For your viewing pleasure
@jackironsides you delight me and I wish to give enough context for everyone to enjoy (though I have never been in your morris team or any archaeology department)
STARTING WITH THE ASIDE:
this is just a strigil for horses
A strigil is a curved metal scraper to remove dirt and oil from the body, used by some ancient Romans.
AND NOW FOR THE MAIN POINT, A TIMELINE, FILLED IN WITH CONJECTURE:
Carboniferous period (like 300 million years ago), formation of the Durham/ Northumberland/ what-would-become-northeast-England coalfields
End of the last ice age (like 13000 years ago), start of continuous human habitation in what-would-become-England
1069-70, the Harrying of the North: William the Conqueror basically destroys northern England. Like, 75% of the people living there are just gone - some killed directly, far more displaced because their farms were destroyed, land remains unused for many years afterwards because there's just nobody there. Northern England for the next millenium has low population density and increased poverty compared to southern England.
Late 1700s to early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution: steam engines get going and England needs a lot of coal to power them. A lot of that coal comes from the northeast. Massive increase in northern English economy, entire pit villages spring up, still poverty but there is work to be had. Winding engines raise and lower cages of miners at shift change, with levels communicated via knocking or rapping a piece of metal sharply some number of times. I can find exactly zero photos of it online, but the string-operated "rapper" in place at Beamish Museum has the exact shape of "rapper" swords that we will get to shortly.
1842, the Mines and Collieries Act: children under 10 banned from underground work in the pits. Pit ponies to haul coal become far more common as a result. (The children still likely work in coal, still likely 12hr shifts at a time, but it's above-ground work like sorting the mined coal not below-ground work like hauling coal and opening/closing ventilation shafts. Except for in the many, many pits which carried on employing them illegally, of course.) Your pit pony, very dirty after their long day hauling coal, may be scraped clean with a flexible bit of metal as shown in the video, also the exact shape of "rapper" swords.
19th century generally, you finish your 12hrs or whatever down the pit, you go to the pub, there's no space, no money, just whatever music and people you can rustle up. A particular type of close-knit formation dance emerges using these two-handled flexible pieces of metal and the style becomes known as "rapper" or "rapper sword dance". To some extent it is developed out of other (rigid) longsword dances and morris dances, idk details, a lot of it is unknowable anyway.
20th century, like many English folk dances rapper mostly dies out and is later revived, I'm not sure if it has a perfectly continuous tradition. Also Maggie Thatcher closing the mines destroys northern economy again (though not as badly as William the Conqueror managed) and the social landscape changes drastically in ways I cannot speak to. Modern rapper teams exist all over the country (not that there are many of them - it is very nerdy even by folk dance standards) and continue to develop the dance in their own ways. Nevertheless, here is a modern performance:
Fun fact: I was briefly in a rapper team (in Australia) with a guy who used to dance with Black Swan (although he isn't dancing in that video).
not to derail but I was so confused by “oh, a strigil for horses” and the subsequent “used by ancient Romans” explanation as if strigils for horses are unusual, that I had to look it up. and it turns out that in English you call strigils for horses curry combs.
In Scandinavia they’re just called strigils (strigle singular, strigler plural)
