News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 2026
Date for Your Diaries
As usual, there is no BDHS meeting in August. The new season’s programme will begin on 17th September with a lecture entitled “Accidental Death in Tudor England” given by Professor Steven Gunn.
Meanwhile…..
…. details of the Cemetery tour and the archaeological site visit, both this month, have been circulated to all members.
Westminster Abbey Visit
Details of this proposed visit have been circulated to all members asking for expressions of interest.
Battle Museum
Battle Museum of Local History is open 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.
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.
Copy of US Declaration of Independence found in UK archives: As the BDHS itself has found in the past (an account of our find is here), surprising and overlooked items can unexpectedly turn up in archive stores.
Such a find has been made at the National Archives in Kew, where a rare surviving copy of the US Declaration of Independence – the only known example of its kind outside the US – has been discovered.
The document was uncovered by a volunteer in February while cataloguing the papers of Royal Navy captains from the American Revolutionary War. It is one of 11 copies printed in Exeter, New Hampshire in July 1776 to spread news of American independence through the colonies before it was seized by the Royal Navy on Christmas Eve 1776 when the HMS Raisonable captured an American ship, the Dalton, off the coast of Portugal following a seven-hour pursuit. The captured ship was brought back to Britain and its papers seized, including the privateer’s commission, printed instructions from the Continental Congress, and the Declaration itself, the only known copy to be taken by military action.
The Declaration was found folded among the letters of Captain Thomas Fitzherbert and was brought to Plymouth in January 1777 before being moved to Whitehall in London. It was listed at the time as “another paper” and stayed hidden in the archive.
Dr Graham Moore from The National Archives said the discovery is “one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about”, adding that it was not meant to be preserved due to the intention to distribute it quickly. “After the original printing on 4 July, the news of the Declaration is travelling fast around North America and it’s being reprinted as it reaches each successive colony,” he said.
The rare copy has undergone conservation works to stabilise its paper and repair a slight tear, making it safe for handling, study and future display. It will go on display as part of Revolution 250: America’s Independence Story, 1763-1783 at The National Archives.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrkl104ly5o
Bird droppings and the transformation of agriculture: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-third of the world’s fertilizer normally passes, has made clear that access to nutrients for crops remains as strategically important in the 21st century as access to oil. Edward D. Melillo, Professor of History and Environmental Studies, at Amherst College in America, has studied how fertilizer transformed the modern world and reveals that its history is about more than scientific innovation or agricultural progress; it also reveals the hidden costs of modern food production, including the brutal treatment of workers and the expansion of imperial power.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, fertilizer companies shipped millions of tons of dried bird excrement from islands in the Pacific and Caribbean to farms across Europe and North America. Rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, guano transformed agricultural productivity at a time when expanding populations and industrializing societies demanded more food than traditional farming systems could produce. It became the first fertilizer commodity traded on a truly global scale.
For centuries, farmers had sustained soil fertility by recycling locally available nutrients, including animal manure, crop residues and human waste, which circulated within largely closed ecological systems linking soils, crops, livestock and people. As industrialization accelerated during the 19th century, the local nutrient cycles that had sustained farming for centuries began to unravel. Farmers searched for new ways to replenish depleted fields as they struggled to feed rapidly growing populations.
For millennia, millions of seabirds, including guanay cormorants, Peruvian boobies and pelicans, had nested on rocky outcrops along South America’s arid Pacific coast. With almost no rainfall to wash away their nutrient-rich droppings, guano accumulated in towering layers. Islands that appeared barren were, in fact, among the world’s richest natural sources of fertilizer. Since the 13th century, indigenous farmers along Peru’s Pacific coast had understood this extraordinary resource but European scientists began to appreciate it only after 1804, when Alexander von Humboldt carried samples of Peruvian coastal guano to Europe and scientists demonstrated its unusually rich nitrogen content. Peruvian guano suddenly appeared not as an exotic curiosity but as an extraordinarily concentrated natural fertilizer.
When commercial extraction began in the 1840s, workers were not simply shovelling loose bird droppings. Centuries of accumulated guano had been compressed by its own weight into a dense, cement-like mass that had to be hacked apart with picks, crowbars and iron bars. Decades before synthetic ammonia transformed agriculture, millions of tons of naturally accumulated nitrogen and phosphorus crossed oceans from remote ecosystems to the world’s farms. For the first time, agricultural fertility itself became a globally traded commodity, laying the foundations for the chemically intensive agriculture that emerged after World War II.
Agricultural abundance has long depended on far more than fertile soil. It has relied on distant nutrients, global shipping networks and the workers whose labour connected remote islands to farms around the world. Guano did more than fertilize fields. It created a global agricultural system whose supply chains stretched across oceans, depended on distant workers and were vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. From Peruvian islands to the Strait of Hormuz, the history of fertilizer reminds us that the world’s food supply has long rested on fragile connections between remote places.
https://theconversation.com/bird-droppings-were-a-foundation-of-modern-agriculture-and-american-empire-287441
The guano trade was also the foundation of the fortune made by Michael Grace, the Irish-American millionaire resident of our own Battle Abbey from 1902 till 1916 and who on his death in 1920 was brought back to the town and buried in Battle Cemetery. An account of his life and times can be found on our website here
25 new World Heritage Sites include D-Day landing beaches:At a meeting in July of the World Heritage Committee, UNESCO designated 25 new World Heritage sites.
The D-Day beaches are perhaps the most newsworthy inclusion, and it encompasses Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches, as well as Pointe du Hoc. As UNESCO notes, “These sites are directly associated with the Allied landings of 6 June 1944, the opening phase of Operation Overlord, which marked the beginning of the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation during the Second World War. The property preserves significant remains of the German Atlantic Wall, including casemates, artillery batteries, fire‑control posts, and resistance nests, alongside battlefield traces, original wartime equipment, and major commemorative landscapes such as the American Cemetery at Colleville‑sur‑Mer. Together, these elements form an exceptional cultural landscape shaped both by the events of 1944 and by their enduring remembrance.”
Despite the mystery of its origins being revealed by the maps, the building’s history still has some twists. By the 20th Century, the building had fallen into disrepair and become a wreck. At that point, the owner of a nearby house saw an opportunity, and for some years the dovecote was rebuilt into a playhouse for their children to enjoy.
Also designated was Mount Olympus, in northern Greece, the country’s highest mountain but also closely associated with ancient Greek mythology as the home of the twelve Olympian gods – and back in the news thanks to the popularity of The Odyssey. “We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to safeguarding Mount Olympus for the benefit of present and future generations,” Georgios Koumoutsakos, Greece’s delegate to UNESCO, was reported as saying. “As Greek mythology wisely reminds us, it is always best to remain on good terms with gods.”
Among the other new sites are the ancient Japanese capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara, and South Sudan’s Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape. In addition, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia and Florida was the only US site to get the recognition this year.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/unesco-adds-25-new-world-heritage-sites-including-mount-olympus-and-d-day-landing-beaches/ar-AA28S4Jm?ocid=BingNewsSerp
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