Abbots Bromley Horn Dance Tune: A Song History
The tune takes its name from the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley, a Staffordshire village, where six dancers carry reindeer antlers mounted on wooden heads, accompanied by a hobby-horse, a fool, Maid Marian, a boy with a bow and arrow, and a musician.[1][2] In his 1911 study of the sword dances of northern England, which included a chapter on the horn dance, Cecil Sharp placed the yearly performance on the Monday of Wakes week, which falls the day after the first Sunday past 4 September; the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the same reckoning.[1][2] Sharp judged that the earliest account was probably Dr Robert Plot's Natural History of Staffordshire of 1686, which recalled a Christmas-season hobby-horse dance with six men carrying reindeer heads and a collection that paid for church repairs and the poor.[1][3] The antlers may be much older than that account: Andrew Bullen, citing the researcher Theresa Buckland, reports that radiocarbon testing dated the leader's set to around A.D. 1065, give or take eighty years, and the English Folk Dance and Song Society likewise says carbon analysis places the antlers in the eleventh century.[3][4]
Wenceslaus Hollar, Stag, etching, 1625–77. A stag rather than the reindeer whose antlers the dancers carry, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.
The music has a looser history than the dance: Sharp found no fixed tune belonging to it, the musician telling him that any country-dance tune would suit if played at the right pace, and he heard only "Yankee Doodle" and one simple melody.[1] Sharp also cited an 1893 letter from the parish vicar recalling a special tune once played on the fiddle that nobody could then recover.[1] The melody now usually meant by the name came to Sharp from Robert J. Buckley, who as a child in 1857 or 1858 had written it down from the playing of the village wheelwright, a fiddler named Robinson who was then said to be the one person able to play the dance's tune.[5][6][7] Sharp printed it as the first item in The Sword Dances of Northern England: Songs and Dance Airs, its preface dated January 1912.[5]
Bullen notes that features of the tune itself have led to doubts that Robinson's melody really belonged to the dance in earlier times, referring readers above all to Edmund C. Cawte's Ritual Animal Disguise (1978), and over the years the horn dancers have used several other tunes, including "Yankee Doodle" and "Bobby Shaftoe."[3][7][8] Even so, the Traditional Tune Archive regards Robinson's minor-key tune as the melody most closely tied to the dance today.[7][8] Maureen Sellers includes an "Abbots Bromley Horn Dance Tune," in DAD tuning, in Simply Christmas, a 60-page book of dulcimer tablature in her "Simply" series, published by Fingers Of Steel.[9]
Sources
- Internet Archive: "The Sword Dances of Northern England, together with the Horn Dance of Abbots Bromley" (Cecil J. Sharp, 1911).
- Wikisource: "1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Horn Dance".
- Country Dance and Song Society: "The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance" by Andrew Bullen, Country Dance and Song 17 (1987).
- English Folk Dance and Song Society: "Abbots Bromley Horn Dance".
- Internet Archive: "The Sword Dances of Northern England: Songs and Dance Airs" (Cecil J. Sharp, 1912).
- Cecil Sharp's People: "Robinson, Henry".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "St. Anne's Tune".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Robinson's Tune".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Christmas".
- Image: Wenceslaus Hollar, Stag, etching, 1625–77. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.