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Salon: Issue 326
22 September 2014
Next issue: 6 October 2014
The Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter (Salon) is a fortnightly digest of news from the heritage sector. It focuses on the activities of the Society and the contribution that the Society's Fellows make to public life. Like the intellectual salons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it aims to amuse and to stimulate debate as well as to inform. A copy of Salon’s editorial policy can be found on the Society’s website. News and feedback for publication in Salon should be addressed to the Editor, Christopher Catling.
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Inside this issue
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Forthcoming meetings
Unless stated otherwise, tea is served from 4.15pm and meetings start at 5pm.
2 October 2014: ‘Romancing Saltwood Castle’, by Peter Rumley, FSA. At face value, Saltwood Castle has all the attributes of a classic medieval defensive castle; in fact it was a private residence for most of its history, ownership oscillating between Church and Crown until the Dissolution, since when it has been in secular hands. This paper sets out the history of this little-known but first-rank ancient monument, reveals the ways in which later inhabitants romanticised the castle and speculates on its origins as a lost royal residence.
9 October 2014: ‘“Not bad for a provincial museumâ€: researching the history of the Fitzwilliam Museum’, by Lucilla Burn, FSA. Founded in 1816 by the will of Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will celebrate its bicentenary in 2016. Today’s museum is the product of evolving ideas about the function of museums and galleries, within the context of the University of Cambridge and more widely, and of the characters, personalities and ambitions of successive directors, staff, Syndics and benefactors. This paper will explore how the Fitzwilliam reached its current form, and ask where it is it going next.
16 October 2014: ‘Rendlesham rediscovered: an East Anglian royal settlement of the time of Sutton Hoo’, by Christopher Scull, FSA, and Jude Plouviez, FSA. Fieldwork on arable land at Rendlesham, Suffolk, has identified an elite settlement complex of the sixth to eight centuries covering c 50ha which may be identified confidently with the Anglo-Saxon royal establishment recorded by Bede in a context of AD 655 x 664. There is evidence too for antecedent prehistoric and Romano-British activity, including a significant late Roman presence, and for activity through the Middle Ages to the present day. More than 3,000 finds have been retrieved by systematic metal-detecting, and their context established by magnetometry and targeted field evaluation. This paper presents the background to the survey, summarises current results and their interpretation, and considers the wider applicability of the approach and methods employed.
23 October 2014: ‘Painting, practice and purpose: the “Making Art in Tudor Britain†project at the National Portrait Gallery’, by Tarnya Cooper, FSA, and Charlotte Bolland. The National Portrait Gallery has recently completed a seven-year collaborative research project, combining technical analysis with new art historical and archival research, to discover more about artistic practices in sixteenth-century Britain. This paper will discuss some of the findings of new research on key Tudor paintings and will also introduce the NPG exhibition, The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Rediscovered (12 September 2014 to 1 March 2015), to which our Society is lending several works, including Hans Eworth’s portrait of Mary I.
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Countdown to ‘Heaven on Earth'
 It is now just four days until the fundraising auction of the year, designed to raise funds to help conserve ‘heaven on earth’, William Morris’s description of Kelmscott Manor. The organisers and donors are to be congratulated on assembling 99 tempting lots, most of them associated in some way with Morris, Kelmscott or the arts and crafts movement, consisting either of eminently collectible objects or the unique experience of being taken for a behind-the-scenes tour of a public institution, private house or stately home by the expert on its history and collections.
You can see a description of all 99 lots here, along with an indication of the reserve price. Absentee bids are easy to place using the website, but for the full sense of occasion, be sure to attend the auction itself. Tickets can be booked here and cost £50, in return for which you will be able to enjoy an evening of champagne, canapés and live music provided by students and staff of the Royal College of Music in the historic setting of the Society’s apartments, plus all the excitement of a live auction.
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Stonehenge and Richard III
Those hardy perennials have been in the news again this week. In case you missed it, the latest news regarding Richard III is that the likely cause of his death has been established from a study of the injuries inflicted on his body at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. The authors of a paper published in the Lancet say that death probably came quickly as a result of two blows to the skull — one made by a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and another made by the tip of an edged weapon that penetrated the skull.
The investigative team, led by Dr Jo Appleby of the University of Leicester School of Archaeology and Ancient History, working with the Forensic Pathology Unit and the Department of Engineering at the University of Leicester, used whole body CT scans and micro-CT imaging of injured bones to analyse trauma to the king’s remains and to identify the medieval weapons potentially responsible for his injuries.
The results show that Richard sustained eleven wounds at or near the time of his death — nine of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had removed or lost his helmet. Sarah Hainsworth, Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Leicester, said that ‘Richard’s injuries represent a sustained attack or an attack by several assailants. The wounds to the skull suggest that he was not wearing a helmet, and the absence of defensive wounds on his arms and hands indicate that he was otherwise still armoured at the time of his death.’
Professor Guy Rutty, from the East Midlands Pathology Unit at the University of Leicester, said that ‘Richard’s head injuries are consistent with some near-contemporary accounts of the battle, which suggest that Richard abandoned his horse after it became stuck in a mire and was killed while fighting’.
Zooming over to Stonehenge, as viewers of the two-part BBC programme, ‘Operation Stonehenge’, did over and again, to the accompaniment of electronic clicking, pinging and buzzing noises and the exaggeratedly histrionic tones of narrator Sam West, we were assured last week that the ‘mystery’ of Stonehenge had finally been ‘unlocked’. Lots of hippies with saturnine beards and long hair looked worried as they crept about in the woods, hunting aurochs or stroking the bones of their relations before placing them in a basket in a virtual reality long barrow, while women and children gave as good as they got in a ferocious battle on Crickley Hill with slow motion death by flint arrowhead. In another interlude that was supposed to have us weeping, a young boy was sent down a flint mine at Grimes Graves as a right of passage only to see his mother crushed to death by a rock fall.
Leaving aside these distracting attempts to inject emotion and drama into the broadcast, it was good to see the entire Stonehenge landscape explained by Fellow Vincent Gaffney and his team on the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, using the latest in high-tech kit from Austria to look at what lies beneath the turf without having to dig. It was good, too, to be reminded that Stonehenge did not stand in isolation, but was part of a crowded landscape, even if, as our Fellow Simon Jenkins pointed out in his Guardian column, we already knew this (‘the idea that Stonehenge was thought an isolated monument is absurd. Timothy Darvill’s 2006 survey, Stonehenge: the biography of a landscape, has the area thick with around 670 similar features. “At a density of about five barrows per square kilometreâ€, he says, “this makes it one of the most heavily populated areas of the British Isles in terms of the number of burial monuments.â€â€™).
Iconoclastic as ever, Simon suggested that Stonehenge needed a tidy up: ‘I wish someone would replace the fallen lintels and fill in the gaps’, he wrote. Witty responses from Guardian readers included the suggestion that Stonehenge also be painted in vivid colours to make it more fun, that McDonald’s or Starbucks should set up on site and that any new ‘stones’ should be built of Lego. One blogger pointed out that Stonehenge had in fact already been rebuilt, not once but six times in the last century alone.
Someone who didn’t seem to mind that the stones no longer form a complete circle and that a few lintels are missing was President Obama, who ‘dropped in’ by helicopter on his way from the Nato summit in Newport to Heathrow. His decision to land at Stonehenge so as to cross it off his ‘bucket’ list (that is, the list of things he wants to do before leaving the planet) was widely described as 'spontaneous'. How convenient, then, that our Fellow Heather Sebire, Historic Property Curator with English Heritage for the west of England, just happened to be on hand to show him round. Is the US President ever allowed to do anything spontaneously? Whatever the answer, President Obama certainly seemed to have enjoyed his visit, which he described as ‘cool’, and no doubt English Heritage will now enjoy a record year for visitors coming to see what the President saw.
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Garden Cities
Somebody has at last looked over the fence and realised that they do planning better on some parts of the Continent. Urban designer David Rudlin has won the £250,000 Wolfson Prize for Economics (the second largest after the Nobel Prize) for an idea that has been core to town planning in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands for the last fifty years: that of satellite villages linked by efficient public transport systems to the core town or city, with parks, gardens, allotments, woodland, agricultural land, nature reserves, wetland and water forming extensive green areas in between.
Planning ‘garden suburbs’ like this would ‘solve Britain’s housing crisis, Rudlin argues. His prize-winning scheme involves devoting the next thirty years to building 86,000 new homes for about 150,000 people in each of forty towns and cities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Reading, Guildford, Canterbury, Ashford, Rochester, Colchester, Chelmsford, Ipswich, Norwich, Northampton, Bedford, Peterborough, Rugby, Stratford-on-Avon, Worcester, Cheltenham, Stroud, Bath, Salisbury, Winchester, Poole, Taunton, Exeter, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Chester, Preston, Blackburn, Harrogate, York, Harrogate, Lincoln, Durham and Carlisle.
Not everyone thinks this a good idea, because it involves building on the sacred green belt. Matt Thomson, head of planning at the CPRE, responded by saying: ‘popularity was supposed to be one of the criteria of this prize but I don't see how building on the green belt will be popular', to which Salon's editor says: 'go and visit Amsterdam or Munich: not only does it work; the spaces between are teeming with wildlife'.
Could it work in the UK? All the main political parties have said that they are keen on the idea, but who dares challenge the might of the developers? Unlike conventional developments where the landowner and developers aim to maximise their profit, the garden city model requires that money be spent on infrastructure and community resources. How likely is that to happen? An sobering article in the Guardian called ‘The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities’ seeks to explain the real reason we have a housing crisis in the UK. If even half of what the article alleges is true, it ought to be compulsory reading for all politicians and planners.
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'Prospering Wisely'
The latest issue of the British Academy Review contains news of a booklet and website setting out ‘how the humanities and social sciences enrich our lives’. The publication challenges definitions of ‘prosperity’ based purely on economic criteria; instead, it says, prosperity ‘encompasses all the elements that make for a good life and a healthy society’. In summary, the Academy argues that the humanities and social sciences are ‘vital drivers of human progress. They provide the rigorous scrutiny and insights, the ideas and long-term thinking that has a profound influence on our social and cultural well-being ... we provide the critical assessments and dissent that are vital to democracy and intellectual progress ... a society without a thriving social sciences and humanities sector achieves at best only an arid kind of prosperity, far less rich than our creative human culture deserves’.
Fellows Mary Beard and Diarmaid MacCulloch were both interviewed as part of the study. Mary Beard says in her interview that it is very easy for ‘backbench politicians from any party to get a few philistine cheers by saying that Classics is done and dusted’, so they do, even if they don’t really mean it. That creates an environment in which we have to justify what we do crudely in terms of instant profit and loss. The point about humanities work — the way the work in the humanities productively ignites our own cultural and political environment — is that it isn’t easily relatable simply in cash terms ... Everybody should justify what they do. But I shouldn’t necessarily have to justify it on whether it can be shown next month to have added a particular number of pounds to the British economy.’
In his interview, Diarmaid MacCulloch says he is ‘very optimistic about our society. I love its irreverence. I love its shapelessness. I grew up in constricted 1950s England, and the transformation has been exhilarating ... we now live in interesting times, when many sorts of authority are being questioned. It seems to me entirely healthy that that should happen. It is an opportunity, when authority is being questioned, to show what a good sort of authority might be. A good sort of authority is usually a well-informed authority. It is also an honest and open form of authority. The humanities and social sciences have a good record on encouraging openness. That might be our contribution to the social progress that this society must make.’
The same issue of the British Academy Review has a posthumous article by our late Fellow Nicholas Brooks on the early charters of Canterbury Cathedral and what they tell us about the management of royal and ecclesiastical estates in Anglo-Saxon Kent. Another article by Dr Elina Screen, of the British Academy’s ‘Medieval European Coinage’ research project, asks whether Anglo-Saxon coins found in Norway represent trade, raid or tribute. A third article, by Richard Ashdowne, describes the completion of the British Academy’s long-running research project, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.
 Last but not least is an article by Philippa Steele, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, on the enigma of ancient Cypriot clay balls. These are typically about 18 to 20mm in diameter, inscribed with between two and eight letters of an as yet undeciphered script. Theories abound as to their use and meaning, but the most likely one is that the inscriptions are personal names and that the balls served as identity cards used by itinerant workers employed in centrally controlled industries such as the mining and smelting of copper in the Late Bronze Age (fourteenth to eleventh centuries BC). Were they perhaps used to ‘clock in’ and ‘out’ of work? Whatever their purpose, Philippa presents them as evidence of the extraordinary diversity of writing systems in use on Cyprus during the first and second millennia BC, including a number of scripts that no scholar has yet been able to read.
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MOLA achieves ‘Independent Research Organisation’ status
MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) has become one of a select number of organisations to be granted Independent Research Organisation (IRO) status by Research Councils UK. As a result, MOLA no longer needs a university partner to apply for research council funding, but can apply in its own right for funds to carry out pioneering research.
MOLA is the first archaeological contractor ever to be awarded IRO status, and this is welcome recognition that developer-funded archaeology can make a genuine contribution to academic knowledge. MOLA joins the British Museum, the National Archives, the British Library and the Imperial War Museum as non-university institutions on the IRO list.
To be granted IRO status, the organisation and its staff must have a track record for leading innovative research projects and maximising the impact and value of its research to the benefit of society and the UK economy. MOLA’s outstanding in-house capacity to undertake innovative projects, its peer-reviewed publications programme, its grey-literature reports and the dissemination of its research to the wider public are recognised by this status.
One ground-breaking research project recently carried out by MOLA, based on the study of the human remains from Spitalfields Market, the UK’s largest cemetery site, demonstrated a direct link between mass burials in London in the fourteenth century and a catastrophic volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Another, called ‘Locating London’s Past’, led by the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and funded by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee), resulted in an interactive website that allows users to search the locations of crimes as recorded at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913. MOLA provided spatial data and manipulated the digital images and maps for this widely used research tool.
MOLA is now eager to hear from potential research collaborators with ideas for further pioneering research studies.
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Didcot Iron Age mirror to stay in Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire County Council’s Museums Service has been successful in its appeal to raise £33,000 to purchase what has been described as 'one of the most beautiful examples of a first-century BC decorated mirror of the eighteen such mirrors that have survived in a state of near completeness in this country'. This mirror was discovered near Didcot some years ago by a metal-detector user and was recently sold to an anonymous overseas bidder. It would have been exported had the appeal not reached its target only hours before the deadline.
Councillor Lorraine Lindsay-Gale, Oxfordshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Cultural Services, said: ‘we are particularly grateful for the support of Wartski, the Court jewellers, who very generously made a major contribution to the appeal launched by the Friends of the Oxfordshire Museum which raised half of the money needed’. The Friends' appeal was matched by grants from the ACE / V&A Purchase Grant fund and the Headley Trust.
Our Fellow Carol Anderson, Director of the Oxfordshire Museum, said: ‘this mirror is a nationally important archaeological artefact as well as an outstanding work of art and piece of craftsmanship, which will now stay in Oxfordshire where it was used more than 2,000 years ago. It will help us properly reflect the incredible archaeological heritage we enjoy in the county, and be a spectacular exhibit for the county’s museums.’
After conservation, the mirror will be placed on temporary display at the Cornerstone Arts Centre in Didcot and subsequently at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock, before forming part of a special touring exhibition exploring the history of metal working in Oxfordshire. The Friends' appeal remains open to receive further donations to contribute towards the costs of researching, conserving and displaying the mirror.
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New mosaic found at Chedworth
Fellow Peter Salway reports on this year’s excavations at Chedworth Roman Villa, where a new mosaic has just been uncovered lying immediately below the turf that might have been the floor of a reception hall inserted as part of a major upgrading of the villa in the fourth century.
‘This year’s excavation concentrated on trying to discover what lies under the confusing pattern of concrete path-like strips laid down by Ian Richmond following his excavations in the 1960s but not published due to his early death in 1965. It also aimed to explore a large open space between the North Baths and the sequence of rooms further east that form the north side of the Lower Courtyard but are elevated above it, including the well-known pillared hypocaust. No mosaics or other features were kept open for display here after James Farrer’s 1864—5 excavations and nothing was shown in the space in G E Fox’s meticulous drawings (now in the Society’s collection) of the 1880s, other than a small square structure with a drain, immediately in front of it. It was therefore assumed, in the past, that this space was open to the elements or that it perhaps formed a veranda.
‘That was until Stephen Cosh (in the mosaics corpus that he and David Neal published with the Society) demonstrated that two small areas of mosaic (Mosaic 418.13) could be reconstructed as parts of a very large mosaic from this spot. Given that Chedworth is a notoriously frosty site, it was very unlikely that such a mosaic would have been open to the elements. Instead, Fellow Simon Esmonde Cleary, in the course of his research for the 2012 National Trust guidebook to the site and for his 2013 monograph, Chedworth: life in a Roman villa, began to suspect that a reception hall might have been inserted here as part of the major upgrading of the villa in the fourth century.
‘The 2014 excavation was directed by Fellow Martin Papworth, National Trust South-West Regional Archaeologist, advised by Simon and myself. Richmond’s concrete did, indeed, represent early walls, part surviving, part in the form of robber trenches. The real surprise was the discovery that little of the space between had been touched since the Victorian excavations, and that there was indeed a large mosaic immediately under the turf (scarily close to the present surface). Despite extensive damage, it is now certain that one mosaic, measuring 18m x 6.6m, covered the whole of this room and that it was, indeed, a single room. Taken together with the small areas already known at the far end of the room, approximately one half of the mosaic has now been uncovered.
‘There is little doubt now that it was a grand reception hall, probably the chief point of entry for suitably respectable visitors in the Late Roman period. In date the mosaic is broadly contemporary with the well-known West Range mosaics, if not of the quality of that in the triclinium. It is stylistically comparable with many other Cotswold pavements and work by the same group of craftsmen is also found in Trier. Stephen Cosh spent a day on site and is also being supplied with laser scans. He is now confident of being able to reconstruct the design of the whole mosaic.
‘The small square room in front of the hall proved to be deep and very well built. It is earlier than the hall itself and may have started as a plunge bath associated with the North Baths before they were reduced in size in the fourth century and converted to operate as a sauna-like dry heat suite. It is not clear whether the square structure was retained when the hall was built. If so, it was probably adapted as a decorative ‘water-feature’. Behind the hall are two quite large apsidal rooms with restricted access. These have not yet been re-examined, and are tentatively interpreted as high-status private rooms, one being perhaps for individual audience with the master of the house.
‘This year’s work at the site forms part of a five-year excavation programme agreed with English Heritage, the prime purpose of which is to inform long-term conservation plans (the site is on the “At Risk†register). The success of the 2012 cover building on the West Range indicates that the National Trust’s intention eventually to cover the North Wing — or at least the North Baths — is correct. This had always been on the cards since developments to transform conservation and public access at Chedworth were first considered twenty years ago. The principal problem in designing a new cover building was that we had insufficient knowledge to be able to brief architects and structural engineers on the shape and extent of what needs to be covered and how, though that is now beginning to become much clearer.’
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Phoenician shipwreck found off the coast of Malta
The Times of Malta reports that the remains of a 2,700-year-old wreck — claimed to be the oldest yet found in the central Mediterranean — has been located by a team of researchers from Malta, France and the USA working off the coast of Gozo. The find of around twenty lava millstones and fifty amphorae of various types and sizes is being interpreted as the cargo from a 50ft-long Phoenician wreck dating from around 700 BC. The exact location of the wreck, which lies at a depth of 120m, is being kept secret until the team has had a chance finish its research, which includes the 3D-recording of objects using photogrammetry.
Timmy Gambin, senior lecturer in the Classics and Archaeology Department at the University of Malta and the co-director of the project, said the shipwreck ‘is in a fantastic state of preservation’, and a Culture Ministry spokesman said ‘it is an important reference point for the entire central Mediterranean ... where we can understand inter-regional trade and exchange in antiquity’.
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News of Fellows
Fellow Bob Bewley has announced that he is stepping down from the post of Director of Operations at the Heritage Lottery Fund (see ‘Vacancies’ below) to head up a new project that is very close to his heart and interests as an archaeologist: ‘Endangered Archaeology’ is an Arcadia-funded project with the aim of locating archaeological sites in the Middle East and North Africa under threat. The project will record and map unrecorded and endangered sites, to a uniform standard, and will evaluate and monitor their condition. The information created will be made available through an open access website. Although it will predominantly use satellite and aerial imagery, it will work closely with the relevant authorities and people to reduce the risk to those sites under the greatest threat.
The project will start in January 2015 and be based at the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University. Arcadia is the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The fund works to protect endangered culture and nature; since its inception in 2001, Arcadia has awarded grants in excess of US$326 million (£200m).
Fellow Peter Yeoman, now Principal Researcher, Heritage Research, at Historic Scotland, is involved in the production of three new history plays currently being performed at the National Theatre in London, having been previewed at the Edinburgh International Festival in August to critical acclaim. Rona Munro’s three plays tell the stories of the Scottish kings James I, II and III, whose reigns span the 1400s. The trilogy builds on the dramatic tensions of their constant battles against the vested interests of the nobility and the ruthless ways in which all three monarchs asserted their ‘God-given’ right to rule.
Peter will be delivering an adult learning event on ‘Castle Life’ on 2 October 2014 at the Clore Learning Centre, Cottesloe Room, National Theatre, placing the three kings into the context of the buildings they inhabited, especially Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle and Linlithgow Palace: ‘I’ll be revealing something about the realities of their lives in the original spaces they knew, from the immensely impressive statement in stone James I created in his private palace at Linlithgow, to the royal garderobe in the hidden David’s Tower of Edinburgh Castle (familiar to all three of our James’s). As well as considering their creations, I’ll also be looking at their acts of devastation, such as the final annihilation of the over-mighty Douglas’s at their island fortress of Threave Castle, wrought by James II and his big guns in 1455.’
Another of Fellow Christine Finn’s recent radio broadcasts may well be of interest to numismatic Fellows: in 2012, some 70,000 coins Iron Age coins were found by a metal detectorist, thought to have been buried by northern French refugees fleeing Julius Caesar’s armies in about 60 BC — Christine draws a parallel between this hidden hoard and the habits of modern refugees not from conquering armies but from the tax authorities, as she explains how the character of Jersey has been formed by its status as a tax haven and why, having been born on the island, she cannot live there because she is not rich enough. Hear her entertaining if sobering story on the BBC World Service.
Congratulations to our Fellow Susan Oosthuizen who has just been promoted to a Readership in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1 October 2014.
In the same month our Fellow Carenza Lewis will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Access Cambridge Archaeology (ACA), which she founded in order to give members of the public the chance to get involved with archaeology and heritage within their own community. Carenza will give a public lecture on 22 October 2014, in which she will remember ACA’s early days, celebrate some of the highlights of the last decade and also look to the future, with questions and comment from the audience afterwards. Further information about ACA can be found here and tickets for the lecture can be booked here.
Earlier this year Fellow Michael Turner, Senior Curator at the Nicholson Museum in Sydney issued an invitation to Fellows visiting Australia to come and give a lecture. Michael now reports that our Fellow Sarah Staniforth has just gone down a storm (pun intended) speaking to a capacity audience on 11 September on ‘Extreme weather and its effect on the British coast, countryside and National Trust buildings’. Sarah’s talk was the third given by a visiting overseas Fellow in direct response to the invitation mentioned in Salon. Last year, Fellow Nathalie Cohen spoke on ‘Treasures from the Thames: London’s longest archaeological site’, and in 2012 Fellow Norman Palmer spoke on ‘Pandora, Rapunzel and the Pantomime of Souls: legal milestones on the trail of abducted and orphaned antiquities’. Michael would be pleased to hear from any Fellow interested in being included in the 2015 lecture programme.
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Bats in churches
Fellows Sally Badham and Jean Wilson are spearheading a fight-back by the Church Monuments Society on the destruction to our heritage caused by bats. They are compiling a database of places of worship that have bat populations or that house works of art that are being damaged by bats or that have had their activities restricted by the presence of bats. Please could Fellows (and others) with knowledge of these get in touch with Sally Badham or Jean Wilson, with their contact details.
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Monuments to antiquaries
Thank you to Norman Hammond for this picture of a monument in St Benet’s Church, Cambridge, commemorating Dr G H S Bushnell, former Vice President of our Society and (like Norman himself) one of very few FSAs expert in South American archaeology. Geoffrey Bushnell was also curator of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a pillar of the Monumental Brass Society and one-time Curator of the Cambridge University Collection of Brass Rubbings. One wonders whether the fact that FSA precedes FBA in the inscription tells us which of the two institutions he most favoured. Further contributions to ‘Monuments to antiquaries’ would be very welcome.
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Lives remembered: Donald Bailey, FSA
Salon's editor is very grateful to Fellow Catherine Johns for the following tribute to her late husband, Donald Bailey, who died on 15 August 2014, at the age of eighty-three.
‘Donald was an internationally respected scholar of classical archaeology, especially in the field of Roman ceramic studies. He combined meticulous curatorial work with research and publication of the highest quality, inspired by, but by no means confined to, the unrivalled collections of the British Museum, where he was a curator from 1955 until his retirement in 1996.
‘His work made accessible large and important areas of the collections and will have laid the foundation for research projects by archaeologists and historians in the future. He also published widely, and wrote the exhaustive four-volume A Catalogue of the Lamps in the British Museum (1975—96).
‘Donald and his twin brother, Ray, were born in London in 1931, so they were eight years old when the Second World War broke out and fourteen when it came to an end. This guaranteed maximum disruption to both their primary and secondary education. Don was twice evacuated out of London in the early part of the war, first to Northampton and later to Colesbourne in Gloucestershire, but he came back to London and attended the William Ellis School in Highgate, though during part of the time he was a pupil there, it was known as the North London Emergency Secondary School for Boys, a name that conveys the conditions of the time. His interest in archaeology started as a pupil there and he first became involved in fieldwork while still a teenager, taking part in Pat Collins’s 1947—9 excavations of the Iron Age hillfort of Blewburton Hill, and also in Fellow Ivor Noël Hume's pioneering urban archaeology work in post-war London.
‘National Service in 1951—3, served in the Parachute Regiment stationed in the Canal Zone of Egypt, gave Don his first introduction to Egypt and to Cyprus, with its wealth of ancient sites, where he went on leave. As there was no academic or professional tradition in Don’s family, the possibility of a university education never even occurred to him. Instead, after National Service, he started work in Paddington public library. It was there, in 1955, that he saw a newspaper advertisement for museum assistant posts in the British Museum, and decided to apply.
‘Working in the museum was a joy to him from the very beginning, with the opportunities it afforded for handling and studying one of the world’s finest collections of Classical antiquities. Soon after he started work there, our late Fellow Donald Strong was appointed Assistant Keeper. Like my Don, he was not only an exceptional scholar, but also a warm and generous person who spread light. He became Don’s principal mentor, and it was undoubtedly his influence that encouraged this modest and diffident young Museum Assistant to start writing articles and submitting them for publication. His succinct yet elegant and erudite note entitled “A false Roman lampâ€, which appeared in the journal Archaeology in 1958, was the first, and possibly the shortest, of several hundred publications which eventually included some of the finest major British Museum catalogues published in the last fifty years.
‘Don, in his own turn, supported and encouraged younger colleagues, as many of us know at first hand. My own debt to him as a scholar is infinite, and his immense knowledge was always at the disposal of anyone who asked. He believed that knowledge should be shared freely.
‘From the mid-1970s he regularly took part in fieldwork in Libya, Greece, Italy and, above all, in Egypt — including the British Museum’s work at El Ashmunein in the 1980s, the 1990s excavations at Mons Porphyrites and field-survey work carried out in the Fayum. He soon became recognised as one of the leading scholars in the formerly somewhat neglected field of Romano-Egyptian archaeology. His expertise included not only ceramic studies, including lamps and terracottas, but also many other aspects of classical art and architecture in Egypt and elsewhere. His final publication, a report on the pottery from several seasons of field-survey work in the Faiyum oasis in Egypt by a German papyrologist, Cornelia Römer, is due to be published later this year.
‘His achievements were recognised within the museum by his promotion into curatorial grades that were not normally open to non-graduates, but in 1992, he actually became a graduate when he was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree, based on examination of his formidable body of published work. He owed the impetus to submit work for that DLitt to our friend Bill Manning. He was also deeply gratified by the Festschrift presented jointly to him and me by our colleagues in 2005. He was so modest that any reminder of the esteem in which he was held always came as a delightful surprise to him.’
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Lives remembered: Ken Hawley (29 June 1927—15 August 2014)
Ken Hawley, who has died at the age of eighty-seven, was a legendary figure amongst industrial archaeologists. Our Fellow Sir Neil Cossons pays tribute to the nation’s single most prolific and inexhaustible source of knowledge and wisdom on the edge tool and cutlery trades of Sheffield.
 ‘I first met Ken Hawley in 1969 when we were judges together on the BBC’s “Chronicle†series of industrial archaeology competitions and we were to become lifelong friends. He had an engaging, limitless and generous capacity to talk about steel and how it could take and hold an edge. He and his wife Emily would regularly drop in to see us in Shropshire, ostensibly for a few words but invariably staying for several hours, to talk about his collection and its future and reminisce about manufacturers, their skills and specialisms. Sitting at our kitchen table he’d run his thumb along the blade of a table knife with a look of ill-disguised disdain. Fortunately, I have only Sheffield-made tableware, otherwise the consequences would have been frightful. It was on one of these visits that he watched while a couple of builders struggled to open up a doorway in a stone wall with lump hammer and cold chisel. Taking the cold chisel he told them exactly what he thought of it and them in somewhat Chaucerian terms: “It’s blunt: you could ride bare-arsed to London on that!â€.
‘Ken Hawley’s education was cut short at fourteen by the war years, which he spent designing safety guards for factory machinery. This inculcated an emphasis on accuracy and detail but, importantly, it brought him into contact with innumerable Sheffield workshops and tradesmen, sparking his curiosity about why and how the city’s cutlers and toolmakers were world famous. On completion of his National Service in 1947 he went into the retail tool business, setting up on his own in 1959 as a specialist tool merchant — not, he would insist, as an ironmonger: in order to distinguish his shop from ordinary hardware stores, he erected the locally renowned sign “we sell nowt but toolsâ€.
‘Those thirty or so years saw Sheffield companies, and the “little mesters†who formed the backbone of the city’s craft tradition, go out of business in their hundreds. Ken established himself as the ultimate source of knowledge about their history, skills and product, based on his enthusiastic collecting of planes, handsaws, files, taps and dies, cutlery, steel rules and micrometers, caliper and vernier gauges, scissors, shears and hammers. First his legendary collection filled two garden sheds, then the garage, then an extra storey added to the garage, as well as the attic of his house. Large items were stored in spaces begged elsewhere.
‘It was a chance conversation in 1991 with Janet Barnes, then Director of Sheffield’s Ruskin Gallery, that led to The Cutting Edge, the first public exhibition drawn from Ken Hawley’s collection. This had two effects: it brought Ken’s endeavours and his collection into the wider public view and it ultimately led — in 1995 — to the setting up of the Ken Hawley Collection Trust with the objective of acquiring the collection and securing its future. Its transfer into university premises in Mappin Street under the wing of ARCUS (Archaeological Research and Consultancy at the University of Sheffield) was carried out with the enthusiastic support of the late Professor (later Sir) Gareth Roberts, then Vice-Chancellor of the University, as well as practical support from our Fellow David Crossley, and a major award from the Heritage Lottery Fund given in December 1998. Ten years later a further and much larger HLF grant led to a building at the Kelham Island premises of the Sheffield Industrial Museum Trust being converted to provide permanent storage and display and this opened in March 2010. At the same time the Trust published a book, The Ken Hawley Experience, illustrating material from the collection and with a text and glossary of terms rich in the mysteries of the edge steel and cutlery trades. A second phase at Kelham Island opened a couple of years later and a third had been proposed by the time of Ken Hawley’s death.
‘In order to achieve all this Ken encouraged and mentored a team of volunteers, not only to catalogue but also to become experts in their own right on various aspects of Sheffield’s steel products. In addition, Ken Hawley was one of the driving forces — for over forty years — in the preservation of Wortley Top Forge, a former finery forge and ironworks, dating from at least the seventeenth century and widely thought to be the oldest surviving heavy iron forge in the world. In his profound knowledge and unquenchable enthusiasm Ken Hawley’s death leaves an unfillable void. But through his collection there remains an abundant wealth of material evidence, something of which Sheffield and the nation can feel justifiably proud.’
For another obituary for Ken Hawley, written by Simon Barley, son of our distinguished late Fellow, Maurice Barley, see the Guardian Online.
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Feedback
The last issue of Salon reported on the recently rediscovered John Nash drawings for what would have been, had it gone ahead, the first building in London to feature caryatids. Paul Hetherington, co-author of the article in the July issue of the Burlington Magazine that reproduces the designs, says that the house to be so ornamented ‘was to be on the east side of what is now Waterloo Place, and so only what an estate agent would call “a stone’s throw†from the Antiquaries’ home ground of Burlington House. The caryatids would have faced towards Carlton House, and so would have formed part of the culmination of Nash’s “New Street†as it descended from Regent’s Park. The footprint of the building is now enclosed within Cox’s and King’s Bank.
‘The client, Lord North, was a member of the Dilettanti and not an Antiquary, but his sentiments were of the highest, as he had a replacement made for the caryatid already taken from the Erechtheum by Lord Elgin, which was taken to Athens and duly installed. He even anticipated Melina Mercouri by agitating for the original caryatid (by then in London) to be returned to its home on the Acropolis ... but that is another story.’
The same issue of Salon reported Julian Litten’s entertaining reminder that there was ‘a fifteenth, albeit mythical, pier designed by Eugenius Birch, that at Frambourne-on-Sea’, located ‘somewhere on the south coast, invented by Harold Snoad and Michael Knowles in 1983 for their BBC Radio comedy series ‘It Sticks Out Half a Mile’. Salon’s editor then said that Frambourne-on-Sea was, of course, the home of the ‘Dad’s Army’ platoon. Close, says Julian, but not quite: ‘Dad’s Army’ was actually set in the mythical town of Walmington-on-Sea, though Wikipedia tells us that the Norfolk town of Thetford was used for location filming in the early episodes, and Chalfont St Giles, in Bucks, for later series, while Weybourne Station, on the preserved North Norfolk Railway, was used as Walmington-on-Sea’s railway station.
The question of who can eat swan meat, and whether the meat is even edible, has been the topic of many a dinner-party conversation since our Fellow Richard Buckley and others published their paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Richard III’s royal diet. Fellow Michael J T Lewis writes to remind us that ‘although it is always said that eating unmarked mute swans is illegal except for royalty and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, Charles Darwin, then an undergraduate at Christ’s College, wrote in a letter dated 15 March 1829: “I have paid Clayton for the memorable Swan. After all it was hardly kept long enough: it was pretty good, but tasted like neither flesh nor fowl, but something half way, like Venison with Wild Duckâ€.' Michael adds that 'Robert Clayton was a fishmonger and poulterer in Sidney Street, Cambridge, and a forebear of mine. The question arises, was he (and Darwin) committing a crime? Or was this something unremarkable? Or both?’ Please do get in touch if you have further information on the topic of swan consumption, its restriction to certain people and institutions and the degree to which any such restrictions were enforced in the past.
Meanwhile, a spot of Google research reveals that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was officially cautioned by members of the Northern Constabulary in 2005 after he admitted to eating a swan that had been killed after flying into electric cables near his home at Sanday, in Orkney. In his defence Max said: ‘I was brought up in the war and you don’t waste food’. His suggestion for consuming swan was to ‘hang them for four days and then you take out the breast meat and the good leg meat ... and make a delicious terrine’. One wonders how the Northern Constabulary became aware that Max had committed this egregious act. Perhaps a neighbour who does not like Modernist music decided to take revenge.
The culinary merits of squirrel meat were also raised last week in the Sunday Times, which reported that the Michelin-starred restaurant Club Gascon, in Smithfield, has squirrel terrine on the menu. The relevance of that to Salon readers is that our Fellow Lord Inglewood was quoted in the report as endorsing the consumption of squirrel meat. Described as someone who has long argued that red squirrels will become extinct in their Cumbrian haven unless the ‘grey menace’ is tackled, Lord Inglewood is quoted as saying ‘Grey squirrels are far better on the plate than in the wild ... anything to keep numbers down’. Lord Inglewood adds that the meat is too nutty for his taste, but Pascal Aussignac, the chef at Club Gascon, says the flavour changes according to the time of year: ‘squirrels eat hazelnuts and acorns in the autumn but barley in the spring’. Salon’s editor knows to his cost that they are also very fond of walnuts, and will strip a tree overnight, just when the nuts are ready to harvest.
Fellow Daniel Woolf says he ‘was delighted to see in Salon news of the recent British Museum exhibit based on the Little Crosby hoard discovered by William Blundell in 1611. 'While the work identifying the coins is new and very welcome', he writes, 'there is an extensive literature on this find and its circumstances going back a century. In the early 1990s I worked on the coin discovery, visited the site and had extensive correspondence with the remote descendants of William Blundell, still in situ at Little Crosby, and published an essay on the significance of the find in the development of early modern archaeology and a sense of the past within the context of the tensions existing for a Catholic manor inside a largely Protestant, even Puritan, parish. For anyone who would like to follow this up, the reference is: “Little Crosby and the horizons of early modern historical cultureâ€, in D R Kelley and D H Sacks (eds), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, 93—132, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.’
Fellow Keith Ray writes to say that anyone interested in learning more about the genesis of Edward Thomas’s poem, ‘Adlestrop’, will find a copious literature: ‘the poem must be one of the most commented upon in English Literature, and the origins of the poem, and the choice of words used in the first stanza, have caused the spilling of gallons of critics’ and commentators’ ink’, Keith says.
He commends ‘two relatively recent works that shed light on the significance of the poem and the specific circumstances of its composition. The first of these, Edna Longley’s Edward Thomas: the annotated collected poems (Bloodaxe, 2008), provides a commentary on the poems of unparalleled detail, including full extracts from Thomas’s field-notebook (British Library, FNB75), which shows that, in composing the poem in January 1915, Thomas returned to his notebook entry for 24 June 1914, but deliberately conflated notes from two different stops on that journey. From his Adlestrop notes, Thomas took and reworked the “chain of blackbirds’ songs†heard “through the willowsâ€, the “no one coming or going on the platform†and “the steam hissedâ€. From his Chipping Campden notes he took his observations on “willow-herb grass and meadowsweet†and the fact that “one man clears his throatâ€. It was at Campden, not at Adlestrop, that the train stopped momentarily — “Stop only for a minute till signal is up†— and where Thomas experienced “extraordinary silence†while “looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metalsâ€.’
The second recent work is Matthew Hollis’s biography, Now All Roads Lead to France: the last years of Edward Thomas (Faber, 2011). This explains the biographical significance of the poem, which ‘memorialises the train journey shared by Edward and Helen Thomas that launched their life-changing trip to the Herefordshire / Gloucestershire border to stay with Robert and Elinor Frost and to meet the association of friends then living in the neighbourhood who became known as the “Dymock Poetsâ€. It was the months after that visit that witnessed the first avalanche of poetry from Thomas that has contributed so much to the reputation he enjoys today.
‘Hollis notes that its conversational opening lines “Yes. I remember Adlestrop — / The name, because one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly. It was late June†were “anything but effortless†for Thomas, who made five separate attempts to get it right. He was quite aware that the train had not been an express train: it had been “train†and “steam train†in earlier versions. Thomas appears to have felt that the contrast between movement and stillness would be more dramatic if the train had been an express and had “unexpectedly†(changed to “unwontedly†in the final version) stopped at Adlestrop, not Campden.’
Keith concludes: ‘this poem is ultimately about the power of memory to recover things lost or misplaced in space or time and that is why “Adlestrop†continues to exercise such a pull on the historical imagination and to have such a special appeal for us as antiquaries.’
Fellow Chris Dyer has also spotted in ‘Adlestrop’ a clue that the poem might be a composite of several experiences. The poet ‘says that he could hear birds in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but Adlestrop station was on the boundaries of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire until 1931, and not even the loudest Oxfordshire bird could have been be heard there’.
Referring back to Richard III’s diet as king, and the suggestion that he drank ‘a bottle of wine a day’, Chris also points out that: ‘many dubious things have been written about Richard III, but it is news to me that he drank wine out of bottles, as they were not in use in his time. If the word “bottle†is being used as a measure of quantity — 75 cl — there is much documentary evidence for aristocratic wine consumption to suggest that bishops, earls, dukes and their companions regularly drank this amount and more, so the analysis of the isotopes is not really telling us anything new!’.
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Events
22 September 2014: the Venice in Peril 2014 Autumn Lecture Series begins with a lecture on ‘Titian: his Life and the Golden Age of Venice’, by Sheila Hale, author of the acclaimed biography of Titian. This is followed on 13 October 2014 by Richard Bassett’s lecture on ‘Venice and the First World War’, and on 3 November 2014 by the Ashley Clarke Memorial Lecture, to be given by the architect Sir David Chipperfield on ‘Venice: The Historic Present’. All three lectures take place at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House; doors open at 6.30pm and the lectures begin at 7pm. Booking details can be found on the Venice in Peril website.
 9 October 2014: The Mick Aston Memorial Lecture, organised by the VCH Somerset Trust and Somerset County Council Heritage Service, at 7.30pm, at the Museum of Somerset, Taunton Castle, will be given by our Fellow Professor Chris Dyer on the subject of ‘Who made the medieval landscape?’. Tickets (£8) are available from the museum or can be reserved by email.
21 October 2014: Oxford University’s annual Hensley Henson series of public lectures on church history will be given this year by our Fellow William Whyte, Professor of Social and Architectural History, on the subject of ‘Experiencing the Victorian Church: faith, time, and architecture’. The lectures take place at 5pm in the Examination Schools, on five successive Tuesdays and are entitled ‘Experiencing’ (21 Oct), ‘Seeing’ (28 Oct), ‘Inhabiting’ (4 Nov), ‘Visiting’ (11 Nov) and ‘Analysing’ (18 Nov). Further information can be found on Professor Whyte’s Faculty of History web page.
1 November 2014: ‘Mick Aston: archaeologist’, a day school at Strode College, Street BA16 OAB, that will celebrate the life and work of our late Fellow Professor Mick Aston. A panel of speakers, including Fellows John Gater, Chris Gerrard, Bob Croft, James Bond and Mike Costen, plus Richard Brunning, Tony Robinson and Tim Taylor, will examine aspects of Mick’s work and discuss his contribution to archaeology in Somerset and beyond. Bookings can be made through the Strode Theatre website.
7 to 9 November 2014: ‘Anthony Snodgrass: a celebration of eighty years’. The pupils and colleagues of our Fellow Anthony Snodgrass, creator of one of the world’s most influential schools of Mediterranean Archaeology, are organising this non-residential conference at the Cripps Conference Centre, Magdalene College, Cambridge, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. It is a measure of Anthony’s standing as a scholar and supervisor that his former research students hold senior positions in institutions across the UK, USA, Greece and Australia, and many of them will be among the list of speakers, further details of which can be seen here.
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David Hume: My Own Life
 In 2012, Salon reported that our Fellow Iain Gordon Brown had been awarded one of the first Honorary Fellowships of the National Library of Scotland and had been elected Curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy. At the time, Iain said that he hoped to be able to promote the links between these two institutions. One tangible outcome of this objective is the publication by Iain of a new edition of David Hume’s famous autobiography.
The manuscript of this remarkable memoir (along with the rest of a large and immensely rich and valuable assemblage of other Hume manuscripts) was bequeathed to the Royal Society in 1838 by the favourite nephew of the great historian and philosopher; for nearly three decades, since 1987, they have been deposited in the National Library. These manuscripts constitute by far the most important assemblage in existence of Hume autograph letters, documents, personal papers and literary manuscripts and remain the cornerstone of Hume scholarship, heavily used by Hume researchers from all over the world.
Hume’s brief autobiographical memoir, which he called ‘My Own Life’, was composed shortly before his death in 1776. Concise, highly nuanced and intensely moving, it has fascinated readers since its first publication the following year when, with almost as notable a supporting memoir by his friend Adam Smith, it appeared as a slim volume entitled The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself. One of the shortest but also one of the most celebrated autobiographies ever written, the memoir is famous for many things, but most notably for its vivid expression of Hume’s astonishing resolution in the face of death and for its memorable and striking use, at the end, of the past tense — as if the grave had already claimed the author.
‘Despite owning the manuscript for so long’, Iain writes, ‘the Society had never exploited this literary treasure to the full. Indeed the manuscript had never been edited. When I became Curator, I was determined that the Society should have an edition of this iconic document, partly for use as a corporate gift but also, and more generally, for sale to the very large community of students and admirers of the philosopher. Now My Own Life is, for the first time, fully edited from the manuscript and extensively annotated. A complete facsimile of the memoir is included in the publication and two new transcripts are provided: one for the general reader, and one for the scholar interested in the evolution of the text. My detailed introductory essays summarise and evaluate much historical and recent thinking on the significance of Hume’s remarkable autobiography.’
David Hume, My Own Life, edited by Iain Gordon Brown; ISBN 9780902198371; Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2014
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Lambert Barnard: Chichester’s Tudor painter
 Fellow Robert Tittler, in his ODNB essay on Lambert Barnard (c 1490—1567/8), describes him as ‘the most accomplished provincial English painter of his time’, while Edward Croft Murray told us in his pioneering study of Barnard’s work, published in the Archaeological Journal in 1957 (Vol 113, pages 108—25), Chichester is the ‘only ... corner of England’ where ‘we find a comprehensive school of early Renaissance painting’. Conservation work carried out by the Hamilton Kerr Institute at Chichester in 2011 has revived interest in Barnard’s various contributions to the cathedral, and this new 38-page booklet, by Karen Coke (who has written many previous papers on this artist and his employment by Bishop Sherborne), shows us the result of that cleaning and stabilisation in rich detail, along with other surviving examples of Barnard’s work at Amberley Castle, the Bishop’s Palace in Chichester and at Boxgrove Priory.
Despite its modest size, the booklet packs in a mass of new research, including new biographical information and a hitherto unpublished dry fresco by Barnard, executed in oil on plaster, discovered behind domestic fittings in 1950 in a building that once housed the cathedral prebendaries in South Street, Chichester. The booklet establishes that Barnard was an old-fashioned painter in some respects — preferring a medieval colour palette — but up to date in others — his portrait of King Caedwalla of the South Saxons is packed with Renaissance detail — and an artist in whose work every detail carries an ideological (and often political) message.
Lambert Barnard: Chichester’s Tudor painter, by Karen Coke; ISBN 9780992871406; Chichester Cathedral, 2014
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The Open Fields of England
 Fellow David Hall has sought in this book to write a national synthesis of a subject that tends to be buried in county journals or village history monographs; the 130-page gazetteer that closes the book lists, county by county, every published document, map, essay or book written on the subject. Bringing this mass of material together means that the story can be told of the origins of the open field, and its chronology and distribution, on a wider canvas, and, as the author says, this serves as a powerful corrective to current theories, which tend to be based on discussions of the Midland type alone.
David’s discussion divides lowland England into a Central Region, where the large and regular open fields associated with nuclear villages tend to be later in date and to have survived later, and the Eastern and Western Regions, characterised by small, irregular fields associated with dispersed settlement. The evidence for the latter is more difficult to find and study because open fields in these regions were enclosed and disappeared at an early date (frequently by the fifteenth century). David Hall acknowledges the work of Fellow Stephen Rippon and his colleagues on the ‘Fields of Britannia Project’ for making so much more new data available through their study of the grey literature arising from developer-funded excavations; he argues for a large degree of continuity between Roman-era and early medieval settlements and fields in these regions, with very complex patterns of ownership and tenancy.
By contrast there is much evidence for a high degree of planning in the Central Region, with holding patterns that suggest an agricultural regime subject to communal rules and regulations, especially regarding the balance of pasture and arable land. Arguably such a system requires co-operation between lords and tenants and arguably it also represents a ‘new beginning’, which the author suggests took place after the seventh century (many such fields overlie Middle Saxon settlements and cemeteries) and before the mid-ninth.
This is, necessarily, a crude summary of a richly detailed book, which ends with a research agenda for taking the subject forward: better dating of Saxon period sites; greater understanding of the extent to which settlements and fields of Roman origin continue to be used in the early medieval period; more comprehensive recording of the physical evidence surviving in the form of hedge patterns and furlong boundaries; and more research into the rich documentary evidence, not least that relating to the estates of the early colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Open Fields of England, by David Hall; ISBN 9780198702955; Oxford University Press, 2014
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Approaches to Industrial Heritage
This 75-page booklet records the proceedings of a conference held in Malta in 2013 to which several Fellows contributed, addressing a number of themes: the rich and interesting industrial heritage of an island that is more often the focus of research by prehistorians; the historical relationship between Britain and Malta, especially in terms of their industrial archaeology; the respective roles of the public and private sector in conserving and interpreting Malta’s industrial remains; and the over-riding question that forms the subtitle to the publication, ‘what works?’.
The keynote address, given by our Fellow Timothy Ambrose, ranges over a number of case studies from around the world showing how industrial heritage has been adapted to serve both cultural tourism and commercial developments. Another paper by Michael Farrugia, of Simonds Farsons Cisk plc, describes the creation of a new heritage centre in Malta at the older part of the huge Farsons brewery site (dating from 1928), based on the company’s heritage collections.
Rounding up, Fellow Reuben Grima, of the University of Malta’s Department of Built Heritage, describes the task ahead for those who care about Maltese industrial heritage as ‘documenting what we have got, deciding what has value and why, deciding how value and authenticity can be safeguarded and handed down to future generations, focusing on industrial processes and landscapes, not artefacts, and on people above all’.
Approaches to Industrial Heritage: what works?, edited by JoAnn Cassar and Reuben Grima; ISBN 9789993248118; The Farsons Foundation, 2014
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Goodrich Castle: its history and buildings
 Fellow Ron Shoesmith’s book provides us with a comprehensive account of Herefordshire’s most substantial medieval castle, based on his forty years spent in studying and excavating the castle and its site. The origins of this book lie in an academic monograph intended for publication by English Heritage: in place of that we have a more ‘popular’ account, minus the exhaustive detail, but benefiting greatly from English Heritage’s earlier investment in the evocative illustrations of our late Fellow, Terry Ball. There are also substantial contributions from our Fellows Pat Hughes and Bruce Coplestone-Crow on place-names, genealogy and documentary evidence, including important insights into the role of the Earl of Shrewsbury in the late sixteenth and first years of the seventeenth centuries in preserving the castle and its estate in such a good state of repair, all of which proved fruitless given the castle’s fortunes during and after the Civil War.
After its slighting, the ruin was regarded by William Gilpin as an essential component in ‘one of the grandest views’ on the River Wye, ‘correctly picturesque’, because of the contrast between the natural and built elements in the scene, the cliffs and woodland rising steeply from the river and crowned with the castle. The book draws together a number of accounts of nineteenth-century tourism: they include the diary and sketchbook of four undergraduates from University College, London, who, in 1892, ‘dined in the banqueting hall (rather eerie)’, and the poem ‘Traveller’s Joy’, written by Louisa Anne Twamley in 1838, describing:
Goodrich Castle, in whose halls now spring
Flowers unmolested; and in chimneys cold
Ferns wave and nettles cluster ...
Round about the buttressed tower
And over the Donjon-keep
The clematis weaves her dainty bower
And decks it bravely with leaf and flower
In draperies broad and deep
Such a different picture, of course, from today’s manicured and vegetation-free structures, which Ron Shoesmith analyses for us, with annotated photographs and drawings pointing out the evidence for different phases of construction and comparing the ruin that we see today with reconstruction drawings of the original work.
Goodrich Castle: its history and buildings, by Ron Shoesmith; ISBN 9781906663834; Logaston Press, 2014
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Hadrian’s Wall: a history of archaeological thought
 Fellow David Breeze delves into the long history of Hadrian’s Wall research to answer a series of specific problems or questions: ‘how it came to be realised that Hadrian’s Wall was built by Hadrian’, for example, or ‘did Hadrian design Hadrian’s Wall?’ The book therefore differs in its historiographical framework from the chronological account of thinking about Hadrian’s Wall published by Fellow Richard Hingley in 2012, which looked at changing perceptions of the Wall as reflections of the political, cultural and ideological concerns of their time.
This book is semi-autobiographical in that David writes in the first person, telling us a great deal about his own forty years of Wall study, dating from 1962, when he went up to Durham University to read history and had Eric Birley as his first tutor. He also introduces us to a cast of other Wall scholars, referring not just to them by their work, but also as people and personalities, conveying the sense of Wall study as a collaborative exercise, and of one generation building on the work of its predecessors and passing on the mantle to the next.
The message that comes across from all of this is the danger of thinking that you have ‘solved’ anything, or provided a definitive answer that will stand the test of time — closely related to the view that ‘there cannot be anything new to say about Hadrian’s Wall’. Echoing R G Collingwood, David rightly reminds us that you may have answered your own questions to your own satisfaction, but other people will have different questions; besides, seemingly watertight theories have a habit of collapsing after a decade or two in the face of new evidence and new insights.
Hadrian’s Wall: a history of archaeological thought, by David J Breeze; ISBN 9781873124673; Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 2014
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Vacancies
William Morris Society: Society Manager
Salary: £28,000 pro rata; closing date: 16 September 2014
Four days a week, two-year contract. See the William Morris Society’s website for further details.
Heritage Lottery Fund: committee vacancies
Closing date: 29 September 2014
The HLF is currently recruiting committee members in Northern Ireland, Wales, the East Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber. Further information on the committee member role and application materials are available on the Committee opportunities website. Applications are welcomed from people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences who can demonstrate an affinity for a country or region’s diverse heritage. Further details can be found here.
University of Lincoln: Head of School of History and Heritage
Closing date: 1 October 2014
Visit the Academic Jobs website for further information.
National Portrait Gallery: Director
‘Attractive salary’; closing date: 3 October 2014
Our Fellow Sandy Nairne has announced that he will be stepping down from the post of NPG Director in February 2015, and the trustees are now seeking to appoint his successor, to take forward the Gallery’s ‘ambitious 2020 plan’. Candidates should combine ‘artistic, managerial and leadership skills with intellectual stature and a sound knowledge of the arts and cultural sector’. Further information is available on the website of search consultants Saxton Bampfylde.
Heritage Lottery Fund: Director of Operations
Salary scale: £81,547 to £108,054; closing date: 5 October 2014
Fellow Bob Bewley (who succeeded our Fellow Stephen Johnson in this post) will be moving to the University of Oxford shortly (see ‘News of Fellows’ above). His successor needs to have ‘proven experience and knowledge of operating at a senior management level ... and a good understanding of the political and policy context for funders in the heritage sector’. The job involves providing ‘direction and leadership to the HLF’s twelve operational teams across the UK, advising the board on all operational matters and working with internal and external stakeholders across the heritage sector’. Interested candidates should consult the HLF website for further information.
National Gallery: Director
Salary not stated; closing date: 6 October 2014
Following the announcement that our Fellow Nicholas Penny is to retire from this post, the trustees are looking for a successor who will be ‘a passionate advocate for Old Masters and their role in the modern world, an individual with an international reputation for excellence in their field, someone with the ability to lead an international cultural institution and to communicate a compelling vision of its future’. If you think you are that person, find out how to apply by going to the Odgers website.
Ashmolean Museum: Sackler Keeper of Antiquities (Senior Curator and Head of Department)
Salary scale: £51,702 to £59,914; closing date: 10 October 2014
A successor is sought to our Fellow Susan Walker, who will retire as Keeper of Antiquities on 31 December 2014. This position is generously supported by the Sackler Foundation and the post carries a Governing Body Fellowship at Wolfson College.
The successful applicant will be an internationally recognised authority in at least one area of the department’s collections (Ancient Egypt and Sudan; Ancient Near East; Aegean prehistory, Ancient Cyprus, Classical Greece, Rome and Byzantium; European prehistory; Anglo-Saxon and medieval and later antiquities), with relevant management experience in a research-intensive museum with significant collections, coupled with excellent IT, organisational and communication skills. The successful candidate will take responsibility for the objects in their care and for delivering the department’s contribution towards the aims and goals of the museum’s five-year strategic plan.
Further details can be found here.
Landscape Research Group: Development Manager
Salary: up to £33,000 pro rata; closing date: 13 October 2014
The Landscape Research Group (a charity dedicated to advancing landscape education and research) is seeking the services of a self-employed Development Manager working three days per week to increase its reach, profile, effectiveness and impact. Further information is available on the Group’s website.
The Gregynog Trust: Chair
Closing date: 20 October 2014
The former home of art collectors and public benefactors Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, Gregynog is a historic house with Grade I listed gardens set in the heart of a biodiversity-rich 750-acre estate in rural Montgomeryshire. Run by the University of Wales since 1960 as a centre for the arts, culture and heritage in Wales, Gregynog is now being handed over to a newly established independent charitable trust, which intends to run Gregynog Hall and its estate as an academic and cultural asset for the benefit of the nation.
The role of the Chair is to provide leadership and strategic direction to the Gregynog Trust and agree the overall long-, medium- and short-term goals, objectives and priorities for the Trust in meeting the needs of those it serves. For further information and details of how to apply, contact Philip Nelson at search consultants Prospect-Us.
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Propose a lecture
Please email Renée LaDue, the Society's Communications Officer if you are interested in giving a lecture at one of the Society's Ordinary Meetings (Thursday evenings at 5pm) or as part of our Public Lecture series (occasional Tuesday afternoons at 1pm).
We welcome papers based on new research on themes related to the Society's field of interest: the study of the material past.
You can view our current lecture programme in the Events section of our website.
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