Customer Reviews

Sword Dances of Northern England Together With the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley

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The Sword Dances of Northern England, originally published in 3 volumes between 1911 and 1913, was the definitive book on the somewhat obscure traditional hilt-and-point sword dances of England, namely the longsword dance of Yorkshire and the rapper dance from the area around Newcastle upon Tyne in the old counties of Northumberland and County Durham. Both of these traditional dances are performed by revival teams spread across both the UK and USA, as well as some traditional teams in their home areas of England - keeping their local traditions alive.

Although Ivor Allsop's book "Longsword Dances" has now supplanted it as the best book on longsword, it remains the definitive guide to rapper, although there were some inaccuracies and in his introductory chapter he tries to draw conclusions about the origins of the dance that are not tenable from the evidence he presents. Although it would be possible to perform the dances based on the information in this book alone, it would be very difficult and I doubt performers would be able to get the style right unless they had seen the dance performed before.

The book has long been out of print - I believe the last reprint was in 1977. This reprint is of volumes 1 and 2 only, and appears to be a photostat of the original printing. It is unfortunate that volume 3 was not included, and the quality of the reprints of Sharp's photographs of the contemporary dancers is very poor. For this reason I have docked a star.

The reprint therefore contains notations for the Kirkby Malzeard, Grenoside, Sleights and Flamborough longsword dances, and the Swalwell, Earsdon and Beadnell rapper dances. There is also a notation for the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, which seems somewhat out of place! Unfortunately, the very popular Winlaton rapper dance was in volume 3 and is not included in this reprint.

In conclusion, a fair effort and well worth the low price compared with copies of older prints from antiquarian booksellers, but it is a shame they could not have included the third volume as well.