HORN DANCING
EXCERPT FROM TRUE BRITS ©JR DAESCHNER

Every Monday after the first Sunday following September the 4th, Tony Fowell and a dozen family and friends perform the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, reputedly one of the oldest traditions in Britain-and Europe.

In many parts of the world, wearing horns used to be the sign of a cuckold. But in Abbots Bromley, it's a great honour.

Dressed in flat caps and short trousers, the men hoist ancient antlers over their heads and traipse through the village and surrounding Staffordshire countryside, dancing, drinking and collecting money along the way.

Before you dismiss it as merely morris dancing with horns, you should know that most of the Abbots Bromley men are quick to distance themselves from the jingle-jangle ankle-slapping of their country counterparts. ("Morris dancers are kind of nancy boys," one tells me.)

Admittedly, though, the hard men of horn dancing do have traits in common with their more effete counterparts.

Both traditions feature faux-archaic costumes designed to conjure up a romantic notion of Olde England. They also have several stock characters in common, like the Jester, the Hobbyhorse and a gender-bending Maid Marian.

However-and I can't stress how important this is-in the Horn Dance, there is no waving of hankies, jingling of bells or festooning of nipples (which, come to think of it, makes morris dancing sound more exciting than it is).

Although the first record of a Horn Dance style hoedown comes from the late 1400s, many morris men believe it predates their own tradition, making it a possible forebear-maybe even a relic of the Pagan Fertility Dance that supposedly swept Stone Age Europe.

As a result, Abbots Bromley is a kind of Mecca for morrissers-not to mention anorak folkies, born-again pagans and other world-class eccentrics.
Though deeply unfashionable, Staffordshire is home to families so old they make the Royal Family look like fresh-off-the-boat immigrants.

The Wolseley estate near Abbots Bromley dates from the Anglo-Saxon reign of King Alfred, while the Bagot clan can trace its roots back to the Norman Conquest.
In keeping with the rest of the British aristocracy, though, these ancient families have suffered dramatic reversals of fortune in the past century.
Both lost heirs during the wars (one on the Somme; the other in the Normandy landings) and faced spiralling death duties and expenses to keep up their ancestral homes; eventually they resorted to opening their doors to the public.

By coincidence, the scions of both Old World families married brides from the New World: in one case, however, the American wife unwittingly helped bring about the downfall of her husband's family; the other Lady, an Australian, has had more success postponing the inevitable, at least until her death.

In the end, however, both families have suffered the same fate-the loss of their estates after hundreds of years.

READ THE FULL STORY IN TRUE BRITS!