For a little light relief from this monomaniacal approach, we sometimes had a crack at a couple of the local dances at practice. Early on in our life, we began an annual custom of "wassailing" the village and environs of Breinton on January 6th, when our local dances would make their only public appearance. It was also an opportunity for the newer men to dance out, with the less demanding dances, in preparation for a few months of hard work at the Cotswold dances for the summer months.
We decided not to change our kit for Wassailing, keeping baldrics, toppers, whites, and unblackened face. The exception was going into brown breeches instead of white trousers, more in keeping with the traditional weather and the state of the rural roads. Over the years, we began to dance out more regularly in the winter, and kept to our local dances at these times, our Green Man seasonally transformed into a Winter Fool.
Meanwhile, the Welsh Border Morris was becoming more well-known to the world at large, due to Silurian Morrismen and others. The Shropshire Bedlams also began to make an impression with their Border-inspired (but invented) dances and kit. We carried on with our winter dancing, with our usual low profile.
It was apparent
to us that we were seeing the birth of the "ancient" tradition of Welsh Border
Morris, as defined by E.C.Cawte in the EFDSS journal in 1968. Certain features
have now become obligatory, such as "whooping" and massed bands of music,
black faces, beribboned shirts. We remain, as always, unfashionable.
Research in the Ring Border Archives throws up some interesting facts. The local sides didn't always black up (Shock! Horror!). Some had baldrics. In the early 19th C the music of choice was the ubiquitous pipe-and-tabor (and we often use it). The most obvious interesting fact is that there was no Welsh Border Morris tradition, but a collection of autonomous village teams with one or two dances of their own. We try to reflect this by retaining and emphasising the differences between the dances, establishing different styles of single-step where there is no collected detail, etc.