Though he certainly thought it more than just a group of seven old men (and one young 'un) cavorting on the Sandfield lawn of a Boxing Day morning, Sharp was not yet aware of the full significance of what he had seen. But its ancient lineage was well-known to him.

There were stories that the dance had been brought back to England by Crusaders, home from fighting the Moors. Certainly it was known by the fifteenth century: a will from 1458 mentioned a “silver cup sculpted with Morris dance”. The sixteenth century account books for several churches list expenditures for the purchase of Morris bells and costumes, and there was also income from the rental of costumes to neighbouring parishes. The dance had been performed at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the tradition was described even then as “ancient''. In Shakespeare's Henry V, the Dauphin says:

Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance.

So Whitsun Morris dances were sufficiently common for the French royalty to know of them (and be scornful of them). In Henry VI part two, the Duke of York says of the rebel, Jack Cade:

Him caper upright like a wild Morisco
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.

In one scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen by Fletcher, the Morris is performed by a team of men and a team of women. This play was performed before Elizabeth I at her house on Drury Lane.

To Coverdale, writing in 1547, the dance was “the deuyls morys”. The description of the Morris by the Puritan, Philip Stubbes, is well known:

“They strike up the Devil's dance withall: then martch this heathen company towards the church and churchyards, their pypers pyping, the drummers thundering, their stumpes dancing, their belles jyngling, their handkercheefes fluttering about their heads like madde men . . .

“But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus. They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this May-pole (this stinking idol, rather), which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometime painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women or children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkerchieves and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground round about, bind green boughs around it, set up summer halls, bowers and arbours hard by it. And then fall they to daunce about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.”  (Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses: Contayninge a Discoverie of Vices in a Verie Famous Island Called Ailgnia, Made Dialogue, 1583)

Later commentators saw the Morris as a fertility ritual, and Stubbes would have agreed with them:

“I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled."

Stubbes claimed to have spent “seven winters” travelling the land collecting the “abuses” he lamented, like a latter day News of the Screws, and in many ways he could be considered to be an early folklorist, despite his condemnation of the things he found. But the earliest reference to the Morris quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary confirms his view that the Morris was hardly to be performed in polite company; a writer of 1513 complained of “thar morisis and syk riot”.

A writer of 1614 put the custom into verse:

It was my hap of late by chance
To meet a country Morris dance
When chiefest of them all, the fool
Plaid with a ladle
When every younger shak'd his bells
And fine Maid Marjan with her smoile
Show'd how a rascal played the roile
And when the Hobby Horse did wicky
Then all the wenches gave a tity
But when the gan to shake their boxe
And not a goose could catch a foxe
The Piper then put up his pipes
And all the woodcocks looked like snipes, etc.

This account was confirmed in a dictionary of 1742: “an antick dance, performed by five men and a boy in a girl's habit, with his head gaily trimmed up. Dr. Brewer tells us it was brought to England in the reign of Edward III, when John of Gaunt returned from Spain. In the dance bells were jingled, and staves or swords clashed. It was a military dance of the Moors or Moriscoes, in which five men and a boy engaged; the boy wore a morione or head-piece and was called Mad Morion. The Maid Marian is a corruption of Mad Morion.”

In 1813, the custom was still well enough known for Southey to refer to it in his Wat Tyler (set in the time of the peasants' revolt of 1381).

The Morris was not confined to England. According to the account of Edward Haies, captain of the Golden Hinde, in 1583 his crew performed Morris dances in what is now Canada for “the solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages”, who must have wondered at these paleface wardances.  Modern folklorists link the Morris with the calusari (or “little horse dancers”) of Romania:

“Like Morris Dancers the Calus squads wear special costume, distinguishable from the festive dress of ordinary villagers. In many parts they wear straw hats like boaters, covered with flowers and embellished with ribbons. . . They have diagonal sashes or baldrics across the chest, and leggings with bells between knee and ankle: all familiar Morris gear. For some of their dances and in their promenades they carry sticks and are thus allied to the category of sword-dancers. They are also distinguishable by the embroidered handkerchiefs given them by the village girls and by the children's caps hanging from their belts (perhaps an echo of the idea of children as non-initiates, between two groups, the living and the dead).

“Another mark is the bunch of woollen tassels dangling in front of the vataf or leader, with which now and then he makes saucy gestures. The leader of the Barca team also carries a wooden club covered with hare-skin and called the neica or 'old man', with which he frightens the children and threatens the women. Probably it is a modification of the wooden phallus which the Fool or Mute in some calus teams wears hidden under his apron. The phallus has a pulley at its root and a cord runs from the pulley to the toe of the Mute's sandal. If he kicks back hard the phallus pops out from under the apron to the admiration of all present.”A. L. Lloyd: The Ritual of the Calus any light on the Morris? (Folk Music Journal, EFDSS, 1978, pp. 318-319). In the same issue of the Journal, Lucile Armstrong reported seeing stick dances performed in Belorado, in the Spanish province of Burgos, and in Santo Domingo de Silos, where the dance was performed in church after the Mass on July 2, “with the usual figures such as in our English Morris dances”..– A. L. Lloyd: The Ritual of the Calus – any light on the Morris? (Folk Music Journal, EFDSS, 1978, pp. 318-319). In the same issue of the Journal, Lucile Armstrong reported seeing stick dances performed in Belorado, in the Spanish province of Burgos, and in Santo Domingo de Silos, where the dance was performed in church after the Mass on July 2, “with the usual figures such as in our English Morris dances”

Surprisingly, Sir James Frazer made no reference to the Morris in his study in magic and religion, The Golden Bough, but in his section on tree worship, he quoted Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880):

“ . . . the mummer was regarded not as an image but as an actual representative of the spirit of vegetation; hence the wish expressed by the attendants of the May-rose and the May-tree that those who refuse them gifts of eggs, bacon, and so forth, may have no share in the blessings which it is in the power of the itinerant spirit to bestow. We may conclude that these begging processions with May-trees or May-boughs from door to door ('bringing the May or the summer') had everywhere originally a serious and, so to speak, sacramental significance; people really believed that the god of growth was present unseen in the bough; by the procession he was brought to each house to bestow his blessing. The names May, Father May, May Lady, Queen of the May, by which the anthropomorphic spirit of vegetation is often denoted, show that the idea of the spirit of vegetation is blent with a personification of the season at which his powers are most strikingly manifested.”

In the Oxfordshire village of Bampton-in-the-Bush, to this day, the Morris side has a member who carries around a fruit cake impaled on a sword. The bearer of the cake assures all who contribute in return for a few crumbs, that any woman who does so will fall pregnant within the year. Arguably a more ancient side than that at Headington, claiming an unbroken tradition stretching back over several centuries (unlike Headington, which re-started after a break at the end of the nineteenth century) the Bampton dancers were visited by Sharp in 1908. Its musician and former fool, Billy “Jinkey” Wells, whose first fiddle was made of a rifle-butt and a corned-beef tin, claimed his family had been connected with the Morris for over two hundred years and seven generations:

“A hundred years ago my grandfather was head of the Morris, leader of the Morris, and trainer of the Morris; a century ago his two sons were in it for ever so many years; his grandfather, Thomas Wells, was head of the Morris a hundred years before that, and he was always called 'Jingle Wells' always. His name was Tom, but he was called 'Jingle'.”Conversation with Peter Kennedy, October 1952, published in Journal of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, 1956, p. 1Conversation with Peter Kennedy, October 1952, published in Journal of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, 1956, p. 1

Many years later, a woman called Mary Neal admitted that she and others had seriously diluted the strength of the old dances when they taught them across the world:

“. . . by putting women on to this masculine rhythm I had quite innocently and ignorantly broken a law of cosmic ritual, and stirred up disharmony which became active as time went on. . . I believe now that this misuse of the Morris dance was the reason for the bitter estrangement between my colleagues and myself, the cause of which was as unknown to them as it was to me.”

But what she failed to realise was that, at a time when war with Germany was looming on the horizon, interest among what Sharp called “the lettered classes” in folk dance and song had played a significant role in England's attempt to rediscover its cultural identity.