News
HISTORY NEWSLETTER JUNE 2026
Our Next Meeting
Our June lecture will be delivered by Ian Everest on Thursday 18th June in the Wynne Room at Battle Memorial Hall starting at 7.30pm. The lecture is entitled “A Sussex Farm in the 1950s” and will show that, while to ‘make hay’ and ‘bring in the harvest’ sound like idyllic pastimes, life was tough life on the South Downs during the 1950s; the war was over but the battle was still being fought to feed the nation. The talk will include clips from original cine film.
Ian Everest was brought up on a farm on the South Downs and after attending Agricultural College in the late 1960’s, he worked in the agricultural sector with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. His growing interest in family and military history led to a career change when he was appointed manager of Newhaven Fort, which he prepared for public opening and subsequently managed for 15 years.
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
Please note that in order to align with the Battle Festival, our July meeting will be held on Wednesday 22nd July not Wednesday 8th as previously advertised. This meeting will be in the Main Hall rather than the usual Wynne Room.
The lecture, to be given by Brigadier Hugh Willing, is entitled “Fernando Po – SOE’s Secret Operation Postmaster”. Many daring raids and secret operations were carried out during WWII by British Commandos and Special Agents and became legendary tales, whilst others remained unsung. ‘Operation Postmaster’ was the clandestine seizure of Axis shipping by SOE operatives in Santa Isabel harbour on the Spanish Island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea off the West Coast of Africa on 14 January 1942. The operation was so politically sensitive that it could have been the catalyst to bring Spain into the war on the side of the Germans and went unreported until 50 years after the war’s end. Now the story can be told.
Hugh, of course, requires little introduction but he lectures on British Military and Colonial History. He has travelled widely in Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, Arabia and the Far East both in a military and private capacity. He was a professional soldier for 36 years before retiring in 2007: he served in the Royal Green Jackets and the 2nd KEO Gurkha Rifles in many parts of the world. His final posting was in Oman as the Defence Attache at the British Embassy for 4 years.
Full details of the 75th anniversary season’s programme are available here.
Westminster Abbey Visit
Details of this proposed visit have been circulated to all members asking for expressions of interest.
“A Different Kind of Diplomat”
BDHS member Michael Hodge was a diplomat for 37 years. Michael has now written a book, “A Different Kind of Diplomat – The story of Branch B of H M Foreign Service”, that tells the story of Sir Antony Eden’s reforms in 1943 which opened up the service to the “great reservoir of talent” that lay outside traditional recruitment from the public schools and Oxbridge. From the 1940s onwards there were many members of the Diplomatic Service who had no degrees and who came from humble backgrounds, recruited on the basis of A-level results, or an entrance exam, and an interview.
Michael is making no attempt to have his work commercially published but it has been placed on the FCDO Historians’ website and you can read or browse it at:
https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/a_different_kind_of_diplomat
2024-25 Journal
Copies of the 2024-25 Journal are now available and can be collected from the front desk at any BDHS meeting. And if you haven’t already had one, then at the same time you can take away your free 75th anniversary commemorative bookmark.
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.
Lost Maya city found on page 16 of a Google search: Most great archaeological discoveries involve years of fieldwork, dense jungle, and a lot of digging. This one involved clicking through page after page of Google results, the kind of Internet rabbit hole most of us only tumble into when we’re bored at home.
Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in Louisiana, was deep in a search when he found it. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC. That laser survey turned out to contain an entire ancient Mayan city, hidden under forest cover for centuries. Auld-Thomas and a fellow archaeologist named it Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon.
The survey used LiDAR, a mapping technique that fires laser pulses from a plane or satellite to measure distances to the ground. When you strip away the tree canopy from the data, you can see what’s underneath: in this case, pyramids, causeways, sports fields, amphitheaters, and thousands of structures in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche. The organization that originally collected the data was monitoring the environment and had no idea they’d flown over a lost city.
The numbers are staggering. The city is thought to have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people between roughly 750 and 850 AD, which is more than the population of the region today. Its density ranks second only to Calakmul, the largest known Mayan site in Latin America, located about 100 kilometres away. Researchers believe Valeriana may have served as a capital.
Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author on the research study and an anthropology professor at Tulane, said the discovery challenges a long-standing Western assumption that tropical regions were places “where civilization went to die.” The opposite appears to be true; these environments were densely settled, intensely developed, and home to sophisticated urban centers.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/archaeology-student-found-lost-maya-city
Another hoard: Metal detectorists continue to find buried Roman coin hoards. It was recently reported that Michael Eakers, from Plymouth, and his friend Brian Dixon, while searching pasture land at North Huish in Devon, uncovered 97 silver coins and six copper alloy coins, just a few inches below the surface. The coins span more than 200 years of Roman history, from the time of Mark Antony in 32BC to the joint rule of Septimius Severus and Caracalla in the early 3rd Century.
Experts say the hoard was probably buried after AD205 and is likely to be the largest hoard of Roman silver coinage known from Devon in recent times. The find has now been declared treasure under the Treasure Act after a coroner’s inquest and Eakers estimates it could be worth at least £10,000.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98rj256kj7o
Missing relic found after 40 Years: A rare royal pendant seal from the 11th century, once used by Edward the Confessor, has resurfaced after vanishing for more than 40 years. Edward, who ruled England from 1042 to 1066 and was later canonized as a saint, is often remembered as the last Anglo-Saxon king before the Norman Conquest and for overseeing the construction of Westminster Abbey. The object, known as the ‘Saint-Denis seal,’ had been housed in Paris’s Archives Nationales for nearly two centuries before it disappeared in the 1980s, leaving historians with no clear explanation and little hope of recovery.
It has now been revealed that the wax object was located by a curator and a PhD student who were examining a section of the Paris archive that houses detached and damaged seals. This rediscovery, made in 2021, is being reported publicly for the first time in a new academic study co-authored by Dr. Guilhem Dorandeu, who found the seal, and Professor Levi Roach of the University of Exeter.
Dr. Dorandeu said: “Pendant seals were two-sided wax impressions that were attached to a document by a cord or ribbon, which hung below it. Historically, these were used by monarchs to authenticate and approve important state papers.
“Edward’s seal is, therefore, a precious historical monument, and its recovery offered us a great opportunity to study it closely and consider what it says about the ambitions and influences swirling around the King and his advisors.” The researchers point to the inscription ‘Anglorum basileus’, with the term basileus being associated with the Byzantine emperor. The depiction of a sword on one side of the seal also echoes imagery seen on Byzantine coins.
“You might think that it’s self-evident that a sword should be a royal attribute,” said Dr. Dorandeu. “But at this point in English history, it’s almost not been used. We do see it, however, in the Byzantine coinage, where it had been introduced no more than five to ten years earlier. So, this suggests strong connections with, and quick responses to, Byzantine iconography.”
https://scitechdaily.com/missing-medieval-relic-of-legendary-english-king-found-after-being-missing-for-40-years/
Britain’s textile history: Textiles shape British life in ways we often overlook – the clothes we wear, the items we inherit, and the patterns that quietly signal where we come from. Yet behind these familiar objects lies a rich history of labour, skill and innovation. From the knitting frames of industrial England to the woollen mills of Wales, the patterned traditions of Scotland and the linen workshops of Northern Ireland, textile crafts have helped shape the UK’s social and cultural fabric.
As interest grows in sustainable fashion, repair and “slow” making, museums and specialist archives across the UK are breathing new life into textile heritage. Together, they reveal how communities have worked, adapted and expressed their identity through cloth. This article provides 22 notable examples of specialist textile museums and archives from across the UK. Follow the link to find out more.
https://theconversation.com/britains-textile-history-told-through-22-museums-and-archives-279485
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