EARLY MORRIS: A BROAD PERSPECTIVE
In 1381, John of Gaunt set up a Court of Minstrels at Tutbury in Staffordshire [1, 2]. This was presided over by an elected King and was allowed to exercise authority over all the craft in five of the midland counties. In 1386, John of Gaunt brought back a troupe of Moorish dancers from Spain. The combination of their practices with those proper to the English Fool's Dance is said to have provided a basis for the Morris Dance. It was in honour of John of Gaunt, therefore, that Robin Hood and Morris dancers continued to wear his emblem of three ostrich feathers and the Red Lion on his shield after his marriage with Constance of Castile provided the name of inns (eg Padstow and Kingston-upon-Thames) which were for centuries the starting point for ceremonial May Day dances. Note that although the name Morris may be a distortion of the word Moorish, there is not a direct line of descent but an intertwining of that culture with an older English tradition.
The earliest direct references to morris dancing refer to objects with representations of morris on them left in wills [3]. In 1458, Alice de Wetenhale, who was the widow of a merchant from Bury St Edmunds, and who had thereafter married a London merchant [4]:
lego Caterine filie mee ... iij ciphos argenti sculptos cum moreys daunce cum unico cooperculo ad eosdem (I leave to my daughter Catherine 3 silver cups with a morris dance engraved on them and with a single cover to them)
Also in 1458 at York, from the will of Sir Thomas Chaworth [5]:
Sir Thomas praith his seid executors that ... thai delyvere to William Chaworth his aldest soon ... iij peces of silver ... the which oon of thaym coveryth, another with a flatt knoppe and with a Moresk yeron.
In the 1510 will of a Coventry fishmonger called Jackson [3] there is:
My cuppe wt the morres daunce
There was one morris cup belonging to the royal family, which appeared in the records until Charles II disposed of it to the Netherlands where it was probably melted down - he was short of money at the time.
References to actual dancing do not occur until December 1466 and New Years Day 1467 in the household accounts at Lanherne in Cornwall as 'moruske' (morisk or moresque) [6]. Lanherne is on the current Ordnance Survey map in the village of St Mawgan (as are Higher Lanherne and Lower Lanherne at OS/SW880680 and OS/SW874674 respectively. A possible translation is pilchard (hernen) enclosure (lan)!. The Guild records for London indicate dancing on the 28th June 1477 for a dance specifically called 'morisse' [7]. The reference to dancing in Plymouth in 1482 on the next page is then potentially only the third record of morris dancing in the history of England.