascinating corner of history, the Muslim area of Europe, that served as a warning for what might have happened had Charles Martel not hit the nail on the head (;) by defeating their advance at Poitiers. Fascinating stuff if you ask me. I completely agree with you, this being the conclusion I reached at the end of my video about dreadlocks. Thank you very much! I will indeed make one around the season this December ;)
The Moors did not murdered and rape. You have absolutely lied!!! They welcomed in to Andalusia by the native people of that land. The Visigoth was not the native people of the Iberian Peninsula. They were actually the rapers and murdered of the native people of Spain!! The Moors were welcomed!!! “The Moors in Spain,” “The Moors After Spain,” “The Golden Age of Moors,” “Nature Knows No Color Line,” Ancient and Modern Britons!” Read and stop lying!!!!
I have never seen black face morris dancers in all my life and there are plenty of groups round Hampshire and Sussex. Morris dancing was as far as we all knew, as country folk, to banish the dark of winter, celebrate the fertility of summer and bring in a good autumn harvest. This post has just all been about race and it makes me wonder, is it the urban people commenting on this who know nothing of country life and rural traditions? This was more a pagan dance linked to the land.
Another very interesting video - I hadn’t heard about that incident. It seems to be a case of completely misplaced ‘social justice’. Morris dancing is such a cliché of ‘Englishness’ that anyone who doesn’t (want to) understand it has seriously got too much time on their hands and apparently not enough sense to use it wisely - by for example learning about cultural history and why phenomena such as Morris dancing even exists to begin with. I do have to agree with ainkarmous though that the Moors were Berbers. Although sub-Saharan areas such as Sudan and Ethiopia were Muslim at that time, I have never heard any reference to Moors coming from anywhere other than the Berber areas. The black face of some Morris dancers and the connection to mining areas is logical - mining is extremely dirty work, and I don’t think they needed to put much extra coal dust on to get that look. So it has (presumably) little or nothing to do with the moors. Your reference to tea being Indian has to be corrected a little, I’m afraid - the latest research I have been able to find indicates that it probably originated in Myanmar and bordering areas of China and Assam in India. Remember a large part of the European (not least Dutch) interest in trading with China was precisely tea and porcelain teas-sets! Think of the phrase “for all of the tea in China”, the opium wars, etc. Tea was first cultivated in Assam by the (British) East India Company in the 1830’s, and does not seem to have been drunk in India before then. It seems to have taken until 1848 (when the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune was sent by the East Indian Company as a spy to learn the Chinese secrets of tea cultivation) to have got it to work though, and was a direct result of the opium wars. But you are completely right on cultural appropriation - every culture in the whole world is a result of borrowing from other cultures - or we would never have become what we are now (for both good and bad). No one culture has ever stood alone, and certainly not the western cultures of today. Even some of the examples you give of Irish and English culture at the end are appropriated. Guinness is a result of a charred batch of malt being brewed and sold cheap to porters in Covent Garden in the 1700’s (hence the beer being called porter) - many were Irish, and they took the new brew back with them to Ireland and began brewing it there (as the Guinness museum in Dublin tells the story of). And chips are of course originally from Belgium (the Spanish Netherlands) or France.
Even if, and I do not believe this to be the case, the origin of Morris dancing is somehow "racist", the modern show of it certainly is not about belittling black people, especially as there are now black people involved in the carrying out of performances and an all black group of Morris Dancers. Yes you are right, I phrased this in a misleading way in the video, only a small proportion of Moors were actually black. So apologies about this and thank you for picking up on it :) Ah yes tea is from China, but I'm fairly sure the British first started to import it in bulk from India which was a British possession for quite a while which is why I referenced it rather than the place of tea cultivation's origin, although I'm glad you made the point because the history of tea (and it's etymology actually from Mandarin "tú" to Min Chinese "te" to Dutch "thee" to English "tea" as well as the other variations of "char" and "chai") is all incredibly interesting :) Quite, I think as 21st Century peoples we have only one chance to save these traditions from being lost completely to history, something which would be incredibly tragic considering our attempts to save the other cultures and traditions of the world at present. Exactly, the English also had versions of Haggis and their Britons probably wore something similar to Tartan which is also worn by the Irish in some form or other. Absolutely, can't get better than Vlaamse Frieten. ;) Thank you for commenting such interesting information Cris, always love reading them!
I’ve just looked into the etymology of the term ‘Moor’, and what the available online literature has to say on them. In Danish the word is ‘maurer’, which comes from Latin ‘maurus’, from Greek ‘maurós’ or ‘amourós’ meaning ‘dark, black’. Morris is thus a corruption of a Latinized Greek word (‘maurus’ -> ‘Moorish’ -> ‘Morrish’ or ‘Mooris’ -> ‘Morris’), or a direct Anglicisation of the Latin (‘maurus’ to ‘Morris’ is no long linguistic jump). It seems to be exactly the same for the personal name ‘Morris’ and other European version (e.g. ‘Mauritz’). The Moors seem to be consistently described as the Berbers living in Al-Andalus and (originally) Mauritania, which is the old name for Morocco (the name of which still retains the element ‘Mor-‘). Even including the modern Mauritania, the original black population was pushed south by the Berbers and Arabs in the 11th century (the ‘light Moors’, as they are described in the Danish literature), but freed black slaves formed a population known as the ‘dark Moors’ from around 1200. So you were right in suggesting black Moors: they were just maybe of a different origin. Having said all this, the Berbers who conquered Spain were known as the Almoravids. Their name apparently comes from the Arabian ‘al-murabitun’ meaning ‘those who live in the border castles’. This name would also give a logical origin to the term ‘Moors’ which doesn’t give connotations of ‘black’. Therefore the term could be subject to folk etymology, being given the meaning black, hence some Morris dancers blackening their faces. I really don’t think it can be labelled as racist either. I’ve always been led to believe that Morris dancing was originally a sword dance, and the literature I have looked at confirms this, being connected with the so called ‘moresca’, a dance drama from Spain and Portugal (and Croatia) symbolising the battles between the Christians and Muslims. Sword dances have a Middle Eastern origin (as well as being found in China, South Asia and India), so again nothing to connect them to sub-Saharan Africans what so ever. And thus back to India and tea. Yes, India was absolutely important for the import of tea to Britain, but first from the 1850’s and onwards. It was the Brits’ way of getting around the ‘difficulties’ and expenses of trading with China at the time - and very much cultural appropriation in both the drinking of it in Europe, India and elsewhere outside of China (Arabs again!), as well as the cultivation of it in India.
I don't think it would go straight from Latin to English unless brought in by the church which I find unlikely. Flemish merchants on the other hand who might be trading with the Spanish being as they were also Burgundians, are more likely to have experienced the dance and then brought it back to England where they then pilfered the name. Thank you for looking this up though, interesting to see how it developed :) That's really interesting actually, in Millennium which I just read it mentioned periods of ethnic violence in Al Andalus which might also go back to this difference. I'm not sure you're right in saying that the Berbers who conquered Spain were Almoravids. The latter were rather later incomers who overthrew the existing Muslim powers in Al Andalus, effectively putting an end to the first success phase of Reconquista carried out by the Christians and ensuring Muslim dominance for several more centuries to come. Always love reading your feedback because I learn so much new information :D
Sorry - bad translation from Danish. I meant subjugated and not conquered. Of course there was a Muslim presence in Al-Andalus before the Almoravids. Had the introduction of Morris dancing happened earlier (say the 1200's), I would not discount an introduction to English from Latin. There are many other ways it could have come into English besides Flemish and Dutch merchants. Direct trade with Spain, for example - wool was Britains contribution to the European market and would be traded both via merchants from England and mainland Europe, and probably made it as far as the Muslim world (though through middlemen). I have recently been looking at the material and cultural exchange between the (Arab) Muslim world and Christian Europe as a consequence of the crusades. This seems to be a late addition to that general theme. Very interesting indeed.
No problem Cris :) Hmm I am in agreement, and you are correct in saying there are many ways it could have reached England which back up the Flemish root of the English term. It's possible that it could have been brought in from the wool trade, although at this time period most of it went across to Antwerp in Flanders who then traded it on, possibly, as you say, to Spain. That must be a really interesting study, it's a topic that has always fascinated me anyhow, as is the Columbian Exchange. I agree, thanks again for all the extra knowledge!
I agree that blackface in Morris dancing is not related to the slave trade and is not meant as mockery. Knowledge that there are black skinned people would have been found in England in the late middle ages after people who had gone on crusade returned. They may have stopped in ports where Moorish traders were present if not stopping on the Barbary coast itself. I think the racist element crept into the tradition of blackface as entertainment in the 19th century when enslavement of Africans was at its height
The black face is because it was a black mans culture it come from the moors who wear ruling Europe at the time and taught English people about music ect
@@viralcliippss6929 Wrong- 100%. - Its a mixture of pagan fertility dancers that eventually were all given the same name. Also the Moors took many slaves from the coasts of Europe and Britain - even at the time of Atlantic slave trade. Almost 2 million white slaves were taken. Stop putting American problems on us!!!
Sorry , but there is another possible connection ( a lot closer by the way ) than the Moors , listen closely at the prononciation , Muresh ( a river in Transylvania ) , Maramuresh ( northernmost region of Transylvania ) and "morishca" ( moorishka ) which means "hand-mill" , so the original dance was performed in a circle ; th-cam.com/video/Tb3WxG3zCkM/w-d-xo.html
Yeah I'm 100% certain it has nothing to do with the Moors. It's an ancient Pagan folk dance, native to Britain. And this idea that the actual Moors themselves were predominantly black is incorrect, a popular misapprehension. The Moors were North Africans of predominantly Arab descent, at least by the time that the Muslims invaded and took over the Iberian Peninsula. They also had Berber ancestry from the previous inhabitants of the Maghreb, and DNA evidence shows that Berbers were actually white, or at least more closely related to Europeans than sub-Saharan Africans. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings of Berbers depict them with red hair and pale skin, much like how the Persians and Phoenicians were depicted, and I still see Iranians to this day that have red hair and milky pale skin, as not all of them have significant Arab admixture in their DNA from the Islamic conquest of Persia. Berbers and Carthaginians were probably related, and Carthaginians were white. The Moors themselves may have actually been a white ethnic group to begin with as well, before being subsumed by the invading Arabs bringing Islamic culture to North Africa. But regardless of what the Moors looked like prior to the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb, by the time the North African Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula, they were predominantly Arab with sub-Saharan African slaves. These black slaves could sometimes be freed and become wealthy in their own right, or could be treated relatively well (aside from the whole getting castrated thing) and dressed in finery and jewels and used as messengers for the Moorish leadership and whatnot, and because Europeans had seen Arabs plenty from all the invasions they had been mounting for centuries but had never before seen sub-Saharan Africans, the majority-Arab real Moors faded into obscurity over time, eclipsed by the concept of Moors as black people, which was brought on by the practice of using "Moor" as a general term for any black person. So in other words, when Moorish leaders sent black court eunuchs to negotiate with Christian leaders, the Europeans got the understandable though mistaken impression that Moors were all or mostly black. In truth, although I suppose you could technically consider the slaves Moors owned as Moorish too because they're part of the same culture, the actual Moors would have been pretty much Arab. It's a shame this misunderstanding has grown into the source of so many lies, especially the sort that are promulgated by black nationalists. They like to claim that Moorish civilization was entirely black and that they introduced literally every form of art, science, and civility you can imagine to the barbaric and backwards Europeans, who then proceeded to steal Moorish culture and form a giant multi-century-long conspiracy to cover up the achievements of black people and disseminate the lie that black people were tribal sub-Saharan Africans, when in fact they were from Atlantis and lived all over the world, creating literally every culture except the ones they don't like, like for instance the Babylonians. Lol they love to claim they are the real Native Americans, it's hilarious.
+History With Hilbert Essentially, blackened facial features were used because Morris was outlawed in Post Industrial Britain and therefore they weren't recognisable by the authorities, giving them time to run away when they knew the law spotted them from a distance. In Britain, it's nothing to do with the Moors. That's only Spain ! Morris is a Pagan Brythonic tradition that even the Romans couldn't destroy while they spent 400 Years raping and enslaving British people. Needless to say, they were booted out during the 1st ever Brexit in the 5C
I had no idea this was a controversy. I learned about Morris Dancing in San Francisco where it is taught as completely of pagan origin regarding the seasons. So I did some checking and found this that is more along with what I learned. I really can't see any of the dance moves and reasons for the dance to be from the Moors.www.britannia.com/wonder/modance.html My ex-husband is in a Morris Dance group in the SF Bay area, so it is definitely still alive and well here.
@Wotsitorlabart That was just the first time these folk dances were written about under the title "Morris Dancing". The dances themselves were going on long before they were labeled with that terminology and written about, I mean it was a folk practice and the peasants were illiterate. It certainly doesn't have Christian origins, it wasn't forced upon the populace in a top-down manner like it would be if it were (because for all intents and purposes, the peasantry of Medieval Europe were still mostly Pagan in their traditions and conception of reality, as they never read the Bible or understood what the priests were saying if they ever attended mass, which many never did or would only do on special occasions), it was an organic part of traditional English and Welsh culture. It makes a lot more sense for these traditional folk dances to simply be labeled "Morris Dancing" in the 15th century than for them to spring up out of nowhere in that century, complete with a name that it had from the start. I feel pretty certain the peoples of Britain were doing folk dances like those for millennia prior to being written about by some Christian nobleman, or at least for centuries. Pagan Europeans always had folk dances and other customs that were retained by the rural and working class populace throughout the Middle Ages. Why do you think we call them "Pagans" in the first place? It comes from the Latin "pagus" meaning "countryside" and "paganus" meaning "inhabitant of the countryside", basically carrying the connotation of "country bumpkin" when the Christians applied this term to people that retained traditional Pagan practices, since the cities had been forcefully Christianized and the Pagans had been forced to the peripherals of the society, as the Church had the most power in cities and their authority waned in more rustic areas.
Up Helly A cannot be called cultural appropriation, because the Norse culture was the indigenous culture of the Orkneys and Shetlands in the Viking Age and long afterwards.
That's a good point William, I meant to include it as another example of where an invading people were honoured with the Norse-themed festival although as you rightly say the comparison is a far stretch as there are many differences between this and the tradition of taking on the "Moorish Dance" throughout Europe.
On the topic of Orkney, have you ever come across the language spoken on the islands into the 18th century called "Norn?" It's unfortunately become extinct as the Shetlanders and Orcadians transitioned to Scots but it was North Germanic Language that I think was based off Old Norse with variations being spoken in Orkney and Shetland. I might make a video about this in future, but I thought you might be interested in this :)
Actually, the first mention of a morris dance is from 1427-28 and the Burgundian court - for the making of luxurious, exotic costumes 'propices à danser la morisque' ('suitable for dancing the morisque').
The protestants banned everything that wasn't in the Bible, including all kinds of folk dance, singing, music, story-telling and having fun in general. Missionaries (both Christian and Wahhabi) are still doing this. Maypoles were taken down and hidden during the Commonwealth. Christmas and Easter went underground, most of the Saints' days were forgotten and the Scottish Yule celebration migrated to Hogmanay. How did the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance survive? I suppose the Puritans who went to America left Morris dancing behind, but clog dancing somehow got through. Hilbert makes the important point that a lot of traditions DID die out and were reinvented. That's true of many, that they may be more modern than we think: e.g. boat burning at Halloween, which started in the 1970's after several centuries of abeyance, Druid ceremonies in Wales and at Stonehenge, and a lot of Royal and Parliamentary flummery which was invented by the Victorians, e.g. slamming the House of Commons' door in Black Rod's face. Most recently we saw the Vigil of the Princes, which was invented by Edward VIII in 1936.
Edward VIII was based, the final British monarch that has my true respect. Yeah, he abdicated by marrying an American double divorcée, a reckless move I wouldn't have made (although, to be fair, they did stay together), but he was a visionary that saw the Europe that could have been, and tried his best to improve relations between the UK and Germany to prevent WWII, taking a tour of the country and being received as honored royal visitors in 1937. And he was always looking out for the working class, and actually put his life on the line for his country fighting in WWI, and for those reasons I consider him an honorable leader. He ultimately chose the love of his life over power, and that is admirable as well, at least on some level.
@@titanomachy2217 You have "true respect" for the Traitor King, who urged the Germans to continue bombing England in the hope that he could return to his throne as their puppet? After the war, the English far right hoped that he would be "called back" in some crisis to replace QEII and appoint Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists as our Führer.
I've been following the discussion for a few days about whether Morris dancers should no longer have their faces painted black. I don't see anything racist in that
The first time I saw Morris dancing, it was with performers who chose not to paint their faces at all, so I didn't realize it had any kind of controversy. Since it occurs at Beltane/May Day (at least, that's where I first heard of it), I think green face paint would be the most thematically appropriate, connecting the dancers with the Green Man, but that's just me. If the reason for the blackface is simply, "It's used at a disguise," the dancing should be able to continue on just the same with different-colored face paint, or with smudges of soot here and there without covering the whole face. Part of traditions surviving is knowing how to adapt, and it can't be denied that in this day and age, blackface can have hurtful implications to some.
You made one mistake in the video, you said when the Atlantic slave trade started for England you said they brought slaves from Africa to England and the colonies, slavery became illegal within England's borders in 1066, and I don't think this law was ever changed, there is a story that one Black slave that was brought to England and because of the law he had to be released from bondage the second he landed on England's shores, this happened in the 18th century, so I think the law remained unchanged to this day, so the only Englishmen who had any contact with African slaves generally were slave traders or men who lived in the Caribbean and the colonies
The first homo sapien sapiens in Europe were blacks there were no whites in Europe for hundreds of years, it was the blacks that became white through evolution
I really like your video. You say a lot of true things that will help people understand where traditions come from and why. Most people just think with a XXI progressive brain.
Presentism is the preeminent bias of our age. Never before in history have so many had such an unfair disposition towards their own ancestors, nor such a self-righteous, self-congratulatory attitude over the great moral accomplishment of simply going with the flow of your culture's Zeitgeist, keeping up with the Joneses in terms of virtue signaling your assent to the value system promoted by the establishment billionaire class. Kids in school are taught that people from the past were intellectually and morally inferior, and that every tradition that was formed by Western society was created by a bunch of big mean patriarchs that just wanted to make everyone that wasn't identical to them miserable. They aren't just knocking over Chesterton's fenceposts anymore, they've ripped up all the fences our ancestors ever constructed and have heaped them and set them ablaze in a bonfire of the vanities, a spectacle of religious zealotry and cultural vandalism on a scale hitherto unseen.
In Spanish Moor just mean Muslim. I say that because I see some people on internet saying that Spain was conquer by blacks. Althouth a part of the Muslim invadors were black, the mayority of them were Berber followed by an Arab elite and the manuscrips from both Christians and Muslims shows it. Ah, and Moors prefered straight swords, like Boabdil's sword (e-ducativa.catedu.es/44700165/aula/archivos/repositorio//3750/3887/html/Espada_Boabdil2.jpg)
Moor means Africanoid/Negro. Hence why there were Christian Moors who faught against Muslim moors. Hence why the Madonna and child are black. Hence why so many painting and MURals of saints in Eastern Europe were Negro...too much to say. 'Alawi dynasty - also rendered in English as Alaouite, 'Alawid, or Alawite' - hmmm, sounds familiar to (Isle of Wight).
@@ElohimTheKing Moro doesn't mean *black* (why the fuck are you using two fucking slurs to refer to black people) in Spanish. It means Muslim. It meant Muslim in the Middle Ages (and we know that because, when black people appear in the Medieval records of the Peninsula they are referred to as Black or Black Moors). It still means Muslim in Modern Spanish. The fact that there's a Moro ethnicity in the Philipines is because they were called by Spaniards as such *because* *they* *were* *Muslims* . Moor meaning Black is a British thing. Not a Spanish/general thing.
Have a look at Basque folk dancing. The music, dance and dress is nearly identical to Morris dancing. They use the sticks, have similar stories (see Obby Oss in Padstow - the French and Spanish basque have the same story). DNA tests have revealed that basques and Welsh people are closely related. Therefore, I wonder whether Morris dancing evolved in England from from te Celtic cultures. It’s also interesting that it’s those exact countries that were invaded by the moors.
I don't think the folk dances have anything to do with the Moors. The notion that there is a connection is spurious, based on folk etymology, not the genuine etymology of "morris", which is unknown. Of course, academia is dominated by the left, so they will look for any excuse to erase our cultural traditions by claiming they are racist, including using hilariously dubious folk etymology. The reason the Basque people dance a folk dance that is akin to Morris dancing is because all rustic Europeans retained their ancient Pagan folk practices, saved from the persecution of the Church and state by their distance from cities. That is why the term "Pagan" came about in the first place, it comes from the Latin "paganus" which basically meant "country bumpkin", a way to smear those who held on to the ancestral European practices and beliefs as provincial, uneducated and backwards. And indeed, these traditions were confined mostly to the rural peripherals of society. In the Middle Ages, peasants in remote villages were really closer to being Pagans than Christians, for all intents and purposes. They couldn't read so the Bible was Greek to them, the sermons they might have heard when they traveled to a city with a cathedral would have been unintelligible to them as they were spoken in Latin, and they almost unanimously believed in fae folk and culture heroes and whatnot. Plus, as you say, there is a probable link between the people of the Iberian Peninsula and the Welsh. I believe the "Black Irish" and tawny Welsh share phenotypic characteristics and DNA haplogroups with the Phoenicians via the Carthaginians via Carthaginian Spain, one of their colonies. If you check out depictions of what the Phoenician ethnicity probably looked like, you'll notice they look basically identical to the Welshmen that have dark, curly hair and brown eyes with tan skin, a distinctly Mediterranean appearance. This lines up perfectly with the old legends about the Carthaginians coming to Wales. Other legends suggest that the Scotti tribe (rulers of Iron Age Ireland that invaded and conquered much of Alba/Caledonia, the land of the Picts, and gave it the name "Scotland") themselves got their name in turn from Queen Scotti, an Egyptian queen that colonized Ireland. This idea may not be as far-fetched as it sounds if you consider how the Berbers and other North African peoples (who were actually Europoid prior to interbreeding with Arabs after the Islamic conquest of North Africa, as can be seen in their art and depictions of Berbers in the art of other civilizations, like a wall painting from ancient Egypt that depicts a Berber man with pale skin and curly brown hair) were heavily influenced by Egyptian culture, to the point that Berber art basically looks just like Egyptian art, depicting the same motifs. The Berbers and the Carthaginians share many cultural and artistic tendencies, so they would have had some Egyptian influence as well, so it could be that there really was a Queen Scotti, but perhaps she was actually a Carthaginian rather than an Egyptian, which would make more sense as the Carthaginians were great seafarers. They were actually Phoenicians that had started as a colony and then became a major independent cosmopolitan thalassocracy in their own right, colonizing the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily and even sailing out into the Atlantic, trading all along the coast of West Africa and the Atlantic and North Sea seaboards of Europe, so if anything it would be kind of weird if the Carthaginians didn't ever end up in the British Isles, being major seafaring explorers and traders and all. Hell, we have a ton of evidence that much of the tin used in the Bronze Age to forge bronze was from Wales, of all places, so we actually have very good reason to believe that at least some Mediterraneans were sailing up to Wales for tin, and the primary candidates would definitely be the Phoenicians and/or their offshoots like Carthage. The Basques probably largely descend from the Visigoths, but also from the Celtiberians and Carthaginians, and any or all of these groups could have contributed to the traditional dances they do. The Celtiberians were Celts like the people of Wales, so there could definitely be a connection between Morris dancing and Basque folk dancing through that culture as well. The Basques are particularly strange because their mountainous homeland is so remote that it allowed them to retain an archaic European pre-Indo-European language, which means they have kept their isolated tongue alive for millennia while being surrounded with peoples that spoke languages with no connection to their own.
I'm not a Morris dancer, though I enjoy the playing the tunes. I think the whole tradition of "black face" including American minstrel shows is truly controversial and represents a particular take on the presence of African peoples in Europe. But as you note, there are many sources for everything, and there are other sources for blackface. As we deal with our racist past we also must acknowledge there are cultural traditions which are not racist per se but arise from historical contact in other ways
'Morris' dancing is a catch-all term to describe several different kinds of dances, most of which don't have anything to do with 'the moors', and almost none of which paint their faces black. Also, bear in mind that in rural England 'moor' often meant anyone vaguely exotic looking. The most popular theory among historians of dance is that they are actually very old dances (they seem to all come from similar cultures), but because after the reformation they became seen as sort of outlandish and exotic-looking, they aquired the name 'Moorish'. Interestingly, there are some Portuguese dances which look very much like an earlier (and more vigorous) version of morris dancing. Britain, being primarily Celtic (apart from the South East and the Midlands), has a lot in common, culturally, with Portugal and Catalonia. Here's an example - th-cam.com/video/DoQuYePHF0c/w-d-xo.html Our modern perception of morris dancing is also really skewed - those white costumes were only invented in the 19th century (before, they wore lots of colourful ribbons and sprigs of leaves), and its now largely performed by old men, who can't jump, whereas it used to be a young man's dance, much faster and more athletic.
You are contradicting yourself. If these dances looked like Portuguese dances it is because the Moors occupied Portugal for more than 700 years hense the similarity.
@@iayyam That would be more convincing if there were not similar dances in other parts of Europe, such as Slovenia. Of course they had Turkish overlords, but not "Moors." Blackface is also part of the Krampus and Zwarte Piet traditions, which have parades but no specific dance.
Says the guy that didn't even listen to a word said or didn't finish the video. He talks about the Moors, but they don't actually have anything to do with Morris dancing. Moors were Arabs, not sub-Saharan Africans. Europeans thought Moors were black because the Moors used black slaves as emissaries and porters and whatnot, so every time they engaged in diplomacy, they sent over a bunch of castrated black dudes, and some of them would have been very finely dressed and educated and whatnot, because some of their slaves took on important roles like being diplomats, as court eunuchs were a common accessory of Muslim leaders. The majority of the inhabitants of Moorish Spain were of Arab descent or pre-Islamic North African descent, with most of the black people being owned as slaves, although some would have been free and probably would have interbred with the Arab and Spanish (Visigoth, to begin with at least) inhabitants, so there were black people that you could consider Moors, but they weren't the majority.
The backup dancers do say that their black make up is from moors but not in a disrespectful way and I don't thinks there's much evidence about the link
After their marriage, the king's Lord High Treasurer's accounts provide numerous entries to show how much he enjoyed lively entertainment, employing foreign minstrels from Italy and elsewhere. King James was generous to all kinds of people, including Black Moors, as the following entries from the Treasurer's accounts demonstrate: To celebrate Shrove Tuesday in 1505, several Africans including a 'taubronar' (drummer) and a choreographer were present in Edinburgh. Twelve dancers (including Italians) performed in specially made black-and-white costumes costing £13 2s 10d. Was this the origin of Morris (Moorish) dancing?
The "More Taubronar" performed at the peripatetic court of King James IV of Scots and his Queen, Margaret Tudor. However I don't think Morris dancing developed in Scotland: unless it was stamped out by the reformers along with the old festivals?
The one thing you got 100% wrong. The English never took any slaves to England!! In fact there was a law that said any slave setting foot in England is a free man. They all went to the Caribbean.
An interesting take, or series of takes. You obviously have an agenda to keep morris clear between ostensible cultural symbolism and political correctness. Good for you. I live on the West Coast of Canada, and one of the people I meet is indigenous, and we talk about his heritage, his mixed native background. He pointed out that their dancers wear paint on their face, and I suddenly saw the point that morris dancers do that as 'identification' within their group, and to identify themselves in society as a whole. It is a symbol of who they are, and it just happens to be the colour of soot, readily available, without anything other than disguise. Remember, morris now is oh-so-white-middle-class. NO, I'm wrong there, that's a generalisation thrown in to debate ... but, mostly it is 'respectable' if quaint. Times gone by, the group could have been any raggle-taggle bunch of guys prancing around in an effort to gain beer and beer money, not oh-so-wholesome gentle men in, often, cricket-white clothes - which is probably what I meant to say earlier. If you - or your audience - have not heard a series of recordings by the stalwarts of English folk revival, stating with "Morris On", through "Great grandson of Morris On", then here's as good a place to start as any th-cam.com/video/igY8PcUXuUc/w-d-xo.html&start_radio=1&t=51&ab_channel=Max
The whole "Moorish" connection with Morris Dancing is purely speculative, and it's only real basis is in the linguistic link of the name. The dances themselves, the music used, the rhythms used, the patters of the dances, the synchronized mock combat with sticks (or swords), and even the body movements of the dancers have precisely ZERO to do with anything in Moorish culture, or any other kind of African culture. The label of "Morris" for this dance is probably just some sort of off-handed attempt by late Medieval Brits to bring some sort of air of cultural exotic-ness to a long-established pre-Christian tradition without actually admitting it's Anglo-Celtic Pagan origins (which would have put them at odds with the Church). The hew and cry by the WokeVolk regarding the black facepaint in Morris is just their attempt to destroy yet one more old cultural icon of Western European Culture. Covid and it's attendant lockdowns and restrictions on public gatherings for over 2 years, have nearly killed off Morris in the US and the UK. This is just part of a much larger agenda, and has nothing to do with "Racism" or "cultural sensitivity", and is nothing more than another stomp of the jackboot of NeoMarxism and their "Long March" to dismantle the West...
The rubbish about Moorish came from an early 20th century failed researcher who could not trace the origins so invented the lie to pretend he had found the answer. Nobody in the Morris believes it.
The black faces are because most people worked in mines (Mostly coal) or up chimneys, in the case of The Sweeps Festival in Rochester. In other areas, it was mud or dirt to hide their faces, as begging was illegal. For the Druids, it was so their faces would not be recognised by the dead spirits they were chasing back to the afterlife. (It was believed that the spirit of the recently passed may linger if they recognised friends and/or family.) It's (at least originally) had nothing to do with race. The rags are because people were poor. It's no more complicated than that. People in the UK have been dancing like this since around 4BCE during the early Druidic times. Many of the dances were used initially to chase away the spirits of winter during Beltane festivals (around May 1st) and to celebrate the coming of summer. Early (4 BCE ), Pagan Brits would hit sticks, bang drums, whoop, and shout loudly to chase away unwelcome winter spirits and wake Jack o' the Green as they marched between the villages.
Keep telling yourself that...Caucasian denial again....anything but black hey, maybe if I say they were Arab you might agree then yeah? But the original Arabs were basically negro so maybe you won't, ahhh I shouldn't of told you this....dammit!
@@ElohimTheKing Maybe look at little further back in history than 'Murica you might learn that not everything in the history of the British isles has to do with race or colour.
@@Tiamat951 Who said anything about 'everything'? One thing for sure it's most of history on the British Isles, Moorish history got whitewashed all over Britain, but because of smart Moors who knew what was happening, they left clues behind for their descendants to put the pieces together, for instance....many inns all over these isles have names like Black A Moor (across the road from Preston Crown Court) or the Turk's head or Black boy, there's many moor, that's why fields and grasslands are named moors..even though moor means navigator...hence why we have the term 'mooring a ship/ankhor a ship' which is what the Moors did all over Europe because they were navigators, even Masonry was Moorish science before it got hijacked by Caucasians (like everything else). So that's why them fields are called 'the Moors' because it was a world wide whitewashing operation, but you know what...I don't diss today's Morris dancers because in truth...imitation is the best form of flattery
Morris dancing first appears in England in the mid 1400's and it is an entertainment at Royal and princely courts. And it is quite different to what we see today - in Henry VIII's Christmas revels of 1515 five dancers and a fool performed their 'moresks' during which they wooed two women who personified Beauty and Venus. Thus the early Morris is an entertainment of the London elite and only spreads out from the south east after the 1560's. And as the blacking of faces is mostly in the 'Welsh Border Morris' tradition and appears much later (19th century) trying link it to the first appearance of the Morris in 1448 as per the video is historically incorrect. Also, the Morris sticks only appear in the later 16th century. If the dance was literally a copy of a Moorish dance we would expect to see them much earlier. But we don't because they are not a representation of curved scimitars - they are used purely to make a loud clashing noise. No one knows if the dance was actually 'Moorish' or was thought by the performers to be what a Moorish dance might look like. And the dance quite categorically is not pagan nore is it some kind of fertility dance to increase the crops - Victorian and Edwardian wishful thinking.
I have no idea if this has any connection at all, Katherine of Aragon’s parents were Ferdinand and Isabella and they conducted the Reconquista. Whether or not she was either old enough or experienced to pass on any stories or descriptions, i have no idea, just interesting that there was a very deep connection between the English monarchy and the two monarchs that encountered the moors in the Reconquista. Also, the Moors had slaves taken from Europe i think, so at the time they were the slave owners.
@@widsof7862 A bit late but yes they do. The earliest references to morris dancing are from the Burgundian court of 1427 and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths 19th May 1448. It's origins are as an entertainment in the royal and noble courts of the 15th century.
I agree that cultural borrowing is an important part of human history and there are more reasons for or consequences of the borrowing than just the negative ones which are the focus of this episode
This should definitely be protected as it is part of their culture and history, it is a Celtic tradition. In Portugal there is a similar dance, look for the "Pauliteiros de Miranda", our dances are protected as "National Cultural Heritage", our Celtic traditions and many others are still present today. We may have lost our Celtic languages in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal/Spain), but in Portugal our traditions are still mainly Celtic. Cheers ❤
You can't ride a buffalo, or bison, as they're correctly called. They're very wild. Every year in Yellowstone NP several foolish tourists get mauled by trying to get too friendly with them.
The Spanish celebrated by doing the exact same thing in the American continent and the canary islands. The Spanish committed a genocide against the completely harmless people of the canary islands.
Morris Dancing tradition is much older than (116 BC ) most of the people think , and was broughted by the most famous ancient warriors named by Roman Empire as mighty Dacians , they come in Britannia and fight with picts building Hadrian's wall and get settled, never return to homeland .
While i agree with your perspective and most of your argument i do not believe that adding a straw man theory at the beginning of your video helps your case and certain other comparisons made through out your video will not help you i believe that if you just stick to the historical development of Morris Dancing i think this video could be used to justify this tradition also im a Mayan living in america so i dont really have a dog in this fight except that i like history and valid arguments
You are right, although some of the arguments were in response to ones made in publications I had read attacking Morris Dancing, although without reference to said articles they do appear to be straw men in the video. An interest is all you need :) I plan to make a few more videos on the Mayans in future actually, you don't be any chance speak a Mayan language do you?
Im sorry im a first gen in america and speaking English is a big deal for my family but i am learning K'iche on my off time i can send you a pdf of an english to k'iche dictionary if that helps heres the link: www.taterenner.com/engkiche.pdf Anyways im just a big fan of history and i want to see you and your channel succeed and i hope than when something like this happens again, because it always happens again, you can learn from this experience and educate others as appose to possibly angering them
That's really awesome, thank you for sending me this! I'm really glad to hear you are learning K'iche, I've heard the language spoken and it is indeed a really interesting one so it's a very good thing that you are learning it to keep it alive. I too am learning my traditional language of West Frisian as unfortunately this is also under threat. I'm really honoured to read that and I'm very glad that you are watching my videos and taking the time to comment on them :) Quite right, this video was a little all over the place, though in future, as you say, I will know how better to structure it and which points to address. Thank you for all your feedback, and keep me posted on your progress with K'iche!
Nice to hear that you are connecting with your roots as well and will definitely try to keep you updated and dont feel to bad about it i saw the points you were trying to make and they were great and really enlightened me to a cultural tradition that i was unaware of keep up the good work and soon youll be a hit in the youtube history community
Thank you :) I'm glad to hear that, though there is room for improvement and as such will act upon it the next time to improve :) Let's make that happen, thank you for your support!
The suggestion that the dance came from Moors was from a failed early 20th century 'researcher' who could not identify any roots so invented the lie to save face instead of admitting failure. Squire of Morris here, 40 years experience of Morris & Rapper Sword dances.
Hilbert, the English culture is mainly based on Proto-Celtic and Germanic and some adstrat words from Latin...more than 12000 years ago the English and also the Europeans were black like everyone in the world...for example, the Cheddar Man was also dark-skinned..The light skin came with the 2nd wave of early neolithic farmers ..btw. the story of Arthus you maybe have heard..the white dragon won over the black dragon? that is the story of England ...if humans could understand what they read would be really helpful...
Everyone should care if something is racist. There's no need to be hurtful. It is entirely possible to keep in touch with one's own cultural heritage without it being exploitative of others. If Morris dancing must survive without black face paint (I've only ever seen it a handful of times and only on dancers dressed as crows/ravens), then paint your faces a different color or not at all. It's such a small modification of a miniscule number of cases that could create a positive image of the artform and show empathy for populations who have been harmed by racism throughout the past several centuries, whether or not the origin of the practice of black face painting in Morris dancing was meant to be racist or portray dark skinned humans.
No. Would you tell me to stop or modify my native american face painting in black? If yes, that's cultural repression, which Natives have already suffered under for decades. If no, why are you treating this tradition differently? Is it because of the race of the dancers? That's actually more racist than anything...I am an African & Indigenous American.
The rot set in a long time ago,were they not called Morrismen for a very good reason.Oh you cannot do that you must allow women to join,hence the name change.Our industrial past is now under attack,miners and chimney sweeps had black faces due to the nature of the job.How can Kent have its sweeps fest without a black face?Great channel with good video`s,thank you.
The moor rule in spain,Italy,scilly and was all over europe look up blackamoor of england and moor crest of europe.It is obvious to me the morris dance is a moor dance.African dance is world dance to me and music.African have been hear since or before the Roman's.
I don't know if is a English thing or not? I Personally don't think it is, I think it would be safer to say a British thing yes 100% but English? Going back in time, Irish and other country's such as Wales and Scotland children were taken in by the English and worked in such places as sewing mills, chimney sweeps, breaking up coal, parents of these children tried to buy there children back, often going into coal mining or looking for jobs abroad ...London was once a part of Wales, the first Queen Boudica revolt and victory was in London. So I think a Britannica or British custom would be safer to say (My thoughts). If I am wrong let me know where I have wronged?
Not sure what you are trying to say with most of your comment. But originally a form of entertainment at 15th century European royal courts, morris dancing as we now know it is most definitely English.
The Morris is divided into Cotswold Morris, (Welsh) Border Morris (Shropshire), Molly Dancing (Anglia), North West Clog (Cheshire, Lancashire & West Yorkshire), Longsword (Lancashire & Yorkshire) and Rapper Sword (North East England). All 100% English.
I danced Morris Dancing for afew years and always thought it was from the Moores as in the land?????? wasnt it to celebrate fertility, harvests, wool and meat, eat drink and be merry, to meet at the crossroads. Black faces.....what about krampus....now you have something to moan about....
Hilbert, your comparisons In this video are not so good at all, did not expect that from you. Also, unfortunately, many traditions do dissappear Bert, this is part of human history, this is how we left the cave.: )
Name of dance Morris is not a Flemmish word but comes from God Mars. It is an ancient military fraternal dance brought by the Romans from Dacia. It was used to celebrate the Cult of Fertility and masculinity all over ancient Europe about 21st of June ( and today Father's Day). No connection at all with African people, moors or slavery.
According to L.G. Pine, the Editor of Burke's Peerage , Jews "have made themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual. So closely linked are the Jews and the lords that a blow against the Jews in this country would not be possible without injuring the aristocracy also." (Tales of the British Aristocracy1957, p.219.) - See more at: www.henrymakow.com/000447.html#sthash.EGof3jJt.dpuf
Sir Granville Bantock once said "An Englishman should try everything once. Except for Incest and Morris Dancing" . Essentially it is intincically silly as is all traditional folk dancing but harmless.
You do have knowledge on this topic but i hear some ignorance as well. I dont think this is racist tho. But i canunderstand why some black people dont like it. England has a history of racism towards black people. They mocked black by doing blackface. Thats why it is illigal today. We dont have this in the Netherlands but we do have black Pete what i think is based on racism. The African tribes that paint their faces white isnt linked to white people at all. Their traditions are probably older than the white race.
Thank you for this explanation of blackface in Morris Dancing. It has confirmed my suspicions that this use of blackface is completely racist. You said they painted their faces to resemble the Moors who were Black. That is blackface and it is racist. Your other examples of 'whiteface' and Native Americans riding horses (what???) were excellent examples of false equivalences. You also said, almost in the same breath, that no one is offended by it, and yet many people are calling for it to be banned. Well, if they're calling for it to be banned, it's likely because many people are offended. Many symbols come to take on different meanings and those meanings can be incredibly offensive and traumatic to people. The swastika was an ancient symbol used in Hinduism and Buddhism. Are you prepared to go around waving a flag with a swastika on it, just because for you it has a different meaning? When it comes to racism, sexism, or any other ism, intention DOES NOT MATTER. It is the effect that matters. And in this case, the effect (other than deeply hurting people which it appears you don't care about) will be a total loss of Morris dancing if blackface is not removed (which you do care about). Are you willing to die on that sword and sacrifice the entire tradition just so you can paint your face black? Remember, slavery was a tradition, and a very lucrative one at that. ALL traditions evolve over time. It would be nice if people did too.
Few people were calling for it to be banned. But following the rise of 'Black Lives Matter' the panicked Morris organisations decided to pre-empt any possible accusations of racism by banning the use of full face black makeup. And blacking up is a 19th century practice - they weren't imitating the Moors, they were imitating the theatrical minstrel troupes.
The people of England has seen black people long before the invasion. Look into the nimble blackamoors, picts and gypsies. The Scots proper were also black. I agree that this dance didn't come from slavery. Moore in Europe goes farther back than the Norman invasion. You can read ancient and modern Britons for info on this. If it was possible to post screenshots here, I could post many that confirm this. Here's a quote "in the medieval anecdote that Scott appends to Ivanhoe, it was remarked that when a man (a native of this country) wished to simulate a jongleur (another name for a gypsy), he had to transform himself, temporarily into an Ethiopian." The book I mentioned above was written in the 1800's and remarks that there were still at that time remnants of those black men that had been in Europe since time immemorial. They were persecuted and killed for not changing their way of life to the "civilized" ways of the normans and even sent to American plantations as slaves at a slightly earlier time than the authors. There is a great deal of interesting history on this. There was also a great deal of intermixing between the Moore or gypsies with the normans which is the cause of the much lighter gypsies that remained and the term gypsy became a general term describing anyone who lived in the manner of the people who refused to live in houses and follow the laws of the land. You may be interested in this as a student of history. If so, I'd be happy to share some sources other than the two I placed here with you.
Also from ancient and modern britons, "Now, although it eventually came to be danced by men of white complexion, this dance (as already pointed out) was originally 'the dance of the blacks'."
I am black and i must admit it seemed like a Micky take of black people why not have green face Morris dancers instead nobody would feel offended then i think that would be a solution.
The intention was to be a disguise to prevent identification to evade prosecution for begging and soot was the handy material to use, not a conscious choice to be racist or suggest being part of an ethnic group. Just a disguise when begging had harsh punishments. Rural folk had hard times over Winter with little farming work and dancing for money helped out.
This guy is absolutely just making outrageous excuses for Morris dancing not being racist..'the Morris dancers sometimes having blackface to imitate moors isn't racist or cultural appropriation, because that's the same as Native Americans(or American Indians, whichever is proper/appropriate, sorry I'm not sure, I'm not perfect either) used horses for Actual transportation, which are European(they're not, they evolved in the Americas, granted originally as a smaller animal subtype which over time evolved & also bred selectively by Europeans), and he says Morris Dancing isnt the same as Minstrel shows, such as shown in this video, apparently because theyre purposely imitating to insult, but blackface is blackface, no matter the intention. But that's Not the info I was interested in. I wanted proper information, about the dance & the outfit, not this.. The dance is said to be Moorish in origin & not 'borrowed', the stick a substitute for a Scimitar(or similar type of weapon, isn't my strong point at all)? That would mean it may be from as far back as the crusades, with Noblemen & Knights, and when they went they would've taken Squires, Pages and an entire host of hangers-on & servants, plenty of people to encounter & experience many cultures & absorb different aspects,(for the record that's my own theory if it is Moorish), that would be nearly a thousand years, to change, interpret, perform, modify, reinterpret & adapt, making it a unique & original thing in itself, not any kind of appropriation, or lack of culture. Everything comes from somewhere, originates with some nugget of an idea and coalesces in some form, I don't think, after that amount of time, it has to be anything other than what it is.. but, and I'd like to know, where did the clothing originate? Why are there bells? Do the colours they wear matter? Is the headgear significant at all? Are the particular steps there for any particular reasons, is the stick, in fact meant to be anything other than the stick? Like a Scimitar? If it's is about begging in times past, I Still have these same questions?? My Final bit...for the record I also am Scottish, I don't think it's a lack of culture in the English at all, I reason some of my questions are valid, some have answers/reasons..(I hope), and my fellow countryman's disparaging remarks are really a lack of knowledge & therefore also a lack of understanding, like my own..
Loads of bullshit, Morris Dance is much older and his origins comes from Roman Empire more exactly by the auxiliary Roman legions of Dacians .AVE LEGIONARI !
@@YorkyOne British History my boy I'm not playing smoke and mirrors here , just type in exactly like that : Calusul Romanesc traditie in Anglia ? And you will be shocked how truly I am
I think those who argue against it absolutely DO understand, but their desire is to destroy a culture.
Yup - quite correct. This is not done to 'protect anyone's feelings', but to hurt the white English. 'Destroy everything so that we can rule over the rubble.' - the motto of the left.
Right on! They always jump at the chance to prove it somehow ISN’T English
Right on! They always jump at the chance to prove it somehow ISN’T English
I'm Irish and what comes with that is a considerable suspicion of all things English. But I'll tell you what, the English should protect Morris dancing with all their hearts. It's part of their culture and their folk history. In Ireland we protect that with everything we have, I don't see why the English can't do that as well, just because of our history.
@@bppmurphyit's a Celtic tradition, it should definitely be protected, it's part of your history.
In Portugal there is a similar dance. Search for "Pauliteiros de Miranda" we still practice and it is protected as Cultural Heritage!
Cheers ❤
Ohh please never take this down! Someone really needed to say this..........
There is a theory that Morris'Moorish Dancing in the Courts was introduced to England by John of Gaunt via his Spanish wife. Probably not about blacking up, but as the presenter says, sticking is a stylised sword fighting technique from the Moors. There are similar dances in Spain and the Basque country. They look very much like Cotswold Morris (in white) but the Spanish wear Turbans and the Basques flat caps! I just wish people would oppose real racism and leave Morris Dancers alone.
The John of Gaunt theory is incorrect.
And the sticks were an 18th century development.
@@suelane3628 Yeah. That is interesting about the Basques. Morris dancing struck me as something that was a Pre Indio European, Pre Celtic tradition. Something that the waves of migration adopted from much older tradition/people's. This is especially if the Basque are doing it.
It's very important that people of english ancestors learn and enjoy their cultural practises.The Anglosphere has lost so much ,replaced by commercialism ,and tv.
This is the first I've heard of Morris dancing! Excellent video. Don't take it down, Western people need to know their roots!
Great! I'm glad I could introduce you to this old English practice :D Thank you very much, I will leave this up after all and make a few more videos about European Culture and traditions because it is under serious threat from the modern PC Culture which is a great shame because if anything we should all be able to celebrate our past and heritage, no matter where we come from or look like :/
Great research, well put together. Don't let the liberals erase peoples history and traditions.
Terry Pratchett made great use of the Morris Dancing, especially in "Wintersmith" the Black Morris Dancers are mentioned with awe and fear... also, in "Lords and Ladies" when a hardy band of men dance the Bucket Dance, thus fending off the evil Fairies. The Black Morris dancers in your clip are definitely weird, like Pratchett's Black Morris dancers. Definitely not cheezy! And we must ignore the silly people who honk away about
racism at the silliest opportunity.
Love a bit of Pratchett! Though I must admit I haven't read Wintersmith, though by your description of the Morris Dancer's role in it it does sound like one I should read. Oh certainly, but I find that the weird, rather strange things are those that best connect us to the past, to our ancestors. I totally agree with you there, moral busybodies are really the ones cause divisions in our society. Thank you for watching :)
Jason! The accordian's melting!
I really dislike it when Scottish people say that English people have no culture, it's obviously wrong but at least ours isn't as commercialised.
I agree, too long English culture has been suppressed by those fearful that it is one and the same with extreme-right, white supremacy (which is total nonsense). To be fair it's not entirely the Scottish's fault that their culture has been exported world wide.
It's a completely stupid thing to say! Every group and country has a culture! I'm English, livng abroad. Take it from me, the English have a culture.
Just visit Scotland, to see a culture being exploited by The Man. Look at the Tartanry and bagpiping that goes on in the Royal Mile of Edinburgh. There's also Orangery with flutes and drums, mainly in the West, but we keep quiet about that.
@@historywithhilbertwhat are you guys talking about? English Culture is way more famous and is exported WAY more...
Scottish people are quite happy with English culture so don't spout incorrect rubbish.
Hi Texan here with both Dutch and English heritage absolutely love Morris dancing specifically those from Beltane
Thank you for your video. I play music for a Morris side and was astounded to hear that there are people who are offended and think it's racist. The origins of this type of dancing are so obscure.There are a few theories about it and there are interesting videos on TH-cam.😊
The reason that Morris dancers in the welsh border regions traditionally blacked up is because at the time Morris dancing was seen as a begging (which was illegal at the time) and so they would put the ash and smear their faces so that they weren't recognised by law enforcement or employers
Will Bremner what you have written is absolutely incorrect!
That's 100% correct. It was used as a disguise. You could be flogged for 'begging'. I think the word Morris dancing just became the word for English folk dancing.
@@billiondollarbaby973 You're the one wrong. This is 100% is correct.
@@jillyb710 Whitesplainin’: white people disregarding truth or fact. Describes the details of an event or situation to fit an alternate reality.
As a Morris Dancer of many years standing I can confirm that the blackface was a disguise used by the dancers in the border region. This is well known in the Morris Dance community.
My brother was a dancer with a Welsh border Morris team who danced in blackface. The tradition that all the guys were delighted to relate was that, some long time prior to that time ('70's) , the people of that area had a really oppressive landlord who owned all the land around, and was a very tyrannical landlord and made his tenant's lives a complete misery, to the point where the local men got so annoyed with him that they disguised themselves by rubbing soot over their faces and lying in wait for the landlord as he came out of the pub one night, whereupon, they jumped him and beat the absolute crap out of him; and, of course, with their faces blacked up, there was no way he could identify them. And then, after that, they commemorated the occasion by rubbing soot on their faces to do their Morris dancing .....
Except the story is nonsense.
@@YorkyOne Yes ..... well ...... who knows? All the guys in the team were pretty convinced of it and they were all very ordinary guys from rural and semi-rural England; not the sort of people who would make up a story for "marketing purposes" or to disguise some latent racism. I didn't dance with them but I knew them all. My impression was the story was real ......
@@chriselliott368
Sorry, I came over as a bit of a prat.
Just reading Michael Heaney's 'The Ancient English Morris Dance' and it's clear that blacking up only occurs following the arrival of the blackface minstrel troupes of the early/mid 1800's.
The revival sides of the 70's took to blacking up as it was visually striking.
In the case of John Kirkpatrick (Shropshire Bedlams) because 'I like to look frightening'.
But there was a lack of understanding as to the origins with stories of disguise, miners, poachers etc - an assumption that it was 'traditional'.
Which is where I believe your story originated.
@@YorkyOne That's all good. Thanks for getting back and for the interesting info. The side I mentioned were from Ledbury area and were one of the revival sides (I just realised, reading what you wrote), and the story of the blackface originated in Victorian times, if I remember right, so only vaguely traditional. All very fascinating. I just wish our woke friends had a bit of discernment and could leave these things alone. Thanks again
@@YorkyOne Cecil Sharp asked a morris dancer why they used blackened faces and was told it was for "disguise", which is the key to Morris dance culture's adoption of it in certain genres. Blackening faces with soot or charred cork has a very long history of disguise for beggars and mischief makers, including dancers and in folk dramas, going way back into history before 19thC minstrel shows appeared. In Lincolnshire they also used "coloured clays" i.e. they used what was available. An MA study on blackened faces in Morris dance and work by the renowned writer on morris dance, Roy Dommett, have not been able to make a direct connection with minstrel shows and my own brief survey of minstrel shows in Lincolnshire indicates they happened in higher population areas than the rural ones where morris dancing & mumming originated. In theatre studies Moors in early dramas were regarded as exotic and finely dressed, so not necessarily negatively presented. All a bit earlier than the 1970s, so you are wrong there.
Another group of dancers that black up from Lancashire are called the Britannia Coconutters.
I have found that people who overly use the word “racist” usually don’t have the first clue what the word actually means.
rights for morris dancers!
They need them!
Since Morris dancing is obviously a dance to practice fighting, I mean it's pretty obvious, would the blacking of the face not be about camouflage in battle? Native Americans, in this part of the country anyway, Cherokees, and Seminoles, do the same blacking on their face for some dances. Especially the ones to do with a fight. Or grass dancers. Both are pretty fun.
Nothing to do with 'practice fighting' at all.
The name Morris dancing was a later name. It was just folk dancing. No one was imitating moors. 😂
Thanks for explaining cultural appropriation. I can hear the cancel culture brigade sharpening their knives 😮
Morris dancing is a subset of English country folk dance, and there are many other traditions. I had the privilege of being one of the antlered "deer" in an Abbots Bromley Horn Dance at an event in the US. The work of John Playford in publishing the music and dance instructions left a large corpus. The revival of Morris was stimulated by the great English folklorist Cecil Sharpe. Let's keep these customs alive. I love playing the dance tunes including Morris ones
Until this video, this American had never heard of Morris Dancing. Thanks for the education!
So, as an outsider looking in, I find it odd that anyone would think that the blackface of this dance is african in origin. The Moors, while from Africa, were fair skinned. The Moors came from Berbers and Arabs, not sub-saharan africans.
And, still, even if the practice was of that origin, it is part of this History, and if we start banning History just because it upsets us, then we lose all meaning to History itself.
And, also, History is written by the Winners. (which is why I keep looking for outlets such as this channel, that attempts to find "the other side" and tell that History as well.
Thanks, again.
Hey I'm glad I could introduce you to this merry old English tradition :D No problem at all, it's what I live for :)
Exactly right, the way I phrase it in the video was a tad misleading in that only a few of the Moors in Spain were actually black rather than Arabic. You absolutely hit the nail on the head here Rick, it's not like the Emirs of Al Andalus are going to be feeling ridiculed by this :P
That's very true, and to the quote that history is written by the victors I would also add that it is written by those who write - something essential for understanding our modern view of the Viking Age. Thank you for your continued support and addition to the discussion!
In the USA red faces are banned! A Welsh Border Morris side called 'Ragged Robins' was formed for a Festival in Anchorage. Naturally they wanted to redden their faces to fit with their theme. (Welsh Border Traditionally blacken their faces as they were begging.)
The word Moor absolutely means Black. It was used to described the Black Africans who conquered Spain and Portugal along with lighter skinned Arabs who were called Saracins. They were both Muslims from Africa.
Formorians predated Islam and Moors were in Britain as original settlers. The Moors were in America pre Columbus and when they were being driven out of Britain and Europe they settled in America. Blackface is a mockery of the noble Moors as their descendants are Afro Americans. Morris dance, square dance was also called Negro dance. The Morris dance recorded in 1448 but the Moors were run out until 1610. Queen Elizabeth did not want "blackamoors" in her realm, they were sent directly to Virginia and Barbados. Keep the Morris dance to retain their memory.
If the Moors were fair skinned then why the need for the phrase 'tawny moors', 🥱🥱🥱😴😴 too many Caucasians keep reading the same whitewashed history and then regurgitating the same BS, Moors were Africanoid. Imitation is the best form of flattery. Just shows you how many Caucasians hate black people deep down. Will accept anything about history as long as it's not black but if its Arab or Asian then that's fine, just not black. I don't blame you guys though, whitewashing is so global most people don't understand. Black people were called Moor back in the day, not black. Black/blac/blæc/blak/blake/blanc/blank/bleak/bleach - it was Caucasians who we're called this and then reversed identities with the Moors as is the law of polarity. Look up the meaning of the word blake. Most Caucasian people know whitewashing exists but choose to pick which they comfortable with admitting or accepting. I guess you think Ancient Egyptians were also caucasian and if not that then Arab hut as long as they are not negro then it's all good huh, GTFOH. People are waking up to the truth....
Newspaper article
Tuesday 20 January 1920, page 2
MORRIS DANCE.
The Morris' dance, originally a military dance of the Moors, was 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.
Typical early 20th century nonsense.
Excellently done, mate. I actually wasn't aware of Morris dancing before now. Thank you for introducing me to it. Such a shame so many innocent traditions are being ridiculed because of the smallest similarities to others that aren't so innocent.
Your parents are direct from the Netherlands? That explains how you know Dutch so well. Sadly I don't know the language as well as I'd like, despite my paternal line being heavily Dutch (hence my surname). I actually know Irish better.
Thank you very much Ethan, I'm so glad I could inform you about this lovely English tradition! It really is beyond stupid in my opinion, I highly doubt this kind of fuss would be made with a non-European tradition where the highest effort is made to conserve their culture and traditions. I think we need to save as much of the culture and the traditions of these different groups as we can, whether in Europe or anywhere else.
Yes indeed they are :) I balance out because I was born and raised in England but also in Dutch culture with Dutch blood and frequent trips back to the Low Countries ;) I was already wondering about your name actually, although my guess was German but pleasant surprise to see that you are a (sort of) compatriot :D
Irish is a completely different kettle of fish, but also a people with a great history!
I doubt the fuss would be there either. I find traditions of all kinds to be equally worthy of love, no matter where they're from.
Hehe, yep. As far as I know, I'm not German in the slightest. I'm equal parts English and Irish, Dutch enough to warrant a surname, there was a great grandfather named Wallace, and I even had a great, great grandfather who was Seneca. My family actually always pronounced our name "skenk" as opposed to the usual "shenk." I only recently learned this was because, as you know, the ch in the name in a Voiceless Uvular Fricative, so the would have just Anglicized it to a "k" sound. I still prefer to go by "shenk" for obvious reasons.
I agree, unless those traditions be something vile like stoning women to death or cutting off their genitals :) But I agree with the sentiment, I just don't want to see repeated what happened to so many Native American peoples over the last 3 centuries.
That's a very interesting ancestry though, plenty to be proud of there :D Yes it would have been because otherwise it'd be too difficult for the modern Americans to pronounce. Yeah haha I do not blame you for choosing that pronunciation :D
History With Hilbert Of course, naturally, I simply didn't want to bring up such terrible subjects like that. I have no problem seeing traditions like that replaced.
Yeah, I quite like my ancestry. I've mostly identified with the Irish side since my family's always indulged in it, but I'm starting to get more into the English as well, and I've always been interested in the Netherlands. My mother's maiden name is actually Donnelly, and her father is the most Irish American person you'll ever meet, though he's only been to Ireland once. Can't wait to see it for myself.
My usage of the alternate pronunciation of of Schenck annoys my mother to no end. My father doesn't mind at all, but one time when I used it she said, "Are you going to tell your grandfather that you've changed you name now?" No mom, I am simply using the pronunciation less likely to make people laugh. Can't wait to get to the Netherlands so that I can use the proper Dutch pronunciation without people saying "What...?"
Ethan I also thought that was a German surname. I have strong Dutch heritage, but also have a German surname, which is strategically hidden on the Internet haha. My Dutch is... Like a baby's
Well done. Rather than racist, I see Morris dancers with blackface as a celebration of and homage to another culture. As a former Morris dancer in the US I am presently studying a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of Antwerp, the Cripples. Painted in 1568, I am convinced it is of Morris dancers, albeit crippled from the effects of ergotism. There are also carved wood sculptures of Moriskentanzer from 1480 in the Munich State Museum, one of which is painted as a black person. I even found a video of a side in Ecuador replete with pipe, drum, wood swords and bells. Unlike most sides that are reviving an old tradition, this side is clearly carrying out a dance on a feast day in a tradition that never died. The dance may have been brought by conquistadors in the sixteenth century. You can catch all the links at my blogsite, if interested. Kathy
kellapitter.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/a-new-look-at-an-old-painting/
I would totally agree with you here, I see nothing at all derogatory or any type of promotion of hate at all so I find those in opposition to it pathetic. Is there much of a Morris-Dancing scene in the US? Also, thank you for watching my video on the subject: I'm honoured! I saw it whilst I was doing my research for this video actually, but it's a good point to bring up :)
That is an interesting thought! I shall have a look at your blog, I'm very much interested to read it. Thank you very much for your insight here Kathy!
Thanks Hilbert. I thought you might enjoy seeing Morris dancers from the middle ages in Flanders, given your Dutch background, and some pre-slave trade references.
Morris Dancing in the US is not huge, but continues to thrive in the northeast part of the country. I was in a women's side back in the 80's. Still have my bells and banners. In all my research on the internet I have yet to find anyone who has linked the Bruegel painting with Morris. How wild to have it discovered by myself, a former Morris Dancer. Guess it takes one to know one. Would you say this is a Morris side in the painting?
@@historywithhilbert this dance and tradition must be very old because it is in other parts of Europe too. I post here three TH-cam videolinks one after the other. First is from UK, second and third from Romania, for comparison:
th-cam.com/video/0ionTgFxPgg/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/VM7lTvNWH8o/w-d-xo.html (old video)
th-cam.com/video/wJy8mkgbUy8/w-d-xo.html (new video)
"Calus", "calusul", "calusar", "dansul calusarilor".
@@kathykellapitter1256
Why do you believe the group of beggars/cripples in the Bruegel painting are morris dancers (or more accurately ex-morris dancers)?
I assume the bells strapped to one of the beggar's legs is your clue. But they are lepers and the bells would be both a warning to strangers of their presence and also an advertisement - they want charity from those strangers. The man at the front has a wooden clapper attached to his belt for exactly the same reason.
The fox tails attached to their clothing was linked to leprosy and also signified fools.
This is from an online analysis of the painting:
'Stechow describes the foxtail as an “emblem of lepers, displayed during
their customary procession on the Monday after Twelfth Night and the days
of Carnival.” Stechow, 1990, 124. The association of foxtails with fools
and jesters is antique. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Robert of Cicyle
(1370) 57: “The fole Roberd with hym went, Clad in a fulle sympulle gar-
ment, With foxe tayles to renne abowte.”'
Morris dancing was resurected in a little villiage in Essex. I grew up there just 100 yards from the garden they held their first meeting. Still occupied by the son of one of the founders (as I was growing up). The Morris ring still come together there each year. Morris dancing is both old and new being an eclectic mix of revived elements from anywhere they could be found. They perform in public and raise essential funds that ..........they like to spend on "refreshments" over the bar. You have read far too much into the historical narative.
Another point about the moors in Spain: they murdered and raped, they opressed the "Spanish" (rather the visgoths), but they also brought new technology and enriched the culture. I want to say: nobody is a saint, nobody is the devil. All cultures have comitted sins.
Cultural appropriation is what everybody since the dawn of man does. Thats the cool thing about culture! It can change!
Great video!!! Can you do one about swarte piet?
I would absolutely agree with you here Jonas, I mean, have you seen the Grand Mosque of Cordoba?!? It's one of the places I very much want to visit in the near future. It's also a fascinating corner of history, the Muslim area of Europe, that served as a warning for what might have happened had Charles Martel not hit the nail on the head (;) by defeating their advance at Poitiers. Fascinating stuff if you ask me.
I completely agree with you, this being the conclusion I reached at the end of my video about dreadlocks. Thank you very much! I will indeed make one around the season this December ;)
History With Hilbert nice!
And awesome hammer reference :D (Martell and the nail :D )
One does one's best to be punny ;)
Do you have evidence to show that the Moors murdered and raped?
The Moors did not murdered and rape. You have absolutely lied!!! They welcomed in to Andalusia by the native people of that land. The Visigoth was not the native people of the Iberian Peninsula. They were actually the rapers and murdered of the native people of Spain!! The Moors were welcomed!!! “The Moors in Spain,” “The Moors After Spain,” “The Golden Age of Moors,” “Nature Knows No Color Line,” Ancient and Modern Britons!” Read and stop lying!!!!
I have never seen black face morris dancers in all my life and there are plenty of groups round Hampshire and Sussex. Morris dancing was as far as we all knew, as country folk, to banish the dark of winter, celebrate the fertility of summer and bring in a good autumn harvest. This post has just all been about race and it makes me wonder, is it the urban people commenting on this who know nothing of country life and rural traditions? This was more a pagan dance linked to the land.
Blacking up was found in the West Midlands Border Morris style - 19th century origins and the 1970's revival.
I'm waiting for the day a Morris side answers the New Zealand AllBlacks Haka. A girl can dream.
Education and understanding could solve many issues.
Another very interesting video - I hadn’t heard about that incident. It seems to be a case of completely misplaced ‘social justice’. Morris dancing is such a cliché of ‘Englishness’ that anyone who doesn’t (want to) understand it has seriously got too much time on their hands and apparently not enough sense to use it wisely - by for example learning about cultural history and why phenomena such as Morris dancing even exists to begin with.
I do have to agree with ainkarmous though that the Moors were Berbers. Although sub-Saharan areas such as Sudan and Ethiopia were Muslim at that time, I have never heard any reference to Moors coming from anywhere other than the Berber areas. The black face of some Morris dancers and the connection to mining areas is logical - mining is extremely dirty work, and I don’t think they needed to put much extra coal dust on to get that look. So it has (presumably) little or nothing to do with the moors.
Your reference to tea being Indian has to be corrected a little, I’m afraid - the latest research I have been able to find indicates that it probably originated in Myanmar and bordering areas of China and Assam in India. Remember a large part of the European (not least Dutch) interest in trading with China was precisely tea and porcelain teas-sets! Think of the phrase “for all of the tea in China”, the opium wars, etc. Tea was first cultivated in Assam by the (British) East India Company in the 1830’s, and does not seem to have been drunk in India before then. It seems to have taken until 1848 (when the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune was sent by the East Indian Company as a spy to learn the Chinese secrets of tea cultivation) to have got it to work though, and was a direct result of the opium wars.
But you are completely right on cultural appropriation - every culture in the whole world is a result of borrowing from other cultures - or we would never have become what we are now (for both good and bad). No one culture has ever stood alone, and certainly not the western cultures of today. Even some of the examples you give of Irish and English culture at the end are appropriated. Guinness is a result of a charred batch of malt being brewed and sold cheap to porters in Covent Garden in the 1700’s (hence the beer being called porter) - many were Irish, and they took the new brew back with them to Ireland and began brewing it there (as the Guinness museum in Dublin tells the story of). And chips are of course originally from Belgium (the Spanish Netherlands) or France.
Even if, and I do not believe this to be the case, the origin of Morris dancing is somehow "racist", the modern show of it certainly is not about belittling black people, especially as there are now black people involved in the carrying out of performances and an all black group of Morris Dancers.
Yes you are right, I phrased this in a misleading way in the video, only a small proportion of Moors were actually black. So apologies about this and thank you for picking up on it :)
Ah yes tea is from China, but I'm fairly sure the British first started to import it in bulk from India which was a British possession for quite a while which is why I referenced it rather than the place of tea cultivation's origin, although I'm glad you made the point because the history of tea (and it's etymology actually from Mandarin "tú" to Min Chinese "te" to Dutch "thee" to English "tea" as well as the other variations of "char" and "chai") is all incredibly interesting :)
Quite, I think as 21st Century peoples we have only one chance to save these traditions from being lost completely to history, something which would be incredibly tragic considering our attempts to save the other cultures and traditions of the world at present. Exactly, the English also had versions of Haggis and their Britons probably wore something similar to Tartan which is also worn by the Irish in some form or other. Absolutely, can't get better than Vlaamse Frieten. ;)
Thank you for commenting such interesting information Cris, always love reading them!
I’ve just looked into the etymology of the term ‘Moor’, and what the available online literature has to say on them. In Danish the word is ‘maurer’, which comes from Latin ‘maurus’, from Greek ‘maurós’ or ‘amourós’ meaning ‘dark, black’. Morris is thus a corruption of a Latinized Greek word (‘maurus’ -> ‘Moorish’ -> ‘Morrish’ or ‘Mooris’ -> ‘Morris’), or a direct Anglicisation of the Latin (‘maurus’ to ‘Morris’ is no long linguistic jump). It seems to be exactly the same for the personal name ‘Morris’ and other European version (e.g. ‘Mauritz’).
The Moors seem to be consistently described as the Berbers living in Al-Andalus and (originally) Mauritania, which is the old name for Morocco (the name of which still retains the element ‘Mor-‘). Even including the modern Mauritania, the original black population was pushed south by the Berbers and Arabs in the 11th century (the ‘light Moors’, as they are described in the Danish literature), but freed black slaves formed a population known as the ‘dark Moors’ from around 1200. So you were right in suggesting black Moors: they were just maybe of a different origin.
Having said all this, the Berbers who conquered Spain were known as the Almoravids. Their name apparently comes from the Arabian ‘al-murabitun’ meaning ‘those who live in the border castles’. This name would also give a logical origin to the term ‘Moors’ which doesn’t give connotations of ‘black’. Therefore the term could be subject to folk etymology, being given the meaning black, hence some Morris dancers blackening their faces. I really don’t think it can be labelled as racist either.
I’ve always been led to believe that Morris dancing was originally a sword dance, and the literature I have looked at confirms this, being connected with the so called ‘moresca’, a dance drama from Spain and Portugal (and Croatia) symbolising the battles between the Christians and Muslims. Sword dances have a Middle Eastern origin (as well as being found in China, South Asia and India), so again nothing to connect them to sub-Saharan Africans what so ever.
And thus back to India and tea. Yes, India was absolutely important for the import of tea to Britain, but first from the 1850’s and onwards. It was the Brits’ way of getting around the ‘difficulties’ and expenses of trading with China at the time - and very much cultural appropriation in both the drinking of it in Europe, India and elsewhere outside of China (Arabs again!), as well as the cultivation of it in India.
I don't think it would go straight from Latin to English unless brought in by the church which I find unlikely. Flemish merchants on the other hand who might be trading with the Spanish being as they were also Burgundians, are more likely to have experienced the dance and then brought it back to England where they then pilfered the name. Thank you for looking this up though, interesting to see how it developed :)
That's really interesting actually, in Millennium which I just read it mentioned periods of ethnic violence in Al Andalus which might also go back to this difference.
I'm not sure you're right in saying that the Berbers who conquered Spain were Almoravids. The latter were rather later incomers who overthrew the existing Muslim powers in Al Andalus, effectively putting an end to the first success phase of Reconquista carried out by the Christians and ensuring Muslim dominance for several more centuries to come.
Always love reading your feedback because I learn so much new information :D
Sorry - bad translation from Danish. I meant subjugated and not conquered. Of course there was a Muslim presence in Al-Andalus before the Almoravids.
Had the introduction of Morris dancing happened earlier (say the 1200's), I would not discount an introduction to English from Latin. There are many other ways it could have come into English besides Flemish and Dutch merchants. Direct trade with Spain, for example - wool was Britains contribution to the European market and would be traded both via merchants from England and mainland Europe, and probably made it as far as the Muslim world (though through middlemen).
I have recently been looking at the material and cultural exchange between the (Arab) Muslim world and Christian Europe as a consequence of the crusades. This seems to be a late addition to that general theme. Very interesting indeed.
No problem Cris :)
Hmm I am in agreement, and you are correct in saying there are many ways it could have reached England which back up the Flemish root of the English term. It's possible that it could have been brought in from the wool trade, although at this time period most of it went across to Antwerp in Flanders who then traded it on, possibly, as you say, to Spain.
That must be a really interesting study, it's a topic that has always fascinated me anyhow, as is the Columbian Exchange. I agree, thanks again for all the extra knowledge!
eating the greenland shark is a icelandic tradition so if you go to iceland try it
I've heard about this! The rotting shark that's been buried over winter?
yes it is good :)
I will have to try that, Iceland is most certainly on my "to visit" list :D
gott
I agree that blackface in Morris dancing is not related to the slave trade and is not meant as mockery. Knowledge that there are black skinned people would have been found in England in the late middle ages after people who had gone on crusade returned. They may have stopped in ports where Moorish traders were present if not stopping on the Barbary coast itself. I think the racist element crept into the tradition of blackface as entertainment in the 19th century when enslavement of Africans was at its height
The black face is a disguise so they aren't recognised. That is the reason. Morris and local clog dancing/pagan dancing have mixed over time.
you sound like a morris dancer to me ;)
You lie
The black face is because it was a black mans culture it come from the moors who wear ruling Europe at the time and taught English people about music ect
@@viralcliippss6929 Wrong- 100%. - Its a mixture of pagan fertility dancers that eventually were all given the same name. Also the Moors took many slaves from the coasts of Europe and Britain - even at the time of Atlantic slave trade. Almost 2 million white slaves were taken. Stop putting American problems on us!!!
@@viralcliippss6929 Also - the Moors ruled Spain - that's it. They didnt rule Europe - even though they raided coastal villages and took white slaves.
Sorry , but there is another possible connection ( a lot closer by the way ) than the Moors , listen closely at the prononciation , Muresh ( a river in Transylvania ) , Maramuresh ( northernmost region of Transylvania ) and "morishca" ( moorishka ) which means "hand-mill" , so the original dance was performed in a circle ; th-cam.com/video/Tb3WxG3zCkM/w-d-xo.html
Anything but Negro hey....Such denial it's hilarious
Yeah I'm 100% certain it has nothing to do with the Moors. It's an ancient Pagan folk dance, native to Britain. And this idea that the actual Moors themselves were predominantly black is incorrect, a popular misapprehension. The Moors were North Africans of predominantly Arab descent, at least by the time that the Muslims invaded and took over the Iberian Peninsula. They also had Berber ancestry from the previous inhabitants of the Maghreb, and DNA evidence shows that Berbers were actually white, or at least more closely related to Europeans than sub-Saharan Africans. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings of Berbers depict them with red hair and pale skin, much like how the Persians and Phoenicians were depicted, and I still see Iranians to this day that have red hair and milky pale skin, as not all of them have significant Arab admixture in their DNA from the Islamic conquest of Persia. Berbers and Carthaginians were probably related, and Carthaginians were white. The Moors themselves may have actually been a white ethnic group to begin with as well, before being subsumed by the invading Arabs bringing Islamic culture to North Africa. But regardless of what the Moors looked like prior to the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb, by the time the North African Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula, they were predominantly Arab with sub-Saharan African slaves. These black slaves could sometimes be freed and become wealthy in their own right, or could be treated relatively well (aside from the whole getting castrated thing) and dressed in finery and jewels and used as messengers for the Moorish leadership and whatnot, and because Europeans had seen Arabs plenty from all the invasions they had been mounting for centuries but had never before seen sub-Saharan Africans, the majority-Arab real Moors faded into obscurity over time, eclipsed by the concept of Moors as black people, which was brought on by the practice of using "Moor" as a general term for any black person. So in other words, when Moorish leaders sent black court eunuchs to negotiate with Christian leaders, the Europeans got the understandable though mistaken impression that Moors were all or mostly black. In truth, although I suppose you could technically consider the slaves Moors owned as Moorish too because they're part of the same culture, the actual Moors would have been pretty much Arab. It's a shame this misunderstanding has grown into the source of so many lies, especially the sort that are promulgated by black nationalists. They like to claim that Moorish civilization was entirely black and that they introduced literally every form of art, science, and civility you can imagine to the barbaric and backwards Europeans, who then proceeded to steal Moorish culture and form a giant multi-century-long conspiracy to cover up the achievements of black people and disseminate the lie that black people were tribal sub-Saharan Africans, when in fact they were from Atlantis and lived all over the world, creating literally every culture except the ones they don't like, like for instance the Babylonians. Lol they love to claim they are the real Native Americans, it's hilarious.
I thought the black face represented the coal on coal workers faces i watched a video where the dancers said this was why they do it
+History With Hilbert
Essentially, blackened facial features were used because Morris was outlawed in Post Industrial Britain and therefore they weren't recognisable by the authorities, giving them time to run away when they knew the law spotted them from a distance.
In Britain, it's nothing to do with the Moors. That's only Spain !
Morris is a Pagan Brythonic tradition that even the Romans couldn't destroy while they spent 400 Years raping and enslaving British people.
Needless to say, they were booted out during the 1st ever Brexit in the 5C
So how do you explain the name of the dance?
@@iayyam
The idiot just makes thing up - nothing of his post is correct.
I had no idea this was a controversy. I learned about Morris Dancing in San Francisco where it is taught as completely of pagan origin regarding the seasons. So I did some checking and found this that is more along with what I learned. I really can't see any of the dance moves and reasons for the dance to be from the Moors.www.britannia.com/wonder/modance.html My ex-husband is in a Morris Dance group in the SF Bay area, so it is definitely still alive and well here.
Not pagan at all - total rubbish.
Not pagan - 15th century.
And originally it the dance was nothing like the morris we see today.
@Wotsitorlabart That was just the first time these folk dances were written about under the title "Morris Dancing". The dances themselves were going on long before they were labeled with that terminology and written about, I mean it was a folk practice and the peasants were illiterate. It certainly doesn't have Christian origins, it wasn't forced upon the populace in a top-down manner like it would be if it were (because for all intents and purposes, the peasantry of Medieval Europe were still mostly Pagan in their traditions and conception of reality, as they never read the Bible or understood what the priests were saying if they ever attended mass, which many never did or would only do on special occasions), it was an organic part of traditional English and Welsh culture. It makes a lot more sense for these traditional folk dances to simply be labeled "Morris Dancing" in the 15th century than for them to spring up out of nowhere in that century, complete with a name that it had from the start. I feel pretty certain the peoples of Britain were doing folk dances like those for millennia prior to being written about by some Christian nobleman, or at least for centuries. Pagan Europeans always had folk dances and other customs that were retained by the rural and working class populace throughout the Middle Ages. Why do you think we call them "Pagans" in the first place? It comes from the Latin "pagus" meaning "countryside" and "paganus" meaning "inhabitant of the countryside", basically carrying the connotation of "country bumpkin" when the Christians applied this term to people that retained traditional Pagan practices, since the cities had been forcefully Christianized and the Pagans had been forced to the peripherals of the society, as the Church had the most power in cities and their authority waned in more rustic areas.
Up Helly A cannot be called cultural appropriation, because the Norse culture was the indigenous culture of the Orkneys and Shetlands in the Viking Age and long afterwards.
That's a good point William, I meant to include it as another example of where an invading people were honoured with the Norse-themed festival although as you rightly say the comparison is a far stretch as there are many differences between this and the tradition of taking on the "Moorish Dance" throughout Europe.
On the topic of Orkney, have you ever come across the language spoken on the islands into the 18th century called "Norn?" It's unfortunately become extinct as the Shetlanders and Orcadians transitioned to Scots but it was North Germanic Language that I think was based off Old Norse with variations being spoken in Orkney and Shetland. I might make a video about this in future, but I thought you might be interested in this :)
I know the language existed, and i believe some words from it survive in modern Orkney dialect.
I'll have to investigate which ones made into the modern dialect, though the accent certainly does sound slightly Scandinavian in its pronunciation.
Actually, the first mention of a morris dance is from 1427-28 and the Burgundian court - for the making of luxurious, exotic costumes 'propices à danser la morisque' ('suitable for dancing the morisque').
The protestants banned everything that wasn't in the Bible, including all kinds of folk dance, singing, music, story-telling and having fun in general. Missionaries (both Christian and Wahhabi) are still doing this. Maypoles were taken down and hidden during the Commonwealth. Christmas and Easter went underground, most of the Saints' days were forgotten and the Scottish Yule celebration migrated to Hogmanay. How did the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance survive? I suppose the Puritans who went to America left Morris dancing behind, but clog dancing somehow got through.
Hilbert makes the important point that a lot of traditions DID die out and were reinvented. That's true of many, that they may be more modern than we think: e.g. boat burning at Halloween, which started in the 1970's after several centuries of abeyance, Druid ceremonies in Wales and at Stonehenge, and a lot of Royal and Parliamentary flummery which was invented by the Victorians, e.g. slamming the House of Commons' door in Black Rod's face. Most recently we saw the Vigil of the Princes, which was invented by Edward VIII in 1936.
Edward VIII was based, the final British monarch that has my true respect. Yeah, he abdicated by marrying an American double divorcée, a reckless move I wouldn't have made (although, to be fair, they did stay together), but he was a visionary that saw the Europe that could have been, and tried his best to improve relations between the UK and Germany to prevent WWII, taking a tour of the country and being received as honored royal visitors in 1937. And he was always looking out for the working class, and actually put his life on the line for his country fighting in WWI, and for those reasons I consider him an honorable leader. He ultimately chose the love of his life over power, and that is admirable as well, at least on some level.
@@titanomachy2217 You have "true respect" for the Traitor King, who urged the Germans to continue bombing England in the hope that he could return to his throne as their puppet? After the war, the English far right hoped that he would be "called back" in some crisis to replace QEII and appoint Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists as our Führer.
I've been following the discussion for a few days about whether Morris dancers should no longer have their faces painted black. I don't see anything racist in that
The first time I saw Morris dancing, it was with performers who chose not to paint their faces at all, so I didn't realize it had any kind of controversy. Since it occurs at Beltane/May Day (at least, that's where I first heard of it), I think green face paint would be the most thematically appropriate, connecting the dancers with the Green Man, but that's just me. If the reason for the blackface is simply, "It's used at a disguise," the dancing should be able to continue on just the same with different-colored face paint, or with smudges of soot here and there without covering the whole face. Part of traditions surviving is knowing how to adapt, and it can't be denied that in this day and age, blackface can have hurtful implications to some.
See the resemblance to the ancient dances of the "călușarii" in Romania. Search on TH-cam or Google.
Morris dancing is not racist.
You made one mistake in the video, you said when the Atlantic slave trade started for England you said they brought slaves from Africa to England and the colonies, slavery became illegal within England's borders in 1066, and I don't think this law was ever changed, there is a story that one Black slave that was brought to England and because of the law he had to be released from bondage the second he landed on England's shores, this happened in the 18th century, so I think the law remained unchanged to this day, so the only Englishmen who had any contact with African slaves generally were slave traders or men who lived in the Caribbean and the colonies
The first homo sapien sapiens in Europe were blacks there were no whites in Europe for hundreds of years, it was the blacks that became white through evolution
@@jamiecartwright5469 nope this is what I'm saying, th-cam.com/video/FLeDbyOsb1w/w-d-xo.htmlsi=DK9w71XFGmAPdr57
@@jamiecartwright5469 please qualify your meaning of simplistic?
@@jamiecartwright5469 racism is about power not skin colour as there is only one race on the planet
@@jamiecartwright5469 you are not white as this means to be original to the land etc, white is not about skin colour, it's a legal status.
Never take this video down. Thank you.
I really like your video. You say a lot of true things that will help people understand where traditions come from and why. Most people just think with a XXI progressive brain.
Presentism is the preeminent bias of our age. Never before in history have so many had such an unfair disposition towards their own ancestors, nor such a self-righteous, self-congratulatory attitude over the great moral accomplishment of simply going with the flow of your culture's Zeitgeist, keeping up with the Joneses in terms of virtue signaling your assent to the value system promoted by the establishment billionaire class. Kids in school are taught that people from the past were intellectually and morally inferior, and that every tradition that was formed by Western society was created by a bunch of big mean patriarchs that just wanted to make everyone that wasn't identical to them miserable. They aren't just knocking over Chesterton's fenceposts anymore, they've ripped up all the fences our ancestors ever constructed and have heaped them and set them ablaze in a bonfire of the vanities, a spectacle of religious zealotry and cultural vandalism on a scale hitherto unseen.
Your thought on the Moores heads on British heraldry?
In Spanish Moor just mean Muslim.
I say that because I see some people on internet saying that Spain was conquer by blacks.
Althouth a part of the Muslim invadors were black, the mayority of them were Berber followed by an Arab elite and the manuscrips from both Christians and Muslims shows it.
Ah, and Moors prefered straight swords, like Boabdil's sword (e-ducativa.catedu.es/44700165/aula/archivos/repositorio//3750/3887/html/Espada_Boabdil2.jpg)
nachoolo ancient berbers were blacks n black Moorish king's ruled
There were literal Muslim empires in Spain that were black. The Almoravids were from Senegal.
Moor means Africanoid/Negro. Hence why there were Christian Moors who faught against Muslim moors. Hence why the Madonna and child are black. Hence why so many painting and MURals of saints in Eastern Europe were Negro...too much to say. 'Alawi dynasty - also rendered in English as Alaouite, 'Alawid, or Alawite' - hmmm, sounds familiar to (Isle of Wight).
@@ElohimTheKing Moro doesn't mean *black* (why the fuck are you using two fucking slurs to refer to black people) in Spanish. It means Muslim. It meant Muslim in the Middle Ages (and we know that because, when black people appear in the Medieval records of the Peninsula they are referred to as Black or Black Moors). It still means Muslim in Modern Spanish.
The fact that there's a Moro ethnicity in the Philipines is because they were called by Spaniards as such *because* *they* *were* *Muslims* .
Moor meaning Black is a British thing. Not a Spanish/general thing.
@@ElohimTheKingGood grief!
Have a look at Basque folk dancing. The music, dance and dress is nearly identical to Morris dancing. They use the sticks, have similar stories (see Obby Oss in Padstow - the French and Spanish basque have the same story).
DNA tests have revealed that basques and Welsh people are closely related. Therefore, I wonder whether Morris dancing evolved in England from from te Celtic cultures.
It’s also interesting that it’s those exact countries that were invaded by the moors.
I don't think the folk dances have anything to do with the Moors. The notion that there is a connection is spurious, based on folk etymology, not the genuine etymology of "morris", which is unknown. Of course, academia is dominated by the left, so they will look for any excuse to erase our cultural traditions by claiming they are racist, including using hilariously dubious folk etymology. The reason the Basque people dance a folk dance that is akin to Morris dancing is because all rustic Europeans retained their ancient Pagan folk practices, saved from the persecution of the Church and state by their distance from cities. That is why the term "Pagan" came about in the first place, it comes from the Latin "paganus" which basically meant "country bumpkin", a way to smear those who held on to the ancestral European practices and beliefs as provincial, uneducated and backwards. And indeed, these traditions were confined mostly to the rural peripherals of society. In the Middle Ages, peasants in remote villages were really closer to being Pagans than Christians, for all intents and purposes. They couldn't read so the Bible was Greek to them, the sermons they might have heard when they traveled to a city with a cathedral would have been unintelligible to them as they were spoken in Latin, and they almost unanimously believed in fae folk and culture heroes and whatnot. Plus, as you say, there is a probable link between the people of the Iberian Peninsula and the Welsh. I believe the "Black Irish" and tawny Welsh share phenotypic characteristics and DNA haplogroups with the Phoenicians via the Carthaginians via Carthaginian Spain, one of their colonies. If you check out depictions of what the Phoenician ethnicity probably looked like, you'll notice they look basically identical to the Welshmen that have dark, curly hair and brown eyes with tan skin, a distinctly Mediterranean appearance. This lines up perfectly with the old legends about the Carthaginians coming to Wales. Other legends suggest that the Scotti tribe (rulers of Iron Age Ireland that invaded and conquered much of Alba/Caledonia, the land of the Picts, and gave it the name "Scotland") themselves got their name in turn from Queen Scotti, an Egyptian queen that colonized Ireland. This idea may not be as far-fetched as it sounds if you consider how the Berbers and other North African peoples (who were actually Europoid prior to interbreeding with Arabs after the Islamic conquest of North Africa, as can be seen in their art and depictions of Berbers in the art of other civilizations, like a wall painting from ancient Egypt that depicts a Berber man with pale skin and curly brown hair) were heavily influenced by Egyptian culture, to the point that Berber art basically looks just like Egyptian art, depicting the same motifs. The Berbers and the Carthaginians share many cultural and artistic tendencies, so they would have had some Egyptian influence as well, so it could be that there really was a Queen Scotti, but perhaps she was actually a Carthaginian rather than an Egyptian, which would make more sense as the Carthaginians were great seafarers. They were actually Phoenicians that had started as a colony and then became a major independent cosmopolitan thalassocracy in their own right, colonizing the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily and even sailing out into the Atlantic, trading all along the coast of West Africa and the Atlantic and North Sea seaboards of Europe, so if anything it would be kind of weird if the Carthaginians didn't ever end up in the British Isles, being major seafaring explorers and traders and all. Hell, we have a ton of evidence that much of the tin used in the Bronze Age to forge bronze was from Wales, of all places, so we actually have very good reason to believe that at least some Mediterraneans were sailing up to Wales for tin, and the primary candidates would definitely be the Phoenicians and/or their offshoots like Carthage. The Basques probably largely descend from the Visigoths, but also from the Celtiberians and Carthaginians, and any or all of these groups could have contributed to the traditional dances they do. The Celtiberians were Celts like the people of Wales, so there could definitely be a connection between Morris dancing and Basque folk dancing through that culture as well. The Basques are particularly strange because their mountainous homeland is so remote that it allowed them to retain an archaic European pre-Indo-European language, which means they have kept their isolated tongue alive for millennia while being surrounded with peoples that spoke languages with no connection to their own.
I'm not a Morris dancer, though I enjoy the playing the tunes. I think the whole tradition of "black face" including American minstrel shows is truly controversial and represents a particular take on the presence of African peoples in Europe. But as you note, there are many sources for everything, and there are other sources for blackface. As we deal with our racist past we also must acknowledge there are cultural traditions which are not racist per se but arise from historical contact in other ways
'Morris' dancing is a catch-all term to describe several different kinds of dances, most of which don't have anything to do with 'the moors', and almost none of which paint their faces black. Also, bear in mind that in rural England 'moor' often meant anyone vaguely exotic looking. The most popular theory among historians of dance is that they are actually very old dances (they seem to all come from similar cultures), but because after the reformation they became seen as sort of outlandish and exotic-looking, they aquired the name 'Moorish'.
Interestingly, there are some Portuguese dances which look very much like an earlier (and more vigorous) version of morris dancing. Britain, being primarily Celtic (apart from the South East and the Midlands), has a lot in common, culturally, with Portugal and Catalonia. Here's an example - th-cam.com/video/DoQuYePHF0c/w-d-xo.html
Our modern perception of morris dancing is also really skewed - those white costumes were only invented in the 19th century (before, they wore lots of colourful ribbons and sprigs of leaves), and its now largely performed by old men, who can't jump, whereas it used to be a young man's dance, much faster and more athletic.
You are contradicting yourself. If these dances looked like Portuguese dances it is because the Moors occupied Portugal for more than 700 years hense the similarity.
@@iayyam That would be more convincing if there were not similar dances in other parts of Europe, such as Slovenia. Of course they had Turkish overlords, but not "Moors." Blackface is also part of the Krampus and Zwarte Piet traditions, which have parades but no specific dance.
Moors ruled Spain from 711 A.D. to 1492 as well as other parts of Europe. Do your research.
Barley the moors had the shit kicked out of them by 1200 they were restricted to southern Spain
Says the guy that didn't even listen to a word said or didn't finish the video. He talks about the Moors, but they don't actually have anything to do with Morris dancing. Moors were Arabs, not sub-Saharan Africans. Europeans thought Moors were black because the Moors used black slaves as emissaries and porters and whatnot, so every time they engaged in diplomacy, they sent over a bunch of castrated black dudes, and some of them would have been very finely dressed and educated and whatnot, because some of their slaves took on important roles like being diplomats, as court eunuchs were a common accessory of Muslim leaders. The majority of the inhabitants of Moorish Spain were of Arab descent or pre-Islamic North African descent, with most of the black people being owned as slaves, although some would have been free and probably would have interbred with the Arab and Spanish (Visigoth, to begin with at least) inhabitants, so there were black people that you could consider Moors, but they weren't the majority.
Kent had coal fields.
The backup dancers do say that their black make up is from moors but not in a disrespectful way and I don't thinks there's much evidence about the link
After their marriage, the king's Lord High Treasurer's accounts provide numerous entries to show how much he enjoyed lively entertainment, employing foreign minstrels from Italy and elsewhere. King James was generous to all kinds of people, including Black Moors, as the following entries from the Treasurer's accounts demonstrate:
To celebrate Shrove Tuesday in 1505, several Africans including a 'taubronar' (drummer) and a choreographer were present in Edinburgh. Twelve dancers (including Italians) performed in specially made black-and-white costumes costing £13 2s 10d. Was this the origin of Morris (Moorish) dancing?
The "More Taubronar" performed at the peripatetic court of King James IV of Scots and his Queen, Margaret Tudor. However I don't think Morris dancing developed in Scotland: unless it was stamped out by the reformers along with the old festivals?
The one thing you got 100% wrong. The English never took any slaves to England!! In fact there was a law that said any slave setting foot in England is a free man. They all went to the Caribbean.
How were there slave markets in England then?...
@@paulreynolds7103Romans.
An interesting take, or series of takes. You obviously have an agenda to keep morris clear between ostensible cultural symbolism and political correctness. Good for you.
I live on the West Coast of Canada, and one of the people I meet is indigenous, and we talk about his heritage, his mixed native background. He pointed out that their dancers wear paint on their face, and I suddenly saw the point that morris dancers do that as 'identification' within their group, and to identify themselves in society as a whole. It is a symbol of who they are, and it just happens to be the colour of soot, readily available, without anything other than disguise. Remember, morris now is oh-so-white-middle-class. NO, I'm wrong there, that's a generalisation thrown in to debate ... but, mostly it is 'respectable' if quaint. Times gone by, the group could have been any raggle-taggle bunch of guys prancing around in an effort to gain beer and beer money, not oh-so-wholesome gentle men in, often, cricket-white clothes - which is probably what I meant to say earlier.
If you - or your audience - have not heard a series of recordings by the stalwarts of English folk revival, stating with "Morris On", through "Great grandson of Morris On", then here's as good a place to start as any th-cam.com/video/igY8PcUXuUc/w-d-xo.html&start_radio=1&t=51&ab_channel=Max
Everybody has outside influences on their culture. Modern Britain is incredibly Indian, a spot of Moorish dancing peeking through is hardly a problem.
The whole "Moorish" connection with Morris Dancing is purely speculative, and it's only real basis is in the linguistic link of the name. The dances themselves, the music used, the rhythms used, the patters of the dances, the synchronized mock combat with sticks (or swords), and even the body movements of the dancers have precisely ZERO to do with anything in Moorish culture, or any other kind of African culture.
The label of "Morris" for this dance is probably just some sort of off-handed attempt by late Medieval Brits to bring some sort of air of cultural exotic-ness to a long-established pre-Christian tradition without actually admitting it's Anglo-Celtic Pagan origins (which would have put them at odds with the Church).
The hew and cry by the WokeVolk regarding the black facepaint in Morris is just their attempt to destroy yet one more old cultural icon of Western European Culture. Covid and it's attendant lockdowns and restrictions on public gatherings for over 2 years, have nearly killed off Morris in the US and the UK. This is just part of a much larger agenda, and has nothing to do with "Racism" or "cultural sensitivity", and is nothing more than another stomp of the jackboot of NeoMarxism and their "Long March" to dismantle the West...
Morris dancing is not pre-Christian or Celtic - that is nonesense with no historical foundation.
The rubbish about Moorish came from an early 20th century failed researcher who could not trace the origins so invented the lie to pretend he had found the answer. Nobody in the Morris believes it.
The black faces are because most people worked in mines (Mostly coal) or up chimneys, in the case of The Sweeps Festival in Rochester.
In other areas, it was mud or dirt to hide their faces, as begging was illegal.
For the Druids, it was so their faces would not be recognised by the dead spirits they were chasing back to the afterlife. (It was believed that the spirit of the recently passed may linger if they recognised friends and/or family.)
It's (at least originally) had nothing to do with race.
The rags are because people were poor.
It's no more complicated than that.
People in the UK have been dancing like this since around 4BCE during the early Druidic times.
Many of the dances were used initially to chase away the spirits of winter during Beltane festivals (around May 1st) and to celebrate the coming of summer.
Early (4 BCE ), Pagan Brits would hit sticks, bang drums, whoop, and shout loudly to chase away unwelcome winter spirits and wake Jack o' the Green as they marched between the villages.
Not
Nope. Wrong.
Keep telling yourself that...Caucasian denial again....anything but black hey, maybe if I say they were Arab you might agree then yeah? But the original Arabs were basically negro so maybe you won't, ahhh I shouldn't of told you this....dammit!
@@ElohimTheKing Maybe look at little further back in history than 'Murica you might learn that not everything in the history of the British isles has to do with race or colour.
@@Tiamat951 Who said anything about 'everything'? One thing for sure it's most of history on the British Isles, Moorish history got whitewashed all over Britain, but because of smart Moors who knew what was happening, they left clues behind for their descendants to put the pieces together, for instance....many inns all over these isles have names like Black A Moor (across the road from Preston Crown Court) or the Turk's head or Black boy, there's many moor, that's why fields and grasslands are named moors..even though moor means navigator...hence why we have the term 'mooring a ship/ankhor a ship' which is what the Moors did all over Europe because they were navigators, even Masonry was Moorish science before it got hijacked by Caucasians (like everything else). So that's why them fields are called 'the Moors' because it was a world wide whitewashing operation, but you know what...I don't diss today's Morris dancers because in truth...imitation is the best form of flattery
about the muslims taxing the christians, the muslims were also forced to pay zakat
Morris dancing first appears in England in the mid 1400's and it is an entertainment at Royal and princely courts. And it is quite different to what we see today - in Henry VIII's Christmas revels of 1515 five dancers and a fool performed their 'moresks' during which they wooed two women who personified Beauty and Venus.
Thus the early Morris is an entertainment of the London elite and only spreads out from the south east after the 1560's. And as the blacking of faces is mostly in the 'Welsh Border Morris' tradition and appears much later (19th century) trying link it to the first appearance of the Morris in 1448 as per the video is historically incorrect.
Also, the Morris sticks only appear in the later 16th century. If the dance was literally a copy of a Moorish dance we would expect to see them much earlier. But we don't because they are not a representation of curved scimitars - they are used purely to make a loud clashing noise.
No one knows if the dance was actually 'Moorish' or was thought by the performers to be what a Moorish dance might look like.
And the dance quite categorically is not pagan nore is it some kind of fertility dance to increase the crops - Victorian and Edwardian wishful thinking.
I have no idea if this has any connection at all, Katherine of Aragon’s parents were Ferdinand and Isabella and they conducted the Reconquista. Whether or not she was either old enough or experienced to pass on any stories or descriptions, i have no idea, just interesting that there was a very deep connection between the English monarchy and the two monarchs that encountered the moors in the Reconquista.
Also, the Moors had slaves taken from Europe i think, so at the time they were the slave owners.
No connection whatsoever.
@@YorkyOne noone knows really.
@@widsof7862
A bit late but yes they do.
The earliest references to morris dancing are from the Burgundian court of 1427 and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths 19th May 1448.
It's origins are as an entertainment in the royal and noble courts of the 15th century.
I agree that cultural borrowing is an important part of human history and there are more reasons for or consequences of the borrowing than just the negative ones which are the focus of this episode
I don't think the Moors were black - darker than Europeans certainly, but not black, not sub-Saharan Africans.
This should definitely be protected as it is part of their culture and history, it is a Celtic tradition.
In Portugal there is a similar dance, look for the "Pauliteiros de Miranda", our dances are protected as "National Cultural Heritage", our Celtic traditions and many others are still present today. We may have lost our Celtic languages in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal/Spain), but in Portugal our traditions are still mainly Celtic.
Cheers ❤
Morris dancing is not 'Celtic' in the slightest.
You are wrong on the race of the Moors. They were North African Berbers. Not black.
You can't ride a buffalo, or bison, as they're correctly called. They're very wild. Every year in Yellowstone NP several foolish tourists get mauled by trying to get too friendly with them.
What's your opinion on Zwarte Piet?
The Spanish Morris dancing tradition was a celebration of the throwing off of their Brutal, Muslim conquerors - colonalists!!! Good for them!
The Spanish celebrated by doing the exact same thing in the American continent and the canary islands. The Spanish committed a genocide against the completely harmless people of the canary islands.
Morris Dancing tradition is much older than (116 BC ) most of the people think , and was broughted by the most famous ancient warriors named by Roman Empire as mighty Dacians , they come in Britannia and fight with picts building Hadrian's wall and get settled, never return to homeland .
Nonsense.
While i agree with your perspective and most of your argument i do not believe that adding a straw man theory at the beginning of your video helps your case and certain other comparisons made through out your video will not help you i believe that if you just stick to the historical development of Morris Dancing i think this video could be used to justify this tradition also im a Mayan living in america so i dont really have a dog in this fight except that i like history and valid arguments
You are right, although some of the arguments were in response to ones made in publications I had read attacking Morris Dancing, although without reference to said articles they do appear to be straw men in the video. An interest is all you need :) I plan to make a few more videos on the Mayans in future actually, you don't be any chance speak a Mayan language do you?
Im sorry im a first gen in america and speaking English is a big deal for my family but i am learning K'iche on my off time i can send you a pdf of an english to k'iche dictionary if that helps
heres the link: www.taterenner.com/engkiche.pdf
Anyways im just a big fan of history and i want to see you and your channel succeed and i hope than when something like this happens again, because it always happens again, you can learn from this experience and educate others as appose to possibly angering them
That's really awesome, thank you for sending me this! I'm really glad to hear you are learning K'iche, I've heard the language spoken and it is indeed a really interesting one so it's a very good thing that you are learning it to keep it alive. I too am learning my traditional language of West Frisian as unfortunately this is also under threat.
I'm really honoured to read that and I'm very glad that you are watching my videos and taking the time to comment on them :)
Quite right, this video was a little all over the place, though in future, as you say, I will know how better to structure it and which points to address.
Thank you for all your feedback, and keep me posted on your progress with K'iche!
Nice to hear that you are connecting with your roots as well and will definitely try to keep you updated and dont feel to bad about it i saw the points you were trying to make and they were great and really enlightened me to a cultural tradition that i was unaware of keep up the good work and soon youll be a hit in the youtube history community
Thank you :) I'm glad to hear that, though there is room for improvement and as such will act upon it the next time to improve :)
Let's make that happen, thank you for your support!
I watched a vid with a couple of Morris Dancer with white faces that is 'blacked up' with white make up
5:40 I don’t know why you think Moors are blacks
The suggestion that the dance came from Moors was from a failed early 20th century 'researcher' who could not identify any roots so invented the lie to save face instead of admitting failure. Squire of Morris here, 40 years experience of Morris & Rapper Sword dances.
The moors are Arabs and amazighs and the local Iberian tribes .
Hilbert, the English culture is mainly based on Proto-Celtic and Germanic and some adstrat words from Latin...more than 12000 years ago the English and also the Europeans were black like everyone in the world...for example, the Cheddar Man was also dark-skinned..The light skin came with the 2nd wave of early neolithic farmers ..btw. the story of Arthus you maybe have heard..the white dragon won over the black dragon? that is the story of England ...if humans could understand what they read would be really helpful...
Rather ! ! I loved it.
Everyone should care if something is racist. There's no need to be hurtful. It is entirely possible to keep in touch with one's own cultural heritage without it being exploitative of others. If Morris dancing must survive without black face paint (I've only ever seen it a handful of times and only on dancers dressed as crows/ravens), then paint your faces a different color or not at all. It's such a small modification of a miniscule number of cases that could create a positive image of the artform and show empathy for populations who have been harmed by racism throughout the past several centuries, whether or not the origin of the practice of black face painting in Morris dancing was meant to be racist or portray dark skinned humans.
No. Would you tell me to stop or modify my native american face painting in black? If yes, that's cultural repression, which Natives have already suffered under for decades. If no, why are you treating this tradition differently? Is it because of the race of the dancers? That's actually more racist than anything...I am an African & Indigenous American.
so this has nothing to do with celtic roots? this is done in portugal in the celtic part th-cam.com/video/PP4rDVHwhX8/w-d-xo.html
No Celtic roots - 15th century.
The rot set in a long time ago,were they not called Morrismen for a very good reason.Oh you cannot do that you must allow women to join,hence the name change.Our industrial past is now under attack,miners and chimney sweeps had black faces due to the nature of the job.How can Kent have its sweeps fest without a black face?Great channel with good video`s,thank you.
Female Morris dancers date back to the 1500's on record.
The moor rule in spain,Italy,scilly and was all over europe look up blackamoor of england and moor crest of europe.It is obvious to me the morris dance is a moor dance.African dance is world dance to me and music.African have been hear since or before the Roman's.
Facts my friend
No pots round London, but until coal became available there lots of charcoal burning.
Morras dance from spanish Moors vs Christian... and in its turno comes from Italian matacini
Incorrect on all counts.
I don't know if is a English thing or not? I Personally don't think it is, I think it would be safer to say a British thing yes 100% but English? Going back in time, Irish and other country's such as Wales and Scotland children were taken in by the English and worked in such places as sewing mills, chimney sweeps, breaking up coal, parents of these children tried to buy there children back, often going into coal mining or looking for jobs abroad ...London was once a part of Wales, the first Queen Boudica revolt and victory was in London. So I think a Britannica or British custom would be safer to say (My thoughts). If I am wrong let me know where I have wronged?
Not sure what you are trying to say with most of your comment.
But originally a form of entertainment at 15th century European royal courts, morris dancing as we now know it is most definitely English.
The Morris is divided into Cotswold Morris, (Welsh) Border Morris (Shropshire), Molly Dancing (Anglia), North West Clog (Cheshire, Lancashire & West Yorkshire), Longsword (Lancashire & Yorkshire) and Rapper Sword (North East England). All 100% English.
I danced Morris Dancing for afew years and always thought it was from the Moores as in the land?????? wasnt it to celebrate fertility, harvests, wool and meat, eat drink and be merry, to meet at the crossroads. Black faces.....what about krampus....now you have something to moan about....
Nothing to do with pagans, fertility, harvests etc - Victorian / Edwardian wishful thinking.
4:22 you looking at the wrong pictures
Hilbert, your comparisons In this video are not so good at all, did not expect that from you. Also, unfortunately, many traditions do dissappear Bert, this is part of human history, this is how we left the cave.: )
Name of dance Morris is not a Flemmish word but comes from God Mars. It is an ancient military fraternal dance brought by the Romans from Dacia. It was used to celebrate the Cult of Fertility and masculinity all over ancient Europe about 21st of June ( and today Father's Day). No connection at all with African people, moors or slavery.
Twaddle.
According
to L.G. Pine, the Editor of Burke's Peerage , Jews "have made
themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two
classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual. So closely
linked are the Jews and the lords that a blow against the Jews in this
country would not be possible without injuring the aristocracy also."
(Tales of the British Aristocracy1957, p.219.) - See more at:
www.henrymakow.com/000447.html#sthash.EGof3jJt.dpuf
There were always Black People in the British Isles!! Let’s debate!!
@@gundissalinus where did these native whites come from?
@@gundissalinus where did the Anglo Saxon, Romans, goths , Franks, Arabs and Celts come from?
@@gundissalinus Where did these people from the Russian Steppes, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia come from thousands of years ago?
@@gundissalinus Are you saying Black skin comes from white skin and white skin is dominant and Black skin is recessive?
@@gundissalinus Did you erase your comment about the first people being pink?😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Mayolè.
Sir Granville Bantock once said "An Englishman should try everything once. Except for Incest and Morris Dancing" . Essentially it is intincically silly as is all traditional folk dancing but harmless.
Oh get over yourselves , Folks.
Morris is Moorish.
Just like "Alcohol" is an Arabic word.
You do have knowledge on this topic but i hear some ignorance as well. I dont think this is racist tho. But i canunderstand why some black people dont like it. England has a history of racism towards black people. They mocked black by doing blackface. Thats why it is illigal today. We dont have this in the Netherlands but we do have black Pete what i think is based on racism. The African tribes that paint their faces white isnt linked to white people at all. Their traditions are probably older than the white race.
You need to do research...
Thank you for this explanation of blackface in Morris Dancing. It has confirmed my suspicions that this use of blackface is completely racist. You said they painted their faces to resemble the Moors who were Black. That is blackface and it is racist. Your other examples of 'whiteface' and Native Americans riding horses (what???) were excellent examples of false equivalences. You also said, almost in the same breath, that no one is offended by it, and yet many people are calling for it to be banned. Well, if they're calling for it to be banned, it's likely because many people are offended. Many symbols come to take on different meanings and those meanings can be incredibly offensive and traumatic to people. The swastika was an ancient symbol used in Hinduism and Buddhism. Are you prepared to go around waving a flag with a swastika on it, just because for you it has a different meaning? When it comes to racism, sexism, or any other ism, intention DOES NOT MATTER. It is the effect that matters. And in this case, the effect (other than deeply hurting people which it appears you don't care about) will be a total loss of Morris dancing if blackface is not removed (which you do care about). Are you willing to die on that sword and sacrifice the entire tradition just so you can paint your face black? Remember, slavery was a tradition, and a very lucrative one at that. ALL traditions evolve over time. It would be nice if people did too.
Few people were calling for it to be banned.
But following the rise of 'Black Lives Matter' the panicked Morris organisations decided to pre-empt any possible accusations of racism by banning the use of full face black makeup.
And blacking up is a 19th
century practice - they weren't imitating the Moors, they were imitating the theatrical minstrel troupes.
The people of England has seen black people long before the invasion. Look into the nimble blackamoors, picts and gypsies. The Scots proper were also black. I agree that this dance didn't come from slavery. Moore in Europe goes farther back than the Norman invasion. You can read ancient and modern Britons for info on this. If it was possible to post screenshots here, I could post many that confirm this. Here's a quote "in the medieval anecdote that Scott appends to Ivanhoe, it was remarked that when a man (a native of this country) wished to simulate a jongleur (another name for a gypsy), he had to transform himself, temporarily into an Ethiopian." The book I mentioned above was written in the 1800's and remarks that there were still at that time remnants of those black men that had been in Europe since time immemorial. They were persecuted and killed for not changing their way of life to the "civilized" ways of the normans and even sent to American plantations as slaves at a slightly earlier time than the authors. There is a great deal of interesting history on this. There was also a great deal of intermixing between the Moore or gypsies with the normans which is the cause of the much lighter gypsies that remained and the term gypsy became a general term describing anyone who lived in the manner of the people who refused to live in houses and follow the laws of the land. You may be interested in this as a student of history. If so, I'd be happy to share some sources other than the two I placed here with you.
Also from ancient and modern britons, "Now, although it eventually came to be danced by men of white complexion, this dance (as already pointed out) was originally 'the dance of the blacks'."
From pg 396
@@hughjohnson6684
Unhistoric nonsense.
Total bollox.
I am black and i must admit it seemed like a Micky take of black people why not have green face Morris dancers instead nobody would feel offended then i think that would be a solution.
The intention was to be a disguise to prevent identification to evade prosecution for begging and soot was the handy material to use, not a conscious choice to be racist or suggest being part of an ethnic group. Just a disguise when begging had harsh punishments. Rural folk had hard times over Winter with little farming work and dancing for money helped out.
This guy is absolutely just making outrageous excuses for Morris dancing not being racist..'the Morris dancers sometimes having blackface to imitate moors isn't racist or cultural appropriation, because that's the same as Native Americans(or American Indians, whichever is proper/appropriate, sorry I'm not sure, I'm not perfect either) used horses for Actual transportation, which are European(they're not, they evolved in the Americas, granted originally as a smaller animal subtype which over time evolved & also bred selectively by Europeans), and he says Morris Dancing isnt the same as Minstrel shows, such as shown in this video, apparently because theyre purposely imitating to insult, but blackface is blackface, no matter the intention.
But that's Not the info I was interested in.
I wanted proper information, about the dance & the outfit, not this..
The dance is said to be Moorish in origin & not 'borrowed', the stick a substitute for a Scimitar(or similar type of weapon, isn't my strong point at all)? That would mean it may be from as far back as the crusades, with Noblemen & Knights, and when they went they would've taken Squires, Pages and an entire host of hangers-on & servants, plenty of people to encounter & experience many cultures & absorb different aspects,(for the record that's my own theory if it is Moorish), that would be nearly a thousand years, to change, interpret, perform, modify, reinterpret & adapt, making it a unique & original thing in itself, not any kind of appropriation, or lack of culture. Everything comes from somewhere, originates with some nugget of an idea and coalesces in some form, I don't think, after that amount of time, it has to be anything other than what it is.. but, and I'd like to know, where did the clothing originate? Why are there bells? Do the colours they wear matter? Is the headgear significant at all? Are the particular steps there for any particular reasons, is the stick, in fact meant to be anything other than the stick? Like a Scimitar?
If it's is about begging in times past, I Still have these same questions??
My Final bit...for the record I also am Scottish, I don't think it's a lack of culture in the English at all, I reason some of my questions are valid, some have answers/reasons..(I hope), and my fellow countryman's disparaging remarks are really a lack of knowledge & therefore also a lack of understanding, like my own..
Loads of bullshit, Morris Dance is much older and his origins comes from Roman Empire more exactly by the auxiliary Roman legions of Dacians .AVE LEGIONARI !
Rubbish.
@@YorkyOne British History my boy I'm not playing smoke and mirrors here , just type in exactly like that : Calusul Romanesc traditie in Anglia ? And you will be shocked how truly I am