News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER MARCH 2026
Our Next Meeting
Please note that this month’s lecture will be on Wednesday 11th March and not, as usually, on the third Thursday of the month. It will start at 7.30pm in the Main Hall at Battle Memorial Hall.
The Society is delighted to welcome back historian, broadcaster and author Professor Tracy Borman as part of its 75th anniversary celebrations. Her lecture, entitled “The Stolen Crown : Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty”, will reveal the shocking truth behind one of history’s best kept secrets – how James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I and how the Stuart dynasty rewrote history.
Lecture Recordings
Whenever possible, a recording of our monthly lecture is made available for a week after the meeting on the Society’s private YouTube channel. A link to the recording, once available, is sent to all members who are asked to treat the link as personal to them and not to share it. These arrangements are part of the Society’s agreement with lecturers and should be respected.
While the Society will provide a recording whenever it can, there are occasions when it is not possible; some lecturers withhold permission for recording and technical issues can sometimes intervene.
Date for Your Diaries
Our April meeting will see us returning to our usual date and location and will be on Thursday 16th April in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. The lecture, entitled “Archaeology at Bodiam : Exploring the Landscape and the Bodiam 100 Project”, will delivered by Nathalie Cohen. Nathalie is the President of the Royal Archaeological Institute and works for the National Trust as the regional archaeologist for properties in Greater London, Kent, and East & West Sussex. She worked for over 15 years at the Museum of London Archaeology Service as the Unit’s Archivist, as a field archaeologist on excavations, and as a specialist in community engagement. Members may have met her if they attended one of the archaeological site tours she led at Bodiam last summer.
‘Bodiam Dig: the road to 100’ is a three-year project exploring the buried archaeology of the site leading up to the 100th anniversary in 2026 of its being bequeathed to the National Trust. While the 14th-century castle forms the central focus, the wider landscape has been less well explored. This project aims to uncover more information about the history of the landscape around the castle, focusing on the potential for Roman activity and of the land management and use of the area close to the River Rother over time. The National Trust collection at Bodiam Castle holds items from all periods, such as a Neolithic polished stone axe and a late Iron Age cremation urn, Roman tiles, a medieval pilgrim badge, fragments of pottery and leather, and more recent artefacts like clay pipes and coins, all of which help to tell the tales of those who lived, worked and visited this place. In its earliest days, when digs were perhaps less controlled than now, Battle Historical Society undertook its own excavations at Bodiam and some of the finds from that work are on display at Battle Museum.
Full details of the 75th anniversary season’s programme are available here.
Change to the July Meeting Date
Looking further ahead, please not that in order to align with the Battle Festival, our July meeting will be held on Wednesday 22nd July not Wednesday 8th as previously advertised.
2024-25 Journal
Copies of the 2024-25 Journal are now available and can be collected from the front desk at any BDHS meeting. And if you haven’t already had one, then at the same time you can take away your free 75th anniversary commemorative bookmark.
Battle Museum
Battle Museum of Local History is currently closed for the winter but will re-open for the new season on Monday 30th March.
History in the News – a digest of recent reporting
If any member spots an interesting history article, just email its details, or scan of it, to webadmin@battlehistorysociety.com and we’ll feature an edited version of it in the next Newsletter.
Professor unearths Iron Age gold stash: The largest known hoard of Iron Age gold coins to be deposited during the reign of the King Dubnovellaunos, who ruled the Trinovantes between 25 B.C. and A.D. 10, is being offered for auction in March. The 16 coins will be auctioned individually and they are expected to realize in the region of £25,000.
Known as The Bury St. Edmunds hoard, it was found in two parcels by Tom Licence, professor of medieval history and literature at the University of East Anglia, in a field near Bury. In the autumn of 2024, Licence discovered 16 Iron Age gold full staters and one quarter-stater. These were promptly reported to the Finds Liaison Officer and were declared treasure. He returned to the site a few months later and found one more stater.
From the hoard, Licence and the landowner have chosen to keep a single stater each. After splitting the money with the landowner, Licence plans to use some of the money raised to support local archaeological work in Suffolk.
Tom started metal detecting as a young boy but took a more serious interest in the hobby in 1994 as a teenager. While walking through Rye in East Sussex, he found a Charles I Rose farthing in a flower bed, which immediately captured his imagination.
When Tom isn’t busy with his Academic work — he is an expert in Anglo-Saxon history and about to publish a book on King Harold — he is out detecting alongside his trusty ‘Mandy’ Manticore detector.
https://www.coinworld.com/news/auctions/professor-unearths-iron-age-gold-stash
Conservation funds secured for rare church frescoes: Conservation work is shortly to begin on a set of rare 12th-century frescoes which were discovered in St Mary Magdalene’s Church in Ickleton, near Cambridge, after an arson attack in 1979. The frescoes, which include the story of Christ’s Passion, are “among the earliest series of wall paintings of this quality in the country”, said vicar Lydia Smith. They are now in need of conservation work, made possible by a National Lottery Heritage Grant, which will begin in April. The frescoes were painted directly onto the fresh plaster walls shortly after the church was completed during the Norman era (1066 to 1154).
Smith said, “Most churches were painted at this time, but it is the quality of these ones that stands out; you can go to much grander places like St Albans Cathedral and see possibly similar paintings. They are clearly very, very high quality, not painted by your local guys, but are also surprising for this little village in the middle of nowhere.
“They are a wonderful way of understanding the stories and being in touch with the medieval people who went to St Mary Magdalene hundreds of years ago. You’re in touch with the practice of storytelling and spirituality from an ancient time.”
As well as the 12th Century frescoes, there is a 14th-century “Doom” painting, which depicts the Last Judgement. “You can see quite a lot of the earlier frescoes, but much of this one is lost,” said Smith. “It does have one unusual feature, the Virgin Mary is seen bare-breasted as a sign of grief – she’s been rending her garments – this is a real rarity in church wall paintings.”
A routine five-year assessment of the church building revealed the need for conservation, partly as a result of bats living in the nave roof and tower. Windows above the frescoes were also letting in moisture. These will be restored first, with the work scheduled to safeguard the bat roost, while conservation work on the frescoes should start in the autumn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c86ypyd5e47o
A history of pancake recipes: Too late perhaps for you to try this year, but Sara Read from Loughborough University, has been researching the history of pancaking making and has collected some recipes from earlier times.
Recipes from the first published cookbooks show that in England, pancakes were made very thinly – hence the phrase “flat as a pancake”. Eggs, cream, butter and animal fats are all products from which people were meant to abstain, alongside all other meats. It makes sense, then, that the dish, generally eaten year-round, became associated with Shrovetide – the days before Lent – when cooks wanted to clear out their pantries to avoid temptation in the long fast before Easter.
Early pancakes were cooked until crispy and served warm with butter and sprinkled with sugar. One recipe from a book published in the reign of Elizabeth I is a rich affair which mixes:
A pint of thick cream
4 or 5 egg yolks
A handful of flour
2 or 3 spoonfuls of ale
seasoned with “a good handful of sugar, a spoonful of cinnamon, and a touch of ginger”.
English poet and writer Gervais Markham’s bestselling book of household management “The English Housewife” which ran to at least nine editions from its first publication in 1615, has a recipe for “the best pancakes”. In this dish, there are:
two or three beaten eggs
a pretty quantity of fair running water.
salt, cloves, mace, cinnamon and nutmeg
thickened with “fine Wheate-flower”
On Shrove Tuesday in 1661, diarist Samuel Pepys visited his cousin Jane Turner where he dined “very merry and the best fritters that ever I eat in my life”. One of the reasons he enjoyed his pancakes so much might be found in a contemporary recipe book, The Gentlewoman’s Cabinet Unlocked (1675) which includes the following instructions for making “fritters”:
Take nine eggs, yolks and whites, beat them very well, then take half a pint of sack, a pint of ale, some ale yest. Put these to the eggs and beat them all together, put in some spice and salt, and fine flower. Then shred in your apples and let them be well tempered, and fry them with beef-suet, or half beef and half pigs-suet.
Elizabeth Hammond’s Modern Domestic Cookery (1819) includes this pancake recipe:
Take eggs, flour and milk, with which make a light batter. Add nutmeg, ginger and salt, fry them in plenty of hot lard. Serve with lemon juice and powdered loaf sugar.
A modern cook might be surprised to see Hammond recommending substituting “snow” for eggs during the winter, “when they are generally very dear”. This is a tip for making eggs go further by using just the whites beaten until fluffy, leaving you free to use the yolks in another dish.
Whatever your preferred recipe, perhaps the key takeaway from history, Sara suggests, is that there is no reason to reserve pancakes just for Shrove Tuesday.
https://theconversation.com/a-history-of-pancake-recipes-from-elizabethan-ale-to-the-invention-of-self-raising-flour-275708
Online Archive Update – September 2021
Exciting news! We now have a great new resource available online. The original Battle Town Index, identified by advisers from the National Archives as potentially the most important item in our archive, was recorded on a series of Index cards. Members of our Society started the Index with the aim of recording information on the use and occupants of all the buildings in the town centre. Information, gleaned mainly from trade and other directories, was recorded up to the early 1990s. The online version of the Index has been edited so that beyond 1940 only information on businesses and a few private individuals reasonably assumed now dead have been included in the online version. This complies with the recommendations of the National Archives on publication of material which is covered by the Data Protection Act. It still, however, provides a wealth of information and is found in our online archive as a series of searchable .pdf files. Go to our archive page The Battle & District Historical Society Archives http://bdhsarchives.com and search for Battle Town Index to see the available .pdf files. When you have downloaded the file you can find the search function by clicking on the magnifying glass symbol and entering your search term.
Website news
The British Library is going to archive our website in the UK Web Archive and to make it publicly available via that route. The UK Web Archive was established in 2004 to capture and archive websites from the UK domain and across the web, responding to the challenge of a digital black hole in the nations memory. It contains specially selected websites that represent different aspects of UK heritage on the web, as well as important global events. We work closely with leading international institutions to collect and permanently preserve the web, and the open UK Web Archive can be seen at http://www.webarchive.org.uk/.
Also an on-line version of the BDHS Journal for 2019 has been added – see Previous BDHS Journals
Meet our new President
Our new President, Professor David Bates, gave his inaugural lecture entitled ‘Writing a Biography of William the Conqueror’ at a very well attended meeting on 16 January. His presentation was well received and afterwards David had the opportunity to meet many members of the Society and be photographed with all members of the BDHS Committee. He also gave another lecture – by Zoom on 15th October. This was about ‘New thoughts on the Bayeux Tapestry’.
Meeting with the new Dean of Battle
The new Dean of Battle, the Very Reverend Lee Duckett, together with his wife Ange, has been presented with some books from BDHS members Keith Foord and Tina Greene, which are concerned with the Church and the Battle Tapestry, currently on display there. BDHS hopes to develop some mutually beneficial projects based on the church’s archives and the use of the church environmental space for exhibitions etc..
The Dark Ages’ greatest Christmas relics were at Battle Abbey
The Guardian and other media have reported that a medieval manuscript listing Battle Abbey’s relics has been analysed and transcribed for the first time by English Heritage historian Michael Carter. It reveals that the relics were the most prestigious given to any abbey, more significant even than those at Westminster Abbey.
A report on this can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/dec/18/a-bit-of-manger-st-nicholass-bone-the-dark-ages-greatest-christmas-relics.Michael Carter’s paper can also be found in full using this reference: Carter, M: The Relics of Battle Abbey: A Fifteenth-Century Inventory at The Huntington Library, San Marino The Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 8 (2019)
Video: The Battle of Hastings. No – the Battle of Battle!!
BDHS Members Michael Hodge, Alan Judd and Peter Greene, working in close cooperation with Natasha Williams of English Heritage, have produced a video explaining where the Battle of Hastings actually took place and why we have a town called Battle. The video has been released by Mirador Television and can be found via Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDe8uyKXL9Y
Amazing find by BDHS
In the process of changing over BDHS archivists Gina Doherty and David Sawyer unexpectedly turned up an old small parchment that appeared to originate from Abbot Richard Tovey of Battle Abbey in 1493. Christopher Whittick of ESRO confirmed its authenticity This is a ‘pass’ entitling the carrier to travel freely in England and quoting the old charter rights of the abbey. Gina has produced an excellent summary of this find which can be read in Section A3.4 of Collectanea. BDHS has also given a facsimile copy to Battle Abbey for future display.
L-R: Neil Clephane-Cameron, Keith Foord, George Kiloh, Gina Doherty, Natasha Williams (English Heritage) handing the parchment to Christopher Whittick (Vice-President of BDHS). Picture Peter Greene