Battle and District
                 Historical Society


 

 

News

HISTORY NEWSLETTER OCTOBER 2024

Next Lecture

The next talk is ‘Odo of Bayeux’ by Professor David Bates at 7.30 pm on Thursday 17 October, Battle Memorial Hall. A video of the lecture will be circulated soon after on the Society’s private YouTube channel.

Date for the Diary : Our AGM will be held in Battle Memorial Hall at 7pm on Thursday 21 November and will be followed by Dr Mary Hersov’s lecture ‘A History of the National Gallery: a personal perspective’. 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 due from 1st September, apart from new members who joined since 1st June and who have already paid for next year. 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 is closing for the winter at the end of October, so do pop in if you have not visited this season.

If you are interested in volunteering for next season, please contact the Museum via its website http://www.battlemuseum.com or by phone during opening hours (see above) on 01424 277100.

History in the News

WWI U-boat: a diary handed down through three generations has helped find the wreck of a German U- boat sunk by a secret Royal Navy Q-Ship in 1917. There had been doubts that the U-boat had been sunk but the diaries helped a documentary team to confirm the sinking and find the location. It was the only known battle where a navy ship and a submarine had sunk each other: on 19 February 1917, the submarine opened fire on the Lady Olive; as the U-boat drew near to assess the damage, the Lady Olive counter-attacked. After a 4-year search, divers from Guernsey discovered the UC-18 at a depth of over 230ft about 50 miles off the coast of Jersey. All the crew of the submarine were lost, but every member of the crew on the Lady Olive was saved.

Lost cemetery: seven early medieval human skeletons have been uncovered on Holy Island and are being removed for further investigation. It is thought that the bodies had been buried in in the main cemetery but were redeposited in a charnel pit, perhaps to make way for new graves. It is hoped that they can discover their age and sex, where they came from, what they ate and how they died.

Newly discovered Roman town: the site near Great Staughton has been given heritage protection as a scheduled monument. The remains of a small town were discovered during survey work for a solar farm. The buried features of the Roman town are well preserved and extend across about 75 acres: there are extensive streets, buildings of a highly organised Roman settlement of urban character, and traces of domestic and industrial activities tell the story of life in the town over several centuries. The discovery of a settlement of such scale and complexity has led to a re-evaluation of Roman Cambridgeshire.

George IV piano: King George IV’s piano has been played again at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion for the first time in about 170 years. Queen Victoria is thought to have removed the piano from the Pavilion in the middle of the 19th century and it is believed to have been in private ownership until it turned up at auction in 2017 when it was bought by Brighton and Hove City Council and returned to the Pavilion. It has now been restored and placed in its original position in the Music Room Gallery.
Mathew Fletcher of Glyndebourne Opera played the piano for Museum patrons.

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 Hollywood in the 1930s, From Negative to Positive: Photography’s long road to recognition as art, Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de St Georges: the African Mozart, 1850’s London, Elizabeth Vigee le Brun: trail blazer, and A piece of the Auction: Behind the scenes at an international auction house.

For further details, please check the ASRV website https://www.theartssocietyrothervalley.org.uk or contact Pat Arrowsmith, Membership Secretary, on 07838 214675.

 

Sarah Hall

 

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







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