How Percy Manning Saved Morris Dancing by Mike Heaney
Lecture given by Mike Heaney on 16 January 2019 at Cecil Sharp House as part of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library lecture series.
Cecil Sharp’s encounter with the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers on Boxing Day 1899 is famous, but it did not spring out of nothing, and would probably not have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Percy Manning, the first serious researcher into morris dancing. This talk describes how he revived the Quarry dancers as the culmination of a decade-long journey of investigation and discovery, which underlies a lot of what we now know about the history of the dancing.
Picture credits: Alchester camp and handaxe: Ashmolean Museum; regalia and objects: Pitt Rivers Museum; manuscripts: Bodleian Libraries