Medieval Section Programme – Page 3 – Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society

Lecture 8th April 2017: Ian Roberts on Wakefield Cathedral and St Giles’ Church, Pontefract: New Archaeological Insights

Our speaker today, Ian Roberts, will talk about the new archaeological insights which have emerged from the work on Wakefield Cathedral and St Giles’ Church, Pontefract. He writes: ‘The major re-ordering which involves the excavation of historic church interiors is a relatively rare occurrence. However, in the last five years, two of West Yorkshire’s medieval churches have had extensive floor renewals, providing archaeological opportunities to investigate and reassess long-standing ideas about their development, based upon Victorian observations.’

The lecture will be in the Swarthmore Centre today at 2pm. Our AGM has been postponed until next month.

Medieval Section lecture 11th March 2017: Early Medieval Execution in England and the Problem of the North

Cotton Claudius BIV 59r hanging close-up 2 — Cotton Claudius BIV 59r hanging close-up

The next talk in the spring programme will be given by Alyxandra Mattison, who will discuss the archaeological and historical evidence for execution in early medieval England. Anglo-Saxons had very specific beliefs surrounding judicial punishment and the treatment of criminals in death, many of which came to an end after the Norman Conquest. The impetuses behind these changes and what they meant for the future of criminality in England will be explored. The talk will then venture to the Yorkshire (and the Danelaw) and the problem of how it fit into this Anglo-Saxon scheme of punishment. Did the Danelaw use the same punishments and treatment of criminals as the rest of Anglo-Saxon England? What sort of evidence, or lack thereof, do we have for judicial punishment in the Danelaw? The venue for our meeting will be the Swarthmore Institute in Leeds. We will start at 2pm and there will be time for questions.

The speaker recently completed her PhD on early medieval judicial punishment at the University of Sheffield. She has general interests in bioarchaeology and funerary studies, Anglo-Saxon England, the Norman Conquest, early medieval law, medieval theology, and the medieval view of the body. She currently work as a commercial archaeologist for Northern Archaeological Associates.

February 2017 Medieval Section Lecture

I regret to inform readers that we have just received the news that Professor Sarah Rees Jones, who had stepped in to give the Medieval Section lecture tomorrow afternoon at Swarthmore in place of Dr Peter Addyman has had to pull out due to ill health. In the circumstances we cannot find another replacement in the time avalable, so we regret that the lecture will have to be cancelled. Please pass this news on to anyone you know who you think may not receive it via this means, or through the Medieval section mailing list and blog.

January 2017 Lecture

Our speaker at the first Medieval Section lecture of the new calendar year on 14th January will be Dr Elisa Foster, and she will be talking about ‘Investigating the Head Reliquary of St William of York: Processions, Piety and Place.’ Dr Foster has kindly sent an abstract of her presentation:

From its foundation in 1408, the Corpus Christi Guild in York was responsible for organising a city-wide procession of the Eucharist. Although the shrine used during this procession was destroyed in 1546, inventory records and account rolls reveal that guild members donated luxury items and devotional objects to attach to its surface. Such offerings were quite unusual for Eucharistic shrines, but were more commonly found on the shrines of saints, like those that could have been seen in York Minster. Although the majority of these shrines were located at fixed sites in the cathedral, the head reliquary shrine of St William was borne in procession around the city on the feast of the saint’s translation, and inventory records indicate that it was also adorned with luxury objects. These shrines are not often examined together, but both objects were deeply connected to the civic identity of late medieval York. This paper will argue that that the processional shrines of the Head of St William and Corpus Christi encouraged emulation and rivalry, both spiritually and civically. A comparative analysis of these shrines and their processions thus aims to reveal new insights into the complex nature of medieval civic identity in the City of York.

Elisa Foster a Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow based at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. She received her PhD from Brown University in the United States, where she wrote her thesis on sculptures of the black Madonna in European art from c. 1200-1700. Her research on this topic has been recently published in Studies in Iconography, Peregrinations: A Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture and the edited volume, Envisioning Others: Race, Color and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America. In addition to her research on Black Madonnas, Elisa is co-editor a collection of essays titled Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and Its Afterlives, forthcoming in 2017. Her research in Yorkshire expands her interest in destroyed objects and iconoclasm, focusing specifically on the shrine of Corpus Christi in York, from which her talk on Saturday 14th January is derived.

As usual the lecture will be held at Swarthmore, 2-3pm. We look forward to seeing you there and have a Happy New Year.

Audrey Thorstad: Interaction, Daily Life, and Socialising Spaces in Early Tudor Castles (10th December 2016)

The next lecture in the programme will be by Dr Audrey Thorstad talking about Interaction, daily life, and socialising spaces in early Tudor castles on 10th December. This will be held in the Swarthmore Institute.

Dr Thorstad kindly sent the following abstract and the photograph of Cowdray Castle:-

‘Castles have long been understood as elite military structures. However, recent approaches to castle studies have demonstrated that historical documents and archaeological remains depict a much more complex narrative for those living, working, and visiting a castle site during the Middle Ages and early modern periods. This paper will explore how people – from the lord and his family to members of the household and guests – moved around and used space in English castles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My approach takes into account sources that have not previously been used together in order to explore the layout and chamber arrangements in an age when castles were supposedly in decline. By dismantling the idea of the decline paradigm often used to describe castles after the fourteenth century, this paper will argue that castles were in fact still heavily used by the nobility well into the sixteenth century.’

Riches Revealed: introducing the medieval archives in the collections of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society

xxxxxxxx — The Whixley cartulary, showing pages from the extent of Whixley manor, early 15th century.

Sylvia Thomas, our speaker for the October lecture, kindly sent the following notes about her talk at Swarthmore Education Centre this Saturday:

Since its foundation in 1863 the Society has accumulated significant archive collections from all over Yorkshire, many of them records of major families, some of which date back as far as the thirteenth century. Highlights are the enormous series of surviving court rolls of the manor of Wakefield (1274 – 1925), the fifteenth-century stock book and sixteenth-century lease book of Fountains Abbey, the secular cartulary of Whixley, North Yorkshire (1430), numerous early Yorkshire charters, and much more.

xxxxxxx — Initial from the Fountains Abbey stock book (late 15th century).

In 2015 all these collections were deposited by the Society for safe-keeping in the University of Leeds, Brotherton Library Special Collections, where they are again available for use by the public.

Sylvia Thomas is the former archivist and a past president of the YAHS, and a retired County Archivist of West Yorkshire. She is Joint Editor of the West Riding and Derbyshire volumes of Records of Early English Drama.

April 2016 AGM followed by St George & England

The next Medieval Section AGM will take place on Saturday 9th April 2016 2pm at the Swarthmore Education Centre. Our AGM will be followed by a talk on St George and England by Samantha Riches who will be talking about the material in this largely international cult, and how St George relates to England, including the late Medieval material culture at Windsor, as seen in wall paintings, jewellery, etc.

The image of St George – the medieval knight on his horse, slaying a dragon – is so familiar that it is tempting to assume his history is a simple one, but the reality is very different. St George is one of the most significant mythic characters in Christian culture but he can also be found in other religious traditions, appearing in numerous different guises in cultures the world over. An important figure in Eastern Orthodox, Coptic and western European churches, his analogues can be found in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and the Afro-Brazilian belief system Candomblé; he also makes frequent appearances in ‘pagan’ belief systems due to his identification with nature, springtime and healing.

With or without his dragon, St George has been repeatedly reinvented over the last 1,700 years. Samantha Riches explores this saint’s significance in nations as varied as Lebanon, Ethiopia and Estonia as well as his totemic role for the Roma people, and provides first-hand accounts of celebrations in Georgia, Greece, Malta and Belgium. She describes the inspiration that artists, poets and playwrights have found in myths of St George and considers the sometimes controversial political uses to which the saint has been put.

The first book to draw together many aspects of the international cult of St George alongside some of the evidence for elements in his English cult that have been largely forgotten, St George: A Saint for All published by Reaktion Books is a fascinating history of an enduring icon.

Samantha Riches is a cultural historian based at Lancaster University. She is the author of Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (2011) and St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (2005).

Lecture on 'The Norman Conquest of Yorkshire' by Dr Paul Dalton

Anglo-Saxon/Norman iron axehead in the Manchester Museum collection

Victor Khadem, Programme Secretary for the Saddleworth Historical Society, has kindly provided details of a lecture assessing the impact of the Norman Conquest of Yorkshire on Wednesday at 7.30pm on 6th April at The Conservative Club, High Street, Uppermill. The lecture will be given by Dr Paul Dalton, a leading authority on the subject.

Even after defeating King Harold at the battle of Hastings in October 1066 and securing his coronation as king of the English at Westminster on Christmas day 1066, William the Conqueror still had much to do to complete the Norman Conquest of England. During the next five years he was confronted by a series of major English rebellions against his authority, some of which received support from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Denmark. Yorkshire was the focus of some of the most determined resistance to Norman rule.

Viking reenactment enthusiasts — Determined resistance in York

This talk will explore the methods William used to deal with this resistance, and important aspects of the dramatic impact the Norman Conquest had on Yorkshire. It will also suggest that the region of Saddleworth might have been directly caught up, albeit briefly, in this process of Conquest.

Dr Paul Dalton is a Principal Lecturer in History at Canterbury Christ Church University. He has published widely on the political and religious history of the Anglo-Norman world, including a monograph book Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship: Yorkshire 1066-1154 published by Cambridge University Press.

Entry for non-members is £3.

Wednesday 6th April, 7:30 p.m.The Conservative Club, High Street, Uppermill

March 2016 talk: Medieval Jug from Africa

Medieval jug from Africa in Leeds Museums collection

Talk Title: A Yorkshire link to an English Medieval ewer recovered from the Asante capital, Ghana, in 1896.

Since 1984 Leeds Museums and Galleries have had on loan a wonderful survival from Medieval England: a bronze ewer, recovered by the Prince of Wales’s own Regiment of Yorkshire from what is now Ghana in 1896. Antonia tells me that the regimental museum in York recently had a major revamp and may well take back the loan later this year, so this may be a timely opportunity to make acquaintance with this fantastic medieval vessel before it returns to the lenders.

Antonia’s talk will situate the ewer in the context of its 1896 retrieval by the British army during an Asante campaign, and explore the routes that this jug, and three others from the same period, may have taken to reach Africa during the 500 or so years following their original manufacture. Clearly the Asante court treasury had a key role in the survival of these jugs and it is interesting to consider what meanings the jugs had for the Asante themselves, as well as their original manufacture and use.

This is not the first time that West Africa has been the focus of interest for us as medievalists. Some time ago we posted on this blog information about a temporary exhibition of ceramic figurines from Komaland in Ghana.

Antonia Lovelace is curator of World Culture at Leeds Museums and Galleries, and author of a paper on the Prince of Wales’s regimental loan to Leeds in the Journal of Museum Ethnography (no. 12, 2000). She curated the ‘Out of Africa’ displays in the World View Galley at Leeds City Museum (2008-2013) and now looks after the ‘Voices of Asia’ gallery in the same space (launched in 2014).

Antonia will refer to a key article by Martin Bailey, 1993 ‘Two kings, their armies and some jugs. The Ashanti ewer’, Apollo (December: 387-390), and to the British Museum Occasional paper 115, by John Cherry and Neil Stratford (1995) ‘Westminster Kings and the medieval Palace of Westminster’, and look at more recent mentions of these English medieval jugs found in Africa.

Medieval Section February 2016 Lecture: the Gilbertines in Yorkshire

The February 2016 lecture will cover the archaeology of the Order of the Gilbertines, focusing on the layout and function of both double and much overlooked single houses. The lecture will primarily focus on the Yorkshire houses of Watton, Ellerton, Malton and St. Andrews, York. Comparisons of layout will also be drawn with other monastic orders to place the Gilbertines within a wider national context and to help shed light on how they were regarded by their contemporaries. Previous excavation, survey and interpretation will be drawn together and re-evaluated. This will include, for the first time, evaluation of St. John Hope’s nineteenth century excavations at Watton Priory with new a resistivity survey carried out on the site by the speaker in 2014.

Our speaker Peter Townend will draw upon research carried out over the last three years for his PhD thesis on the Monastic Order of the Gilbertines. He intends to submit his thesis for examination by Easter of this year, so we are very grateful to him for speaking when he has weightier matters to think about. Peter has a background in landscape archaeology and completed his Masters in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in 2009, following a undergraduate degree in History and Archaeology at the University of Hull. He worked for a number of years at Northamptonshire Archaeology. He is currently collaborating with his supervisor Dr Hugh Willmott on the Thornton Abbey Research Project having previously worked together at Monk Bretton Priory and Humberston Abbey. Publications for all three of these sites are planned for this coming year. Attendees at the monthly lectures and followers of this blog will be familiar with Monk Bretton because Dr Willmott kindly spoke to the Medieval Section in April 2014.