In 1429 the eight year old Henry VI was presented at his coronation feast with a custard pie garnished with an English lion grasping a French fleur de lys in its claws. This edible emblem of territorial ambition and legitimacy to rule over the conquered is not an isolated example of a food item purposefully loaded with meaning at this period. Henry was also served with a pie in the form of a shield, garnished with ‘lozenges gilt” and borage flowers, chosen for the powerful ‘cordial’ effect they would have on the young king’s humours. From a pasty in the form of a bird served to the Worshipful Company of Salters at their Christmas Feast in 1394, to the funeral bake metes of Hamlet’s murdered father, pies and other pastry creations figured large in Renaissance culture.
In this free illustrated lecture, food historian Ivan Day will discuss the role of food as emblem, as a vehicle for Galenic dietary theory and as an occasional player in power politics.Booking is essential as places are limited. Phone Wakefield Museum on 01924 302700 or email museumslearning@wakefield.gov.uk
Here’s an event that may be of interest to Medieval section members. It’s a talk by Dr Jonathan Foyle about the rediscovery of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s marriage bed. Apparently the bed was bought at auction in 2010 and research showed it to have been made in 1485. It was most likely commissioned after Henry VII’s accession to celebrate his marriage to Elizabeth of York and the end of the War of the Roses. You can find out the full story of this astonishing discovery – what is surely the nation’s most exceptional example of historic furniture, and a seminal royal artefact with Dr Jonathan Foyle, architectural historian, broadcaster and CEO of the World Monuments Fund Britain.
Ruth Spencer has contacted me to say that Upper Wharfedale Heritage Group (UWHG) is organising a free Open Day on Monday, August 25th in the Amerdale Hall, Arncliffe in Littondale (BD23 5QD or NGR SD 9328 7185) . The focus for the day is the recent UWHG project undertaken in the village to research and investigate the location of an interesting archaeological discovery found by a metal-detectorist in 2000 and is a direct follow-up to the ‘Festival of Archaeology’ display that the group will have in Long Ashes Leisure Centre in Threshfield between Sunday the 13th and Sunday the 27th of July. UWHG would be very pleased to see any YAS members at either (or both) of these events.
Programme for the day:
From 11:00 until 16:00, Amerdale Hall in Arncliffe will
be open to present a range of project related items.
You are free to drop in anytime during the day:
11:00 – 13:00 Take part in a simulated burial
excavation with Kevin Cale, Community Archaeologist
14:00 – 14:30 Final Results for the Arncliffe Project
Dr Roger Martlew
Yorkshire Dales Landscape Research Trust
14:30 – 1500 Arncliffe’s Anglo Saxon Context –
recent excavations of Early Medieval sites in the
Ingleborough area.
Dr David Johnson, Independent Researcher and
Ingleborough Archaeology Group
15:00 – 16:00 Take part in a simulated burial
excavation with Kevin Cale, Community Archaeologist
Chas Jones who kindly showed some us around the 1066 battlefield site of Fulford last September has been in touch to let Medieval Section members know that he is doing some more digging at Fulford in July as a part of the CBA Festival of Archaeology. Last year a trial trench was dug and Chas talked about the results of that excavation when we did the walk last September. He has kindly invited Medieval Section volunteers to go and do some digging. The site has been in the news recently, and Chas told me that his day in court went very well but they are waiting, he said, for the judgement. Chas believes there is hope for the future. He tells me the trees along the whole of the ditch (see photo above) have been cleared so there is a great view of the battle site now! There is a web page saying how to sign up.
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.
Excavations at Pontefract Friary in 2011 (courtesy of Simon Tomson)
St Richard’s Dominican Friary in Pontefract was one of 56 Dominican friaries in England by 1300, but, as our speaker told the audience, it was not known precisely where it was until very recently. The opportunity to locate the missing friary arose when the A & E department of the local hospital was demolished. Pontefract Castle dates from the 1080s and Pontefract was laid out as a planned town by the de Lacys in front of the castle along an east west ridge. The present town centre overlies the medieval suburb. A number of place names clues suggest that the friary had once been nearby: Friar Wood and Friar Wood Lane. Pontefract Friary Action Group (PFAG) gathered 2000 signatures in just a fortnight to press for the site to be explored archaeologically. The hospital authorities planned to reduce the ground surface by a metre. WYAS conducted a desktop assessment which showed there was a high likelihood of there being archaeology beneath the hospital estate. Balfour Beatty Heathcoe provided £10,000 to fund the excavation.
Friaries came late (from the 1250s) on the medieval monastic scene and, having to set up where they could, tend to be extra-mural and Simon showed a map of medieval Bristol for comparison. The friaries were outside the town on the flood plain. Beverley Friary set up over the town sewer! In Pontefract Eric Holder and Pontefract and District Archaeology society excavated pits at the bottom of the hill where it was thought the friary might lie. Joining up dots from the exploratory trenches enabled the excavators to tentatively mark out the plan of the cloister. Drought marks in a garden suggested a possible guesthouse on the west side of the cloister. It appears the friary garderobe flowed into a duck pond.
The society had to meet a number of health and safety requirements in order to dig but within 10 days of coming back off holiday, the Chairman supported by the society had mobilised 30 volunteers and were ready to start digging. They sank a number of 2m square sondage pits but they only revealed an undifferentiated five feet thick grey garden soil which had been turned over repeatedly. It had been the dumping ground for the contents of privies mixed with ash and contained lots of clay pipe fragments and broken pottery. Black and white photographs of the site showed how it had been used to grow liquorice, which requires deep well-drained soils, during the early modern period.
Liquorice from Manchester Museum Botany collection (courtesy of Claire Miles)
The grey layer rested on top of the local coal measure sandstone. The surface of the sandstone contained one burial: that of a man who had been hanged. The radiocarbon date suggested he’d lived between 1283 and 1394. Simon speculated he might be a veteran of the Battle of Boroughbridge (1322) in which Thomas of Lancaster, who had risen in rebellion against King Edward II, was defeated. Afterwards the Earl was brought back to Pontefract, tried and executed.
The site where the skeleton was found lay against an 8 metre vertical sandstone cliff face which had been quarried extensively for the stone from which the friary had been constructed. A rock-cut foundation trench was found providing the footing for the North wall of the friary church. The friary was extensively robbed when Pontefract was being rebuilt after three destructive sieges during the English Civil War. However, the excavators found a major east-west wall with three buttresses and an impressive but unfinished broken grave cover incorporated into a buttress. It had been damaged by the stonemason during manufacture and had been re-used. Against the wall a line of whitewash could be seen. Black and white floor tiles had butted up against the wall. On the inside of the east wall was found what was believed to be part of the base of the altar. The dating of the tiles suggests they were made prior to the founding of the friary and may have been used and re-used several times before being given to the friary.
Head niche of Purbeck marble (courtesy of Simon Tomson)
The head niche of a sarcophagus of Purbeck marble was found near a rebate in one side of the chancel. This sarcophagus would have been expensive and shows that the person buried there was of high status. Unfortunately most of the sarcophagus appears to have been made into lime for mortar after the Dissolution in 1536. Several brass letters dating from the early to mid-15th century were also found. Nevertheless there are a couple of candidates, whose last resting place this might have been. The battle of Wakefield took place in 1460. Richard Duke of York and his son Edmund Earl of Rutland both lost their lives. There is historical evidence that they were buried at Pontefract Friary. In 1476 Edward IV and Richard Duke of Gloucester arranged a funeral cortege to take their father’s remains for re-burial at Fotheringhay. Pieces of window tracery dating from about 1375 were found. There is also historical evidence that John of Gaunt provided wood for rebuilding the friary roof after 1365.
To the north lay the cemetery. The society sampled one of the skeletons. Simon thought the radiocarbon date obtained for the skeleton (1283-1394) was suspiciously close to that of the skeleton of the hanged man. He suspected that radon gas seeping up out of the coal measures might be blurring the precision of the results. The partial plan revealed by the excavation enabled Simon to overlay onto it a plan of a surviving friary, such as that of Norwich to give an impression of the complete plan of Pontefract Friary. This enabled him to predict the line of the south wall and he tested the theory by digging in a narrow piece of land between the children’s ward and the public road. The south wall of the church was found and it was the buttress was only half a metre out! Simon showed a photo of the Blackfriars Theatre in Boston which gives an idea of how the building next to the cloister might have looked.
Simon Tomson is Excavation Field Director, Pontefract and District Archaeological Society. Our sincerest thanks to Simon for giving his lecture and providing images for use in this blog post.
Plan of Monk Bretton in the light of recent excavations (courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott).
The speaker at April’s lecture meeting is interested in the end of the monasteries, and, as Monk Bretton is close to Sheffield and has an interesting Post-Dissolution history; it was the perfect site for fieldwork. But why bother? Don’t we know it all anyway? There are a lot of historical records, including suppression records, with which to map the process of destruction and rebirth that takes place on such sites. However, archaeologists have generally been more interested in the story of how the abbeys were founded, and how the architectural styles changed over time, rather than what happened after their Dissolution. The fact that the majority have a Post-Dissolution life that may be longer than the duration of the monastic occupation is often ignored. Simon Thurley in his 2007 Gresham Lecture ‘The Fabrication of Medieval History’ referred to the policy of the Office or Ministry of Works (M.O.W.) under the guidance of Sir Charles Reed Peers (1868-1952), which was summarised as “Our job is to throw up the distinctive character and individuality of the medieval constructor”. So it was that Monk Bretton was turned into a lovely ruin with a beautifully manicured lawn during the consolidation work carried out there from the 1930s to 1950s. In keeping with the M.O.W.’s policy the Post-Dissolution phases were seen as an inconvenience and swept away during the tidying up of the site. During the recent archaeological work, which the speaker directed, the aim was to explain how the functioning farmhouse created out of the monastic buildings was turned into a picturesque ruin. It is easy to blame people in the past, however, and there is still today the feeling that the Middle Ages are the ‘real’ or ‘pure’ past and that all the other interventions are to be regarded as unfortunate. This leaves us with a rather black-and-white picture of the dedicated religious in their abbeys and priories and the unprincipled secular determined to exploit the situation at the Dissolution. In advertising its annual conference, the Society of Church Archaeology has stated “In Yorkshire the avarice and greed of those who sought to benefit from the Dissolution came into stark conflict with the piety of those who aimed to retain vestiges of the Old Religion” (2010) but this is a simplification of a relationship that was more complex, as our speaker aimed to show in his presentation.
Founded in 1153, Monk Bretton was a Cluniac house under the jurisdiction of Pontefract. In 1281 it became an independent Benedictine house (although there was bloodshed over this when an armed group led by the Prior from Pontefract disputed control of its wealth!). It was dissolved on 39th November 1538. Its estate was valued at £246 19s 4d. It was granted to William Blithman, one of the assessors. He grew up locally and was one of Cromwell’s key agents in Yorkshire, which would explain Blithman’s interest in Monk Bretton. The priory was purchased at the suggestion of Bess of Hardwick for her stepson Henry Talbot in 1580. It left the possession of the Talbot family during the early 17th century and then slipped into historical obscurity. The site was cleared by land owner John Horne during the 1920s and taken into guardianship by the Office of Works in 1937 and turned into a public monument. The last owner, John Horne, corresponded with the President of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Dr Walker. Literature published about the site explains Monk Bretton was a Talbot residence. The residence was in the west range, where a stair case and gateway represented the core of the Tudor mansion but there is little that is Tudor in the present predominantly medieval range. Other Talbot mansions are known. The Earl of Shrewsbury was one of the richest noblemen in the country and the Talbot family owned Rufford Abbey (Nottinghamshire, 1540) where the main range was turned into a fancy house; a new build at New Hall Pontefract (1591), which was demolished to make way for the M62 motorway; and Worksop Manor (1590s).
The recent work began with an intensive resistivity survey of the core of the monastic site. It proved to be surprisingly empty of archaeological features, apart from a collapsed mine shaft that runs underneath the site. Apart from patches of debris showing where buildings were cleared by the M.O.W. there was little to be seen. However, an anomaly beyond the church seemed to show a set of walls. Test pits were dug in Easter 2010. A test pit dug north of the North Transept revealed walls and a piece of early to mid-16th century German stoneware was found, as well as an area of puddled clay in which there were lots of broken edges of window glass. These were the trimmings (never leaded) or offcuts from creating windows. They were not monastic but were 16th or 17th century in date.
This work was followed by further documentary research and the digging of a larger trench. When the old M.O.W. files were inspected a piece of graph paper dated 31st May 1950 was found on which there was a sketch plan of a building that was recorded near the North Transept wall. It had been recorded accurately but in rudimentary fashion before being back-filled because it didn’t fit the prevailing contemporary interpretative narrative that focused on the monastic rather than the Post-Dissolution archaeology. Further excavations in July 2010 dug up an area of the lawn and the area where window glass had been found. The latter revealed a boundary wall with puddled clay on one side and medieval garden soils beneath. It was not the intention to excavate a medieval garden and the trench was closed.
The trench north of the Transept was more complex because it revealed lots of walls and features. Here was evidence of Tudor building and Post-Medieval material culture but the more the excavators dug the less it seemed to make sense! The chief obstacle was the M.O.W.’s excavation technique which consisted of following walls to create a plan of the buildings on the site. Unfortunately this divorced the walls and buildings from their archaeological contexts and associated dating evidence, leaving them ‘floating’. However some nice pieces of a carved stone syncopated arcade from the Cloister were found.
The garderobe at Monk Bretton (photo courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott)
Later building work appears to have respected an earlier feature that had been left in situ. This was interpreted as a ‘furnace’ during the 1950s but it turned out to be a closed-shaft garderobe built against a wall, complete with an exit chute. The M.O.W. excavators found pottery here and this was traced and turned out to be an almost complete urinal. Urinals are often found down reredorter drains. This suggests whatever was going on in the area was of a domestic nature but just north of the North Transept seemed like a strange place for a substantial building of this kind. However, Castle Acre Priory had a similar building running away from the North Transept.
Medieval urinal found in garderobe at Monk Bretton (courtesy of Dr Hugh Willmott).
The recent excavations also revealed late medieval coarse wares amongst the 1950s back-fill. The most interesting pieces turned out to be industrial wares. A 14th or 15th century drinking jug was badly corroded. Perhaps it had been used for boiling something acidic as part of a metal-working. A pot with greenish-blue deposit proved to be unexpectedly dangerous because the analysis revealed it contained copper arsenate! It had probably been used as a dye pigment. Similar vessels were discovered at Pontefract Priory. Clearly some interesting activity was going on at the Priory in the 15th century. However, the finds also reveal high status activity too. The current excavations uncovered a Germanic drinking glass or beaker as well as window glass, decorated with grisaille and lead canes. Nice windows and imported glass may suggest this was the early guesthouse.
Most of the walls related to the mid-16th century phase before the site came into the possession of the Talbot family. A lot of medieval stone was reused making dating the activity difficult. A large fireplace was reused and incorporated pieces from different fireplaces to create two water tanks. The edges of the tanks were chipped. The timber frame building resting on stone sleeper walls appears to have been a smithy and there is evidence of burning. Lots of good ceramics were recovered from the drain including so-called Cistercian wares and Blackwares as well as a decorative stone crocket (a decorative architectural element probably from a pinicle on the monastic church). Another metalwork sample proved to copper alloy containing significant traces of zinc and tin. This is the composition of bell metal and it is interesting that five bells are mentioned in the Suppression document. There was a lot of lead work too that had been cut off and twisted ready for melting down and recycling.
In the final phase dating to the late 16th century, much was demolished and filled-in. This is about the time when the site was acquired by the Talbot family. In addition to the construction of the smithy there had been some reconstruction at Monk Bretton under Blithman’s ownership elsewhere on the site. Parts of the Church Nave were demolished. Part of the North Aisle went to Wentworth where it was built into the Parish Church. Our speaker pointed out that one of the first things that Post-Dissolution owners did was to slight the church to ensure that the monks did not return. This was only prudent at a time when the political wind was blowing both ways. The eastern end of the church that was left appears to have been retained as a barn.
In order to better understand what happened at Monk Bretton in the late 16th and 17th centuries and before the M.O.W. tidied up the site, Ordnance Survey maps were consulted. One edition of 1931 was published just before the M.O.W. acquired the site. Another of 1906 shows a west range. Part of the farmhouse and medieval masonry were incorporated to create a long gallery. Photographs in Barnsley Archives Office show this as a long gallery with a timber-framed top hall, and with Tudor chimneys coming off it. People reused the stone from this Post-Dissolution building. The Tudor House seems to have had an inserted stairwell and a long gallery. In a letter from the last owner Mr Horne to Dr Walker of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, a series of investigations are described: ‘In the centre refectory wall is a circular structure which may have been a fireplace. There is a wall going through the centre of the building put in at the time of the 16th century…’ The circular structure must have been a bread oven. Another building described as the ‘administration building’ has been dated to the 13th century on the basis of some rather fine columns but archival research shows that the M.O.W. made extensive changes to this structure in the 1930s and ‘medievalised’ what probably started out as a stable or coach house in the Post-Medieval phase of Monk Bretton. During the 1930s Monk Bretton was ‘fossilised’ as a medieval monument even though by this time it had been transformed into a working farm.
The lecture showed that life at Monk Bretton went on long after the closure of the priory in 1538 and indeed the Post-Dissolution phase lasted as long as the duration of the monastic occupation. The recent archaeological work showed what happened to a site at the Dissolution and what was involved in the transition from an ecclesiastical estate to a secular one. Life went on the and to the peasant working the land there would not have been much, if any, difference. Sadly this continuity is often overlooked in the traditional narrative of the Dissolution being about the destruction of the monasteries and the expulsion of the monks. In this Monk Bretton is not on its own. There must have been hundreds of Monk Brettons in the landscape after the Dissolution. About one third of religious sites were destroyed; between a third and a half were converted into a house or farm; and about a fifth remained in parochial religious use. The situation is slightly different in Wales and very different in Scotland.
The Section is very grateful to Dr Willmott for kindly commenting on the text (though any mistakes that remain are the Hon.Secretary’s responsibility) and for providing photographs. Dr Willmott was planning to publish the more detailed report on the 2010 excavations in the YAJ, but is currently finalising the ‘grey’ report for English Heritage.Dr Willmott has also offered to speak to the Section about his work at Thornton Abbey in North Lincolnshire at a date to be confirmed.
Medieval Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society 