I have admired most of the research going into the creation of the Channel 4 costumed drama 'Downton Abbey'. In its Christmas Special, there was some kind of village fete with a morris dance team - all men of course! Apart from the obvious questions: Who were they? or, Who were they meant to be? could somebody better placed than me vouch for the likelihood of a Cotswold-influenced morris team performing in North Yorkshire in the early 1920s? One assumes this was not a by-product of the Esperance Working Girls' Guild. Apart from then, I had thought that a mix of the English Folk Dance Society and Cambridge students as 'The Travelling Morrice' was responsible for building up a caucus of interest nationally in the days before the Morris Ring was formed in the 1930s. Is this a case of shurely shome mishtake, or me know too much?
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