Longsword in Loftus, East Cleveland - The origins of a Folk dance
- Grace Redpath
- Jun 2
- 5 min read
I'm delighted to share Grace Redpath's fantastic article on folk dance in Cleveland after featuring in 2024's North East History Compendium. Her work celebrates the tradition of longsword dancing, which thrived in the ironstone villages of North Yorkshire. Its 18th century roots were revived some 200 years later, but is greatly remembered among the rolling hills around Loftus and even reached international recognition.
Sitting in recent memory, alongside heavy visual documentation, the Loftus longsword team of the 70s and 80s were rockstars in the field of Folk Dance. Revived in the early 1950s, longsword in Loftus had long been performed in the village, yet not always over a consecutive period.
It is in the villages amongst the Cleveland Hills that unearthed ironstone in the 1850s, and exploited this mineral until the mid-20th Century, that the folk dance of longsword was once performed by male inhabitants. Academic Stephen D. Corrsin comments that the term “Longsword”, ‘seems to date from folk dance and music collector Cecil Sharp’s time, having been coined to distinguish from ‘short sword’ or ‘rapper’ sword dances performed elsewhere in the North East.’ The first written description of a sword dance in the North East came in 1769. In the book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland, James Wallis described how young men during the Christmas period would march dressed in bizarre attire, village to village, visiting every house. It was outside each house that they would stop, entertaining the inhabitants with a dance featuring ‘swords or spears in their hands erect and shining.’ Remarkably, ‘this they call the sword-dance.’ Either a ritual or ceremonial dance, longsword involves 6 to 8 dancers, with each performer holding a single “sword” (a metal strip with a handle). The dance then consists of holding a sword and forming ‘circular patterns performed by stepping or leaping over or under the swords, occasionally breaking into parallel lines to form other shapes’ before climaxing in a “lock”. Enamoured by sword dance, when Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society in 1911, he made the “lock” the logo of the organisation, which is still used today by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
The same year as establishing the EFDS, he published a seminal text on sword dancing, The Sword Dances of Northern England. Amongst his transcriptions of dances is The Sleights Sword Dance. He noted that The Sleights Plough Stots or Eskdale Sword Dancers performed annually on Plough Monday, (the first Monday after twelfth night and the start of the agricultural year) with the dancers once being ‘accompanied by a band of youths dragging a plough, decked with ribbons and greenery – hence the term ‘ ‘Plough Stot,’ i.e., plough bullock.’ In a comparable manner to Wallis’ account, they collected money traveling from Sleights to Whitby as, ‘they stopped every cart, carriage, motor-car, bicycle, etc., they met and solicited labourers in the fields, masons and bricklayers on buildings, and knocked at the door of every cottage and house they passed on the road.’ Sword dance, a custom amongst agricultural workers to gather money over the harsh Northern winter, it is through labour migration linked to industrialisation, (and the intangible nature of the dance style), that variations of the dance led to widespread variations in the villages of the North East. As illustrated by Loftus and their longsword sides.
The East Cleveland village of Loftus is found 15 miles North of Sleights. An article in The Loftus Advertiser from Saturday, December 26th 1883, describes how during a Mummers play (a folk play traditionally performed around the Christmas period), the performers participated in a sword dance.
‘Dressed in grotesque costumes, each representing a distinct character, having its origins in the distant past. They repeated doggerel verses, and generally had in their party one or more skilled in the sword dance, which they perform with much agility, and to the satisfaction of the on-lookers.’
Who these performers are is unknown. Yet, it is possible they included members of the Featherstone family. In 1973 K.M. Gratton, (the then leader of the Loftus longsword team), wrote in the English Dance and Song journal about how a Mr. Featherston taught the dance to local men and members of his family but in the early 1890s, during a time of economic instability, many people from Loftus moved to Poolsbrook in Derbyshire to work in the village mine. Notably, this included the men of the longsword team Mr. Featherston had helped form. Upon returning to East Cleveland, the team disbanded, but as members settled in other ironstone mining villages of the region, they began forming longsword sides there. The most notable was North Skelton, where Sharp visited in the early 1900s on his odyssey to record traditional dances of Northern England.
Sharp did not visit Loftus during this journey as the local vicar wrote to him informing that disappointingly, as of December 1912, “we have no sword dance here nor any other old customs”. It is not till 1951 that we know of longsword once again being performed in the village. Forming part of that year’s Festival of Britain celebrations, Mr. Norminton, the headmaster of the Loftus County Modern School, taught Morris to his pupils with the help of a Mr. Victor Simpson before teaching longsword with Arthur Marshall accompanying on melodeon.
Although a dance traditionally performed by males, during this chapter of Longsword in Loftus, in 1952, female pupils at the school also performed! Yet, by the 1970s and 1980s, it was the men’s team who were making waves in folk dance circles. Performing throughout the North East, at the Royal Albert Hall, visiting folk festivals in France and Norway, as well as winning prizes in Wales and at Teesside‘s own Eisteddfod. Loftus were used as the “yardstick” of all sword dances, but when this momentous Loftus team stopped is unclear, and sadly, the custom once more fizzled out. However, in the 1990s, Longsword was performed by school children in Loftus as teachers who knew of the tradition tried to keep the dance going. Perhaps it's time for another revival?
Grace Redpath graduated from the University of Brighton in 2022 with an MA in Curating Collections and Heritage.
She is currently Learning Manager at the Land of Iron museum in Skinningrove, having previously acted as project cataloguer for Teesside Archives on the Teeswork Archive, and as Assistant Curator at the Redcar Palace community gallery.
She is also a member of North East Statues, a project that explores public art and memory in the Tees Valley and East Cleveland, and she runs the @fortyyearsinamoorlandparish Instagram account, a visual archive of North Yorkshire’s folklore and customs.
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