September Newsletter
Our Next Meeting
Our next meeting will be on Thursday 17th September in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. The lecture, entitled “Accidental Death in Tudor England” will be delivered by Professor Steven Gunn, fellow of Merton College, Oxford and a specialist in late medieval and early modern Britain and Europe. As well as researching into accidental death and everyday life, Steven has published works on Tudor government, warfare, foreign policy and political culture and the comparison of the English state in this period with others in Europe.
Tudor England was a dangerous place. There were plagues, wars, perilous childbirths and shocking infant mortality but what about the risks in people’s everyday lives? There were dangers in the workplace, housework and even leisure activities such as football, swimming, bell-ringing, river-side flower picking and even getting too close to performing bears!
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. Please treat this link as personal to you and do not 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.
Dates for Your Diaries
Our October meeting is on Thursday 15th in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. It will feature the Commemoration Lecture given by our President, Professor David Bates and entitled “Matilda and England’s Eleventh Century Queens”.
If you want to see the lecture programme for 2026-27 in full, it is now available here.
Millennium – “Millenium”
Many of you will know that 2027 has been designated the “Year of the Normans” marking the 1000th anniversary of William the Conqueror’s probable birth. Events are taking place across Europe to reflect Norman influence on the continent as well as across sites in the UK including London, York, Winchester, Canterbury, Newcastle, Exeter, Norwich, Edinburgh, Belfast, Hastings and, of course, Battle itself.
BDHS will be supporting the programme of events here with six lectures on Norman themes, four of which fall in the 2026-27 season with October’s Commemoration Lecture as the first of these.
And by the way, “Millenium” is not a spell-check failure; it’s the French, rather than the English, spelling that has been adopted for all event branding.
To find out more, visit https://www.millenium.fr/en
The Normans: conquest, conflict and colonisation
If your appetite for all things Norman needs whetting, the National Archives are running a series of three online events during October highlighting a century of change under the Normans.
Tickets can be booked through Eventbright and are available on a “pay what you can” basis from £0 to £15. To find out more, click here
Battle Museum
Battle Museum of Local History remains open until the end of October for the 2026 season. The special exhibition this year focuses on gunpowder plot celebrations in the town and the role of the Battel Bonfire Boyes.
Extracts from the Archive
Our online archive holds a number of recordings, mostly made in the 1980’s, with memories of Battle in earlier times. A small selection with links to the recordings, appears below.
Tony Emeleus (b. 1911) remembers Battle High Street in the 1920s in a recording of a talk he gave to PROBUS in 1991. Click here.
Herbert Newbery‘s (b. 1911) reminiscences were recorded in the form of four walks around Battle and this re-recording of the original tapes made in 1986-7, spoken by Eric Augale was made in 1992 due to traffic noise on the original. They are very informative and well worth listening to. The first recording covers walks one, two and part of walk three. Walk one goes from Marley Lane via the station footpath into Lower and then Upper Lake and was originally recorded on 17 July 1986. Walk two covers St Mary’s Church and 1-45 High Street and was originally recorded on 23 September 1986. Walk three covers 49 High Street to 1 Upper Lake and was originally recorded on 31 October 1986. Walk three continues at the start of the second recording.
Walks one, two and the first part of three can be heard here.
The second recording covers the end of walk three, approximately 74 High Street to 1 Upper Lake and walk four. Walk four covers 4 Mount Street to 49 High Street and was originally rcorded on 20 May 1987. Click here.
Fred Holland, local butcher, (b.1903) also provides interesting listening and can be found here.
History in the News – a digest of recent reporting
If any member spots an interesting history article, just email its details, or a scan of it, to webadmin@battlehistorysociety.com and we’ll feature an edited version of it in the next Newsletter.
New insights into the Battle of Hastings: Tom Licence, professor of medieval history and literature at the University of East Anglia, believes that a lost letter from the Pope could rewrite the story of 1066 and that a power struggle in Rome may have shaped the invasion of England by William the Conqueror.
The letter from Pope Alexander II sheds more light on how it all came about. It shows that the battle for England’s crown was shaped by a bitter power struggle between two rival popes, who both claimed authority, in the 1060s. England’s support for his rival, Honorius II, may have persuaded Pope Alexander II to back William’s invasion, the newly discovered letter from the Vatican archives shows.
For centuries, the Norman Conquest has largely been understood as the result of a power struggle sparked by the death of Edward the Confessor and rival claims to the English throne. The letter suggests that the power struggle in Rome may have had far-reaching consequences as well.
“1066 was not simply decided on the battlefield at Hastings. The outcome may also have been shaped by decisions taken almost a thousand miles away in Rome,” Licence says. “Harold’s policy on the papacy may ultimately have played into the hands of his enemies, giving William’s opportunistic invasion the legitimacy of a just war.”
The discovery followed an examination of overlooked excerpts from a lost letter by Pope Alexander II that was preserved in a medieval canon law collection held in the Vatican. The Pope’s whole register of letters is lost but some survive as copies or excerpts. Two excerpts from this particular letter survive.
In the letter, the Pope said England had been under the protection of St Peter until people “fired with the pride of their father Satan” led the English away from “the path of truth”. Historians largely treated these remarks by the Pope as unexplained references. But now, researchers say, they can be fully understood in the context of a fierce dispute which divided Western Christendom in the early 1060s. This may help explain why a pope supported the violent overthrow of an anointed king.
https://share.google/xz8sNPfcPftnjiJGx
No 10 North has a precedent – in medieval York: Andy Burnham’s decision to establish No 10 North, a permanent northern base for the Prime Minister’s Office, has been hailed as an ambitious shift in state power. Critics have questioned the practicalities of moving part of the machinery of government beyond London but the idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile.
The royal household, senior officials, courts, records and administrative departments moved with the monarch. The scale of this movement could be extraordinary. At the height of his reign, King John (who reigned from 1199 to 1216) relocated his court and government on average 220 times a year. Other historical centres of power include Winchester, which served as the political heart of pre-Conquest England. During the English civil war (1642-1651), Charles I established Oxford as the Royalist capital, because parliament controlled London.
But these examples are not quite the same as Burnham’s No 10 North. Winchester was an early royal capital – before Westminster rather than alongside it. Oxford was the capital of the king, but not of parliament. York was different. Between 1298 and 1337, three successive English kings repeatedly transferred major parts of their central administration to York. Parliament met in the newly-completed chapter house of York Minster. The city’s sheriff was ordered to construct the distinctive chequered table used by the Exchequer and prepare secure accommodation for the royal treasury inside Clifford’s Tower. York castle was adapted to house the two principal common law courts, King’s Bench and Common Pleas. York even witnessed a royal wedding when Edward III married Philippa of Hainault in the minster in 1328. For extended periods, York was the closest England came to having two administrative centres.
By the late 13th century, York was uniquely equipped to play this role. It was the largest and wealthiest city in England after London. Situated on the tidal River Ouse, it was connected directly to the Humber and the North Sea, making it one of England’s most important commercial centres. Major roads converged on the city, giving it communications second only to London. It was also a centre of authority; the county town of Yorkshire, England’s largest shire, and the seat of the archbishop of York. The city possessed many of the things a government needed: accommodation, administrative experience, skilled clerks, commercial wealth and political prestige. York offered proximity to the northern frontier during Edward I’s wars against Scotland while still providing the infrastructure required to administer a kingdom.
No 10 North is not a medieval revival. Edward I moved his government north because of war, royal politics and the practical realities of medieval kingship, not because he sought to reduce regional inequality or rebalance the relationship between London and the rest of England. Yet the historical comparison matters because it challenges a persistent assumption: that England has always been governed exclusively from London.
Westminster’s dominance can appear timeless but it is the result of historical change rather than inevitability. For much of the Middle Ages and early modern period, the location of government remained flexible. England has experimented with multiple centres of power before – and for a time, York showed that a different seat of government could work.
https://theconversation.com/andy-burnhams-no-10-north-has-a-precedent-in-medieval-york-288467
Head of extinct thylacine sells for £60k at auction: This may be more natural history than history but it’s too good to overlook.
An item that was originally believed to be an antique taxidermy fox has sold at auction for £60,000 after being identified as the mounted head of an extinct animal. It was first bought for just £50 at an antiques market before it was later discovered to be a rare thylacine, a creature sometimes referred to as a Tasmanian Tiger. The specimen is one of only 101 known taxidermy examples of the thylacine and attracted plenty of attention when it went under the hammer at Auctioneum, in Bristol.
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial with dog-like traits that was native to New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Most died out about 2,000 years ago but a population continued to live on Tasmania into the 20th Century before hunting, disease and habitat destruction drove it to extinction. The last known individual died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
Taxidermy, pelts, bones and other items from the thylacine are now a top prize for zoologists, scientists and collectors and complete mounted heads are rare outside of major museums and scientific institutions. Replicas of skulls or bones sell for thousands of pounds and to find a complete item like this is almost unheard of, especially in the UK.
The specimen was purchased by taxidermy and natural history collector, James Cranfield, who described the piece as “the find of a lifetime.” He said he planned to ensure that the head would be available to the academic and scientific community.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg60ejkk48o
Kevin Doherty
webadmin@battlehistorysociety.com
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