Brimmfield, danced by Beltane Border Morris

BRIMFIELD MORRIS DANCE In 1909, as the photographs taken bv Miss Leather show, the men wore fancy dress, has their faces blacked with white painted patches, but had no bells or handkerchiefs, only short thick sticks. These were six to eight inches long and one and a half inches diameter. The dancers had box hats and the musician a large hat with feathers. The men said that they remembered when the dancers wore smock frocks, breeches, white stockings and gaiters with soft felt hats - "Jim Crow" hats after the style of the clerical hat of the time. They used to have a separate fool whose tunic and trousers were made of any gaudy stuff. The melodian player had no fixed music for the dance, polkas were preferred but sometimes schottiches played rather slow. They used to have a fiddler, Tom Payne, but he had played since 1895 for the side at Richards Castle, two miles to the west. The dancing stopped at Brimfield with WWI.