I've just finished reading "Lancashire For Me", a sort of autobiography by Tommy Thompson who was a broadcaster and writer of dialect stories, film scripts and pieces for the Manchester Guardian in the 1920s and '30s. There's an interesting paragraph in the book which is a contemporary account of morris dancers known as the "Rossendale coco-nutters":

Often, too, the morris dancers came down from the Rossendale valley. These working lads were real tough guys, who thought nothing of dancing twenty and thirty miles, providing there were enough pubs on the way to provide them with sustenance. They were dressed in velvet knee breeches and white tunics and short skirts, decorated with red trimmings, and they carried little mops with ribbons attached. In the palms of their hands they wore "nuts" of wood, and they also had these "nuts" attached to their knees and belts. Sometimes they were known as the "Rossendale coco-nutters." Their dancing was a combination of intricate evolutions, which they emphasised with short leaps and tappings of their "nuts." There is still a band of morris dancers at Bacup in Lancashire, and I introduced them to broadcasting some time ago. Naturally, we could only get the music from their concertina and the tapping of the nuts and clatter of their polished clogs on the stone pavement of a millyard, but it did successfully give the atmosphere.

Interesting to think the coco-nutters and the "tapping of their nuts" were broadcast on the radio.