At its business meeting on 10th May the Section committee set itself the target of publishing the first issue in a new series of ‘Medieval Yorkshire’ by December 2014. A number of people have already generously offered to submit material and we look forward to receiving this in due course. Two long-standing members have kindly given a small grant to assist with the production of the volume. There is, however, still scope for additional contributions of papers given the amount of space likely to be available, and we very much hope that other researchers will be willing to support this new venture by providing accounts of their work.
We hope to achieve a degree of variety in the topics covered and to combine longer, feature articles with shorter reports, book reviews and accounts of lectures for example, all written by knowledgeable authors for an intelligent readership. Beyond that, the intention is that the result should reflect well on the Section and the Society as a whole, with whose other publications our journal will be co-ordinated.
Anyone who feels they may be in a position to offer material this year is invited to make contact with us as soon as possible. Technical matters such as word-processing and illustrations can be dealt with then.
We are very fortunate in being able to offer members an additional lecture meeting, to be held at 2pm on Saturday 14th June on the Chantry Chapel on Wakefield Bridge. This is a joint lecture between Wakefield Historical Society and the Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. The speaker, Dr Laynesmith, will talk about Cecily, Duchess of York. As I’m sure many readers and members will know, Cecily Neville was the wife of Richard, Duke of York, who was killed at the Battle of Wakefield. Dr Laynesmith will cover the tumultuous career of this mother of kings, who was the only major protagonist of the Wars of the Roses to live through the entire conflict. It will address the conflicting strands of her reputation for sanctity and recent debates about her adultery. Dr Laynesmith will focus on Cecily’s political role through the 15th century, her responsibilities as the wealthiest noblewoman in England and on her motherhood.
Please note that as space in the Chantry Chapel is limited, Medieval Section members should book their free place in advance by emailing pamjudkins@btinternet.com or phoning 0797 144 9463. Tickets for non-members (i.e. members of neither Wakefield Historical Society nor Medieval Section) cost £5. Please return the slip below with a cheque made out to Wakefield Historical Society to: WHS, 18 St John’s Square, Wakefield, WF1 2RA.
The Chantry Chapel can be reached by public transport from Wakefield Westgate Station on the free circular City Bus, getting off at The Hepworth Gallery, or on foot from Kirkgate Station. For more information see https://www.wymetro.com/BusTravel/freetownandcitybuses/Wakefield/
Pam Judkins has kindly pointed out that the venue is very close to The Hepworth Gallery in case people attending would like to combine the two. The Hepworth has a good café. Also it is on the free City Bus route and has parking nearby (double yellow lines on the bridge outside the Chapel, but never enforced).
Vikings Life and Legend exhibition at the British Museum
Last Saturday Christine and I went down to London to see two museum exhibitions: the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain exhibition at the Natural History Museum and the Vikings Life and Legend exhibition at the British Museum. For obvious reasons this blog post concerns itself with the latter.
We had to book in advance to see the Vikings Life and Legend and had to choose a time slot.The BM’s bookings management system has to accommodate the large numbers of visitors who come to see their Blockbusters. However, we wondered why we bothered because when we went in, the first room was very small and the previous intake of visitors were still looking at, or rather waiting to look at, the exhibits in the cases. Even with a booking system and tight control of what time you went in, visitors still had to queue to see the exhibits. As many visitors had opted for audio tours and insisted on remaining at the display cases until they’d heard every word of the commentary, everyone else was left ‘rubber-necking’ in a largely vain attempt to peer over their shoulders to see or read something. We somehow walked past the Vale of York hoard without realisiing it was there the press of visitors around the case was so thick. Thank heavens Joyce Hill is talking to the Medieval Section on 10th May on this topic.
The choice was to wait an excessively long time to try and see what was in the cases or to pass on to something else in the hope of coming back later in the hope that the crowd would pass. But it never did because the next lot of visitors was already coming in and so we didn’t bother. This set the tone for the whole exhibition, which I regret to say is badly laid out, poorly lit and with often illegible labelling, even if you do have the luxury of being able to see the exhibits through the surrounding scrum.
The exhibits can be the best in the world – and these almost certainly were – but if you can’t see it’s a waste of time. Wasn’t this what the booking system with the time slots was supposed to avoid?
We weren’t the only visitors to feel this way. Neil Handley writing in the Museums Journal this month (May, 2014) commented that if ever a major exhibition was ruined by poor layout and a fraught visitor experience, this is it. He called it a ‘cattle crush of an exhibition’ and we agree entirely.
Sainsbury Gallery entrance
We hoped things would get better in the main viewing gallery – the specially-funded Sainsbury gallery was built precisely to help the British Museum put on these kinds of popular exhibitions. The gallery was dominated by the remnant of the longest Viking surviving longship from Roskilde (no.6) but the timbers were dwarfed by the armature which extended to show just how big the vessel had been when complete. It seemed to be the tail wagging the dog. The same effect could have been achieved by marking out the ‘footprint’ of the vessel on the floor of the gallery.
Again this set a trend for the exhibition. The size and scale of the cases seemed hopelessly out of kilter with the exhibits they were supposed to show off to best advantage. A small object was often lost in a massive case. Perversely, a large case with plenty of room for a label inside had its label outside. In one case this was in the dark and low down out-of-sight. At first we and another visitor complained bitterly that there was no label at all. It turned out the lady was standing just in front of it and we couldn’t see it in the gloom. Sometimes it was all but impossible to tell which label related to which exhibit. Personally I’m not a fan of number keys but they were badly needed here.
One of the most moving exhibits is a selection of Viking skeletons discovered at Ridgeway Hill in Dorset. The men appear to have been the crew of a Viking ship that was perhaps shipwrecked. They were beheaded one-by-one on the edge of a pit. A blood-chilling artist’s reconstruction of the massacre in the published account of the discovery ‘Given to the Ground’: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth by Louise Loe, Angela Boyle, Helen Webb and David Score (2014, Oxford Archaeology: £29) isn’t shown in the exhibition. Perhaps that would have brought home to visitors some of the hard realities of life at this period, hard realities that it has become fashionable in academic circles to ignore or explain away as historical hyperbole and racial stereotyping. I was left reflecting on what those men went through waiting in line to be executed, like the victims of Katyn. That the Anglo-Saxons meted out this sort of brutal treatment to their captives may say something about how Vikings treated Anglo-Saxons.
Vikings Life and Legend is open until 22nd June but a word to the wise: try to go during the week when its quieter.
We came out of the exhibition little the better in temper for our visit. I seriously considered asking for our money back but things looked up when we went to see the newly redisplayed Sutton Hoo exhibits which have been given more space in the early medieval gallery. More about that in another post.
Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society 