ABSTRACT

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history.

Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance – custom and tradition – in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays.

As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

part I|168 pages

Folk drama, theatre and performance

chapter 1|28 pages

Towards an anatomy of English customary drama

Theatre, stage, play

chapter 2|20 pages

Performing calendrical pressures

Shrovetide processions and shroving perambulations in premodern England

chapter 4|24 pages

Alongside the mummers’ plays

Customary elements in amateur and semi-professional theatre 1730–1850

chapter 5|19 pages

The Alderley Mummers’ play

A story of longevity

chapter 6|25 pages

A performance bestiary

chapter |13 pages

Performing community

Village life and the spectacle of worship in the work of Charles Marson

chapter 8|19 pages

Boxing Day fancy dress in Wigan

part II|178 pages

Folk dance

chapter 9|19 pages

Merry neets and bridewains

Contemporary commentaries on folk music, dance and song in the Lake Counties during the Romantic period

chapter 10|22 pages

Sword dancing in England

Texts and sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

chapter 11|23 pages

From country gardens to British festivals

The morris dance revival, 1886–1951

chapter 14|18 pages

Fancy footwork

Reviewing the English clog and step dance revival

chapter 15|20 pages

Expanding a repertoire

Leicester Morrismen and the Border morris

chapter 16|21 pages

Dancing with tradition

Clog, step and short sword rapper in the twenty first century

chapter 17|19 pages

‘Sequins, bows and pointed toes’

Girls’ carnival morris—the ‘other’ morris dancing community

part III|230 pages

Folk song and music

chapter 18|22 pages

Re-crafting love and murder

Print and memory in the mediation of a murdered sweetheart ballad

chapter 19|24 pages

Burlesquing the ballad

chapter 20|33 pages

The rise and fall of the west gallery

Popular religious music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

chapter 24|30 pages

Folk choirs

Their origins and contribution to the living tradition

chapter 25|22 pages

‘Past Performances on Paper’

A case study of the manuscript tunebook of Thomas Hampton

chapter 26|35 pages

The performers in the playground

Children’s musical practices in play