News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER JANUARY 2026
Our Next Lecture
Our monthly lecture will be held on Thursday 15th January in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall and begin at 7.30pm. Christina Greene will be talking about the “La Mora Project”, which commemorates the 1000th anniversary in 2027 of William the Conqueror’s birth, and also her contribution to it, the La Mora Tapestry, which is involving not only Battle residents but visitors as well.
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 next lecture will be held on Thursday 19th February in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall and begin at 7.30pm. “Portrait of a Lady : The Duchess of Cleveland at Battle Abbey” will be delivered by Robert Catt and Fiona Stapley who are both volunteers at the Abbey. Their lecture will focus on one of the stories from Battle Abbey’s rich history beyond 1066 – the life and times of the Duchess of Cleveland, who lived there during the late Victorian period (1857-1901) and who literally dug into its history; landscaped its gardens and opened it to visitors.
Full details of the 75th anniversary season’s programme are available here.
2025-26 Subscriptions
Outstanding membership subscriptions for the new season are overdue now. The cost is the same as last year at £20 for a single member and £30 for two members at the same address. If you need to let the Society know of any changes in the details we hold for you, membership forms can be downloaded from the website or collected from the front desk at lectures. We strongly encourage payment by bank transfer but payments by cheque can be sent to the Membership Secretary or you can pay by card or cash at the front desk.
2024-25 Journal
Copies of the 2024-25 Journal are now available and can be collected from the front desk at any BDHS meeting.
Memorial Hall Energy Project Appeal
As members who were at the December meeting will know, the Memorial Hall Committee is faced with raising the money to replace the 50-year old boiler which heats the Hall and is at the end of its life. Now, the aim is to make the Hall comfortable, reliable, and sustainable for generations to come by installing a renewable heating and cooling system, along with battery storage which will allow the Hall to use clean energy generated by solar panels.
An appeal has been launched to help raise funding. This is supported by Aviva Insurance’s Community Fund so that every donation is equally matched by Aviva. To find out more and to make a donation if you wish, full details are available at:
https://www.avivacommunityfund.co.uk/p/battle-memorial-hall-energy-project-1
“New Year, New You”
The annual “New Year, New You” event organised by Visit Battle and showcasing the clubs and societies based in the town will be taking place in the Memorial Hall on Sunday 11th January from 10am until noon. BDHS representatives will be there alongside volunteers from the Museum to make people aware of who we are and what we do – and maybe attract some new members. Do come and visit our stand if you can that morning and maybe take a look at the very many other activities available in our town that you might like to become involved in.
“The King’s Traitor”
If you’re looking for a way to spend that book token you had for Christmas, how about the newly-published biography of Reginald Pole by BDHS member, Dr. Helen Hyde. “The King’s Traitor” charts the life of Pole – a royal cousin, near-miss pope, target of Henry VIII’s assassins, friend of Michelangelo, and the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury – through turbulent Tudor times. Described by our recent lecturer Nathen Amin as “a revelatory exploration from a masterful scholar”, “The King’s Traitor” is available from Rother Books and all other good booksellers.
Battle Museum
Battle Museum of Local History is now closed until the beginning of April.
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.
Ancient Egyptian pleasure boat found off Alexandria coast: An ancient Egyptian pleasure boat that matches a description by the first-century Greek historian Strabo has been discovered off the coast of Alexandria, to the excitement of archaeologists. It was discovered off the submerged island of Antirhodos, which was part of ancient Alexandria’s Portus Magnus (great port).
The pleasure boat, which dates from the first half of the first century CE, was 35 metres long and constructed to hold a central pavilion with a luxuriously decorated cabin. Strabo had visited the Egyptian city around 29-25BC and wrote of such boats: “These vessels are luxuriously fitted out and used by the royal court for excursions; and the crowd of revellers who go down from Alexandria by the canal to the public festivals; for every day and every night is crowded with people on the boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness.”
The excavations were conducted by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) under the direction of Franck Goddio, a visiting professor in maritime archaeology at the University of Oxford, who said, “It’s extremely exciting because it’s the first time ever that such a boat has been discovered in Egypt. The boats were mentioned by different ancient authors, like Strabo, and they were also represented in some iconography – for example in the Palestrina mosaic, where you see such a boat of a much smaller size with noblemen hunting hippopotamuses. But an actual boat has never been discovered before.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/08/ancient-egyptian-pleasure-boat-found-archaeologists-alexandria-coast
“Beachy Head Lady”: The skeleton of a women discovered in 2012 in the basement of Eastbourne Town Hall in a box labelled ‘Beachy Head (1959)’ may not be the “first black Briton” that she was initially believed to be.
Based on an analysis of the skull, the skeletal remains – dating from Roman times – were previously thought to belong to a woman from the sub-Saharan region and a craniofacial reconstruction had depicted her as having curly black hair, brown eyes and dark skin. However, a recent analysis of her DNA, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, has revealed that she actually had a strong genetic similarity to individuals from rural Britain during the Roman period and that she likely had blue eyes, between pale and dark skin and light hair.
The publication’s authors – a team from the Natural History Museum, University College London, Heritage Eastbourne, University of Reading and Liverpool John Moores University – said that the earlier identification was never published in a scientific journal but it was widely reported in the media. The new results are based on high-quality DNA data made possible by recent advances in science and technology.
The Beachy Head Lady was an estimated 5ft (1.52m) tall and is believed to have been aged between 18 and 25 when she died although scientists have not been able to determine her cause of death. There is evidence that fish had been a greater component of her diet, consistent with her living on the coast.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce86jzgxxy4o
Sutton Hoo ship needs a new name: Members of the public are being asked to suggest names for a reconstruction of a 90-foot Saxon ship – but have been warned that Saxon McSaxface is unlikely to make the shortlist
The Sutton Hoo Ship’s Company was founded in 2016 and since then has been working to make the first full-size model of the ship, the remains of which were discovered in 1939. The official launch is scheduled for late spring 2027, when the vessel’s name will be revealed. Organisers are looking for suggestions for names and will draw up a shortlist from suggestions ahead of a public vote. Entries can be submitted through the ship’s company website and should have an explanation of why the name is suitable. A statement on the website reads “we are looking for suggestions that are simple to pronounce and reflect the ship’s history and heritage” but makes clear that this excludes any “Saxon McSaxfaces, thank you.”
https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2025-11-21/sutton-hoo-ship-needs-a-new-name-but-not-saxon-mcsaxface-please
A Christmas Carol: an anti-slavery story?: Research by Lucy Whtehead from Royal Holloway suggests that an autographed script written by Charles Dickens during the American Civil War raises the possibility he may also have understood A Christmas Carol as speaking to the cause of ending slavery in the US.
First published in the UK in 1843, the novella is famous for its advocacy of a reformed relationship between the Victorian capitalist Scrooge and the workers whose labour he profits from, epitomised by his downtrodden clerk, Bob Cratchit. However, a slip of blue paper held in Harvard’s Houghton Library shows how Dickens may have also seen the story through the lens of American slavery. Lucy’s research in the library’s collections shows that in March 1864 Dickens wrote out and autographed A Christmas Carol’s most famous line so that it could be sold in aid of the anti-slavery side in the ongoing American civil war (1861–65). The closing sentence – “And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!” – is usually associated with Victorian families united in the Christmas snow. However, Dickens’ contribution to a set of celebrity autographs being collected for sale at the 1864 New York Metropolitan Fair enlisted his novella in the cause of supporting the goal of ending slavery in the US.
While there are no direct references to slavery in A Christmas Carol, there are good reasons to think it was on Dickens’s mind at the time he was writing it. The two works he was publishing immediately before it – American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit – both make vivid reference to the inhumanities of slavery. They had been inspired by the five-month tour that Dickens made of the US in 1842.
Lucy writes “If Dickens did intend to use the final line of A Christmas Carol to support the anti-slavery cause in the American Civil War, this would allow us to rethink how he may have seen the relationship between exploitation and inhumanity at home and abroad. It suggests that, in at least some circumstances, he was able to see these causes in connection rather than competition”.
https://theconversation.com/did-charles-dickens-see-a-christmas-carol-as-an-anti-slavery-story-272292
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