The Folklore of Discworld

awareness of the Running of the Bulls, which is done every July at a fiesta at Pamplona in Spain.
    All of which is well and good, but does not even begin to explain what souls, and cakes, have to do with it. Here, by remarkable coincidence, English traditions can again cast light on the problem. In the Middle Ages 2 November, All Souls’ Day, was the day when Christians prayed particularly for the souls of the dead, to speed them on their way from Purgatory to Heaven (as is still done in Catholic countries); on this and the preceding days, it was customary for those who could afford it to give away little cakes to the poor, asking them too to pray for the donor’s dead family and friends. Long after the religious purpose had been forgotten, people made fancy cakes at this time of year, and called them ‘soul cakes’; in the nineteenth century in the rural parts of Cheshire and Shropshire, the poorer people went from farm to farm asking for money, food or drink, with the song:
    Soul, soul, for a souling cake,
    I pray you, good missis, for a souling cake,
    Apple or pear, a plum or a cherry,
    Anything good to make us merry.
    Up with your kettles and down with your pans,
    Give us an answer and we’ll be gone.
    They said they were ‘Going Soul Caking’, but secretly they hoped there’d be some beer to go with the cakes, or, better still, some money. By the end of that century the custom had died out among adults; children, however, were still keeping it up in the 1950s. Though sometimes they forgot about the cakes:
    Soul, soul, for an apple or two,
    If you’ve got no apples, pears will do;
    If you’ve got no pears, ha’pennies will do;
    If you’ve got no ha’pennies, God bless you.
Morris Dancing, Light and Dark
    There are some things Nanny Ogg took good care not to mention to the lady folklorist from the city – the things she calls the ‘real stuff’, things like the Dark Morris. The lady would be bound to get them all wrong anyway.
    Now, even ordinary Morris dancing, what we may for convenience call the Light Morris, is a curious thing, both on Earth and on the Disc. A typical dance involves six men in two lines of three, facing each other; they are all dressed alike, usually in white, with coloured baldrics and decorated hats, and possibly with ribbons and rosettes too; they clash sticks in time to the music, miraculously avoiding one another’s fingers by a hair’s breadth, or wave large handkerchiefs, or clap; they have bells strapped to their ankles and knees. There will be one or two reserve dancers in the team, to replace anyone who retires exhausted or injured; a musician playingan accordion, or a fiddle, or in earlier centuries a pipe and tabor; a Fool; and someone to go round taking the collection.
    On one level it’s a public display of skill, strength, stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness, which some people in Lancre think of as entertainment and others as a form of martial art (especially when sticks and buckets are involved). There is a definite competitive edge to it. You can have events like the Fifteen Mountains All-Comers’ Championships, which the Lancre Morris Men have won no fewer than six times. It gives the teams a chance to dress up and swagger around, to be someone special.
    In Elizabethan England, the strict Puritans thought the swaggering was much too much fun, both for the dancers and the crowd. In 1583 Philip Stubbes complained furiously in his Anatomie of Abuses that at village festivals there would be Morris Men dressed in ‘green, yellow, or some other light wanton colour’:
    And as though that were not gaudy enough, I should say, they bedeck themselves with scarfs, ribbons and laces, hanged all over with gold rings, precious stones and other jewels; this done, they tie about either leg twenty or forty bells, with rich handkerchiefs in their hands, and sometimes laid across their shoulders and necks, borrowed for the most part from their pretty Mopsies or loving Betties, for bussing them in the dark … Then march this heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs fluttering above their heads like mad men, their hobby horses skirmishing among the throng.
    On a second level – at any rate in England, where it has flourished (off and on) for at least six hundred years – Morris dancing used to be an excellent way for working men in country districts to