Yes! Well met in these threads! So happy to find it after some funny other tunes and quick stepping horn dancing elsewhere...

There can never have been just one way of dancing what we now call the Abbots Bromley dance. First documented only in the late 1600's, it goes back to much earlier times, as evidenced by the antlered reindeer skulls that are kept in the church in Abbots Bromley. These have been used by successive generations of dancers (they were no doubt hidden away during Puritan times) have been carbon dated to the 11th and 12th centuries, and would have been imported from Scandinavia, as there were no domestic reindeer herds then in what is now the UK. The dance possibly began as a fertility rite to increase flocks for livestock, or more likely as a dance related to hunting, which means that it had more than entertainment value for villagers as it touched on survival. Based on similar dances seen in other cultures and times, the first dancers likely wore deer hides as "costumes" to go with the antlers, and the dancing and attire changed over the course of centuries, as did the music. The song that you often hear played today for the dance, "The Wearin' of the Green", only dates to the 18th century.

@@gunnarthorsen But Tricia Neal is correct - this is not the Abbots Bromley dance. It is Thaxted Morris team's slowed down modern concoction with no basis in tradition - seemingly to entertain the tourists. Even the tune, which is now synonymous with the horn dance and originating from an Abbots Bromley musician, was never used at Abbots Bromley. It really should be called the 'Thaxted Horn Dance'. The fertility rite origins is the usual pagan mumbo-jumbo with no evidence to back it up (it looks pre-Christian therefore it must be!). And the first written evidence from the 1500's notes a hobby horse but makes no mention of the antlers. So is its origin simply a medieval hobby horse dance with the later additions of antlers? Even Abbots Bromley give a date of 1226 rather than some mystical pagan beginnings (but even that date is based on no evidence whatsoever).

123, 456 their steps are on the 1 and the 4 rather than 1-3, 4-6

It wasn't a horn dance tune.

Same used as the portland revels

+Cassie Rowantree Care to elucidate? If this isn't a version of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, what is?

I agree, iused to watch the horn dance when i lived near Abbots Bromley in the 1960's

Agree - this is a reinterpretation. The original is quite different. They are using the right tune though.

@@billblakely3472 it's a version of something. The antlers are over 1000 years old and much heavier and larger. No violin. The accordion is missing and the tune my people dance to is called Cock o the north. I don't know what this is. It's ok. But it's not THE Abbots Bromley Horn dance

@@JourneymanAlto The Abbots Bromley dancers don't use this tune and according to them never have done.

+Revels North Thank you, I've always wondered why the documentaries online seem to play such a different, upbeat tune, compared to the one I was taught. It's a shame that we don't know the original, but I suppose all traditions change over time

There’s also a tune called Jack Robinson.

The Abbots Bromley dancers have said that 'Robinson's Tune' was never used in the Horn Dance.

[Wheelwright] Robinson's Tune