by the council, opened in January 1913 on the site already used by the school children for gardening lessons and duly celebrated its centenary in 2013. The National School building was used for Sunday school and Mothers' Union meetings for several years. A harvest festival sale was also held there until 1965. The Sunday school then moved to the church and after about 1955 the Mothers' Union meetings were held in the Lady Mary School building which had become the village hall. In 1966 the National School building was finally declared unsafe and was pulled down; the site is now used for car parking. For some years the county council had the meadow behind the Hollies earmarked for a school playing field. When the Hollies was sold in 1965 the council purchased the field and the playing area adjacent to the 1913 building was completed in 1967. A highlight of the school year has for many years been the Rose Day event when the elected May King and May Queen are crowned at a ceremony incorporating maypole dances. On 1 July 2014 the school officially converted to academy status. It became part of the Innovate Multi-Academy Trust together with Weedon Bec, Woodford Halse and Kilsby Schools. Morris dancing Up to about the mid-19th century, a number of villages in south Northamptonshire had Morris dance teams who performed each spring and early summer as part of their local customs. This ancient English tradition, considered to be very old even at the time of Elizabeth I, was common throughout the area of the Cotswolds and into Northamptonshire. The changes brought about by the enclosures, industrialisation and the railways all changed rural life dramatically. Many of the traditional Morris dance teams just stopped dancing, and their dances were forgotten and lost for ever. Badby had a tradition of Morris dancing, and village men still danced till about the 1870s. They too broke up about then, some moving off to find work. Without new recruits, the dancing stopped. The dances of Badby might have been lost too, but about 1911 the folk song and dance collector Cecil Sharp visited the Daventry area with George Butterworth, the composer, who was a fellow collector and a dancer himself. They sought older villagers who could remember the Morris and the names of those men involved in it. The team costume was described as all white with pleated