News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER MAY 2026
Our Next Meeting
Our next meeting will be on Thursday 21st May in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. The lecture to be delivered by our Chair, Charlotte Moore, is entitled “Diaries of a Battle Doctor in the 1940s”. It is based on the diaries of her grandfather and will paint a vivid picture of what it was like to be a doctor in mid 20th-century Battle.
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 June lecture will be delivered by Ian Everest, on Thursday 18th June in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. The lecture is entitled “A Sussex Farm in the 1950s” and will show that, while to ‘make hay’ and ‘bring in the harvest’ sound like idyllic pastimes, life was tough life on the South Downs during the 1950s; the war was over but the battle was still being fought to feed the nation. The talk will include clips from original cine film.
Ian Everest was brought up on a farm on the South Downs and after attending Agricultural College in the late 1960’s, he worked in the agricultural sector with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. His growing interest in family and military history led to a career change when he was appointed manager of Newhaven Fort, which he prepared for public opening and subsequently managed for 15 years. Since his retirement, he has a developed a number of talks relating to farming history, Sussex local history, military and social history.
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 opened for the 2026 season on Monday 30th March. The special exhibition this year focuses on gunpowder plot celebrations in the town and the role of the Battel Bonfire Boyes.
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.
Prehistoric find under Pembroke Castle: A cave hidden beneath an 11th Century castle in Pembrokeshire is a “truly remarkable site” which could rewrite Britain’s prehistory, researchers say.
Small digs of the cave under Pembroke Castle, known as Wogan Cavern, have so far uncovered “extremely rare” evidence of early humans and animals – including the bones of a hippopotamus which roamed Wales 120,000 years ago. The University of Aberdeen will now lead a larger five-year exploration of the site, which archaeologists hope could reveal a great deal about our early prehistoric forebears.
Wogan Cavern, thought to have been dug out by the Victorians, is accessed via a spiral staircase from the castle. Measuring 23m (75ft) in length, with a height of up to 10m (32ft), the cave has been described as “enormous”. It was long assumed that there was little archaeological material left at the site, but small excavations between 2021 and 2024 uncovered evidence of both humans and animals over more than 100,000 years – including stone tools and mammoth, hippo and woolly rhinoceros bones.
“There is no other site like it in Britain – it is a once in a lifetime discovery,” said Dr Rob Dinnis from the University, “not only is there extremely rare evidence for early Homo Sapiens, there are also hints at even earlier human occupation, probably by Neanderthals.”
For Pembroke Castle – the birthplace of Henry Tudor and a popular tourist attraction – the project represents an exciting new chapter in its history. “This is incredibly exciting news for everyone at the castle,” said manager Jon Williams, “we have watched with great interest as Wogan Cavern has started to reveal its secrets – it’s very different from the medieval history we usually deal with at the castle.”
The new excavations are scheduled to begin at the end of May.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8ejjw7377jo
The first known mosaic image of a venatrix?: A researcher may have identified a depiction of a female hunter—known as a venatrix—in an ancient Roman mosaic. According to a new study published in the International Journal of the History of Sport, the 1,800-year-old artifact provides rare visual evidence of women battling wild animals.
The mosaic was discovered in Reims, France, in 1860. The archaeologist Jean Charles Loriquet sketched a copy of the artwork, which dates to the third century CE. Decades later, it was destroyed in a bombing during World War I, and only one fragment survived. But that fragment matches Loriquet’s drawing, suggesting that he may have copied the mosaic accurately.
According to the drawing, the original mosaic featured 35 figures surrounded by intricate borders; these figures were a mix of beasts, beast hunters and gladiators from Roman arenas. The woman is topless, and she holds the handle of a whip in her right hand. Her left hand holds the pommel of another weapon, probably a dagger. She is looking straight ahead towards a leopard running in the opposite direction. Previous research had identified the female figure as an agitator or a paegniarius, a kind of clown with a whip, Instead, the latest study argues that she was a kind of venatrix known as a succursor. In this role, she may have wielded a whip to push the leopard toward another hunter.
But some experts are sceptical of the Reims mosaic, uncertain whether Loriquet’s drawing is accurate. Thomas Scanlon, an emeritus classicist at the University of California, suggests that although “the article is well documented” his “concern is that the actual mosaic is not extant. The images are from an old [drawing], which may not be reliable in detail.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/is-this-1800-year-old-mosaic-the-first-known-image-of-a-woman-fighting-wild-beasts-in-an-ancient-roman-arena-180988456/
Brother and sister buried together in mediaeval grave: The remarkable discovery in an early medieval cemetery has revealed the identities of two children buried together more than a thousand years ago. Ancient DNA analysis has confirmed that the pair—interred side by side at Cherington in Gloucestershire—were sister and brother, offering a rare and deeply personal glimpse into family life in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The grave contained a young boy buried with a sword and an older girl accompanied by a workbox, suggesting distinct but meaningful roles attributed to each child. Their bodies had been carefully arranged, with the girl placed facing the boy in what appears to have been a deliberate and intimate composition. Double burials in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are relatively uncommon, and even when multiple individuals are found together, they are not always buried at the same time. In this case, however, the positioning of the children indicates that their burials were contemporary. Researchers suggest that their deaths may have been caused by a fast-acting infectious disease, though no definitive cause has been established.
The grave lies within a wider Anglo-Saxon cemetery that has attracted attention in recent years after it first came to light in 2016. Subsequent investigations revealed that the cemetery extended beyond the initially explored area, with further excavations uncovering additional burials, including a second child buried with a sword. The presence of two such burials in close proximity is highly unusual and has raised new questions about status, identity, and burial practices in early medieval England.
https://www.medievalists.net/2026/04/medieval-grave-in-england-reveals-brother-and-sister-buried-together/
1926 Irish census release: For the global diaspora of some 80 million people claiming Irish ancestry, tracing their family tree has always run into difficulties due to the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the outset of the Irish civil war. While much of what was housed in the PRO is lost for ever, the challenge will be somewhat reduced with the release onto the internet of nearly 3 million freely-available records from the 1926 census.
But as well as providing many new leads for family historians, the census records are a trove of information for academics looking to understand conditions in the country at the birth of the Saorstát Éireann (the Irish Free State). Ciara Breathnach, Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork, is planning to explore wider socioeconomic, cultural and political aspects including, for example, teasing out the relationship between the populace and the newly-formed An Gárda Síochána, the unarmed police force established in 1926 who acted as census takers. Did they encourage participation, or instil a reticence to engage, among those who opposed the Irish Free State government?
Scholars of migration, she suggests, will see birthplace as a critical data point in tracing Northern Irish Catholics seeking refuge from sectarian conflict, although research into the extent to which the 106,456 decrease in the new state’s Protestant population since 1911 reflected those leaving for political and safety reasons is, somewhat ironically, compromised by the loss of the 1926 Northern Irish census records through archival neglect.
https://theconversation.com/80-million-people-globally-claim-irish-ancestry-why-the-release-of-1926-irish-census-records-is-so-momentous-280746
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