There are two distinct styles of sword dancing native to England. Longsword is mainly from the Yorkshire in northern England and is characterised by men holding flexible metal or wooden swords and weaving complex patterns.
The other popular style of sword dancing is Rapper. This uses flexible steel swords and is similar to Longsword, except generally danced very much faster, with more complex figures and with intricate stepping. Rapper developed in the coal mining villages around Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-East of England.
As with many English traditional dances, both are now also performed outside England, especially in the USA and other English-speaking countries, but even in more surprising locales such as Norway!
Please submit sites primarily concerned with longsword or rapper. Teams who primarily dance Morris but who also include sword dances in their repertoire are best submitted to the appropriate Morris Dancing section in the category above. If you are submitting a team site, please remember you are submitting a description of the website not a description of the side. So please include such details as whether the site contains things such as an events programme, photograph album, contact details, side history, dance notations, etc... Do also include some basic details of the side though, in particular the gender(men/women/mixed) and the location (town or village and county and country if outside England). Do not repeat the name of the side in the description if it is in the title. Thanks.