Honorary Life Member – Michael Heaney

See list of Honorary Life Members and Friends of the Morris Federation.

Michael Heaney – Honorary Life Member (2025)

Nomination by Jerry West on behalf of The Morris Federation Committee at our AGM in 2025:

Mike Heaney is perhaps best known to members of the Morris Federation as a musician for Eynsham Morris and for his work on the history of morris dancing and his championing of the Oxford antiquary Percy Manning.  Many of you will have seen Mike’s online talk for the Morris Federation in April 2023, More morris than you can shake a stick (or handkerchief) at.

Mike’s interest in morris started after he moved to Oxford in 1970. He joined Oxford City Morris in 1976, having been inspired, as so many were back then, partly after watching a performance by Gloucester Old Spot, at Bampton the previous year.  

Knowing he had an academic background, Oxford City asked Mike to “bring the side history up to date”.  Mike later said “So I started digging and never stopped. In the end, I produced 11 volumes for Oxford City, bringing the history up to 1982. … I’ve always been one for digging down to the roots of things, and I’d got the bug [to pursue my research into the morris].”  Mike’s professional career was spent at the Bodleian Library in Oxford which meant that he was ideally placed to conduct research into the topics that interested him: morris, Slavic languages (his degree subject) and cryptozoology (the study of legendary animals). 

Moving to Eynsham in the early 1980s Mike joined the revived village side as a dancer until his knees gave out and has been a musician for them ever since.

Combining his professional and social interests, Mike produced An introductory bibliography on Morris Dancing (EFDSS, 1985) the first modern catalogue of published works on morris dancing.  There were 173 references, extended to 188 in a 1990 addendum!  For those of us interested in the history of the morris, this was an invaluable resource, bringing together for the first time an up to date list of publications likely to be of interest.  Of course, this was before the Internet as we now know it, so getting copies of these documents usually involved the mysteries of Inter-Library Loans from the British Library out-store at Boston Spa. Nonetheless, we now knew that the publications existed and could at least try to find them.

At this time, Mike met up with John Forrest, an American academic who had started researching the early morris a few years beforehand. They agreed to collaborate, and the result was the Annals of Early Morris (University of Sheffield, 1991) and companion article Charting Early Morris in the Folk Music Journal (v6 n2, pp. 169-186). The Annals attempted to list all original-source references to morris, and all morris-dancing events, up to the year I750.   It contained 851 such references, dating the earliest at 1458.  In the thirty years since then, this number has nearly doubled at least 1,444 and the earliest reference pushed back to 1448!

Forrest published his magnum opus The History of Morris Dancing 1458 – 1750 (James Clarke & Co, 1999) and it is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural transmission of morris and its context in England as seen through the contemporary evidence.

Despite a busy day job, Mike kept up a stream of publications on the morris and its history through the 1980s and 1990s, slowing hardly at all on his appointment as Executive Secretary  of the Bodleian Library in the 2000s and captaining the winning team (from the Library) on “University Challenge: the Professionals” (quizmaster Jeremy Paxman) in 2006!   Mike is still today an active researcher with an enviable publication record.

But it was only on his retirement in 2012 that Mike was able finally to collate and publish his decades of research.  His first work was produced in conjunction with his ex-employer: a full Library catalogue of the Percy Manning Collection and the publication of Percy Manning: The Man Who Collected Oxfordshire (Archaeopress, 2017).  Manning was a Collector (capital-C) who amassed a huge collection of antiquarian and archeological items (now at the Pitt-Rivers and Ashmolean museums in Oxford) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and who also conducted research into the folklore and customs of his home county, Oxfordshire, including, of course, morris dancing (at Bampton and elsewhere).

In 2018, Mike was instrumental in the organisation of a two-day conference The Histories of the Morris in Britain, held at Cecil Sharp House in conjunction with the Historical Dance Society and the EFDSS, with the support of all three Morris Organisations, and edited the subsequent published proceedings, which are freely available online.

But it had always been Mike’s intention to complete his own history of the morris and The Ancient English Morris Dance (Archaeopress, 2023) is the result.  An astonishing 420 pages of superb research, it covers the morris not as transmission through context (as per Forrest) but as evolution through history “to illuminate the role and significance of the dance itself” (ibid, p. xi). The book is in five parts: Emergence (1448-1569); Contention (1570-1659); Fragmentation (1660-1800); Re-emergence (1801-1899); and Revival (1899-present).  We cannot hope to either summarise the contents or do the book justice here, we can only say that it too is essential reading for everyone interested in where the dances forms they enjoy so much came from – though perhaps not in one sitting!

The Committee of the Morris Federation would like to recognise Mike not only for his published works, but also for his quiet support in different ways, his willingness to provide advice and to share his knowledge, and propose that the Morris Federation extend to Michael Heaney its Honorary Life Membership.

Michael receives his certificate and badge from Pauline Woods-Wilson at JMO 20th bithday in London in 2023:Save