News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER MARCH 2025
Next Lecture
The next talk is ‘The Life and Legacy of the Sultan Saladin’ by Professor Jonathan Phillips at 7.30 pm on Thursday 20 March, Wynne Room, Battle Memorial Hall. A video of the lecture will be circulated soon after on the Society’s private YouTube channel.
Date for the Diary : ‘Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders’ by Dr Nathen Amin at 7.30 pm on Thursday 10 April, Battle Memorial Hall. Please note the earlier than usual date for this lecture. Full details of this year’s programme are available here.
Membership Renewal
If you have not renewed your membership yet, just a reminder that subscriptions for 2024/25 are overdue. After very many years we have had to increase the subscription to £30 for two people from the same address, or £20 for single membership. This will enable us to maintain the high standard of our lecturers, at a cost of less than £2 per lecture. Additional donations are, as ever, very much appreciated.
Society Facebook Page
Don’t forget to check out the BDHS Facebook page. For those who are Facebook users, please find it at https://facebook.com/BattleHistorySociety or by searching for Battle and District Historical Society when logged into your Facebook account. Remember to like and follow the page to get notification of our posts.
Battle Museum
The Museum will be opening for the new season on Monday 31 March 2025. There are still vacancies for museum volunteers, so if you are interested in volunteering this season, please make contact via the museum website http://www.battlemuseum.com.
Whatlington Parish Church 750th Anniversary
As part of the programme for the anniversary year, there will be a talk in the church at 7.30 pm on Friday 4 April. The talk will last about 1 hour and there will be refreshments afterwards. Entry is free but donations will be welcomed. Car parking is available at Whatlington Village Hall.
Recently-Published Articles on Collectanea
Maria Soane School Certificate from Battle and Langton
3.1 School Certificate of Maria Soane
History of Battle Arts Festival
1.2 Battle Arts Festival
1911 and 1921 census
1.3 Comparison of 1921 and 1911 census data for Battle High Street
Table 1
Table 2
History in the News
First tomb of pharaoh found in a century: a tomb discovered in 2022, has recently been identified as that of Thutmose II who ruled 3,500 years ago and who was succeeded by his wife, Hatshepsut. Archaeologists believe that the contents, including the mummy, was moved to a yet to be discovered tomb nearby following a catastrophic flood. Alabaster jar fragments, inscribed with his name, allowed for identification of the tomb, which had been richly decorated with scenes from the Amduat, a religious text which was reserved for kings. The search is now on for the final resting place of Thutmose II and the tomb’s original contents.
Army food: the Fusilier Museum in Warwick has a temporary exhibition (15 February-26 April) on how the army has fed its troops over the last 200 years. The WW1 section includes hard tack biscuits which were inedible unless added to stew or hot water: the reason for making them so hard was to avoid being eaten by vermin or suffer from environmental conditions; some students even wrote on the biscuits. In WWII, rations were more diverse, a combination of tinned food and dry, packed food. Items from the Boer War include utensils and chocolate bars, which are perfectly preserved.
Sledges: it has been discovered that humans were using sledges more than 20,000 years ago – the earliest form of transport. Fossilised drag-marks, likely to have been discovered at White Sands national park in New Mexico in the US, which give the first indication of how heavy and bulky loads were moved around before wheeled vehicles existed. The tracks were preserved in dried mud which filled with sediment over time, eventually turning to stone. Some of the tracks were in a single line, suggesting they were made from dragging two poles end to end; others consisted of two parallel lines, suggesting they were created by two poles, crossed in the middle, like a traditional sledge. The fact that they were found alongside human footprints suggest that the primitive sledges were pulled by people rather than animals. Many of the footprints around the tracks appear to be from children, so the researchers believe that groups of children followed behind or were walking at the side whilst the adults pulled. Until now, the earliest evidence of transport came from cave art with pictures of boars dating from around 10,000 years ago, as well as changes to animal hooves and paws around the same period which suggests that they were pulling heavy loads.
Pompeii find: in 2020 researchers found a brain which had been preserved when it turned into glass. Pea-sized chunks of black glass were discovered inside the skull of the victim who was about 20 years old and died in his bed. It is now believed a cloud of ash as hot as 510C enveloped the brain then very quickly cooled down, transforming the organ into glass; the pyroclastic flow would not have reached a high enough temperature and could not have cooled quickly enough. It is the only known case of any organic material turning to glass naturally.
Other history articles in the press: If any member spots an interesting history article, just email a scan of it to bdhs66@yahoo.co.uk and we’ll feature an edited version of it in the next Newsletter.
The Arts Society Rother Valley (ASRV)
Lectures in the programme include Elizabeth Vigee le Brun: trail blazer, A piece of the Auction: Behind the scenes at an international auction house, David Devant, England’s Greatest Magician: All Done by Kindness, and The Two Gustavs: Mahler and Klimt.
For further details, please check the ASRV website https://www.theartssocietyrothervalley.org.uk or contact Pat Arrowsmith, Membership Secretary, on 07838 214675.
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