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Salon: Issue 302
22 July 2013
Next issue: 19 August 2013
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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Summer closure
The Society’s library and apartments will close for the summer at 4pm on Friday 26 July 2013 and reopen at 10am on Monday 2 September 2013. Fellows who wish to use the library during this time are advised to telephone in advance to arrange an appointment to visit.
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Iona celebrates 1450th anniversary of St Columba’s mission
The eighth-century St Oran’s Cross returns to Iona after travelling to Selkirk for restoration (image courtesy of Donald MacLeod)
This year marks the 1450th anniversary of the arrival of St Columba on the island of Iona in AD 563, using the monastery he established there as his base to bring Christianity to the Picts. It is also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Iona Community by the Revd George MacLeod in 1938, leading to the rebuilding of the abbey, which came into the care of Historic Scotland in 1999. To mark this special year, Historic Scotland has created a number of new displays (on the life of St Columba, on the island’s archaeology and on the abbey’s restoration) and a new museum devoted to what our Fellow Peter Yeoman, who is in charge of the project, describes as ‘the most important group of early Christian cross slabs and high crosses in Scotland, including important material from the early centuries of the Columban monastery’.
The process began in 2012 with a conference held in the abbey at which a wealth of new historical and archaeological material was presented, establishing the significance of Iona as the birthplace of the Gaelic Golden Age, lasting into the 800s, and showing that more of the remains of the early monastery survive, within the landscape of the abbey, than was previously realised. Peter believes that the monks consciously set out to replicate their idea of the Holy Places of Jerusalem on their Hebridean island, as an aid to their constant contemplation of the Passion of Christ. ‘This idea unlocks an understanding of the Street of the Dead as the Via Dolorosa, passing the High Crosses, representing Golgotha, and culminating in Columba’s shrine chapel as the Holy Sepulchre’, he says.
Three of those high crosses now form the focus of the new museum, with the oldest — St John’s, the first ever ring-headed Celtic high cross, dating from the early eighth century — in front, and St Oran’s (c AD 750) behind to the left and St Matthew’s (c AD 900) to the right. ‘These crosses’, says Peter, ‘have long been fragmented, and so considerable resources were invested in designing recessive but strongly engineered mounts to allow them to stand once more in all their glory. Along with the broadly contemporary Ruthwell and Bewcastle Northumbrian crosses, they represent the most sophisticated use of the cross in Western Europe in their time. Because their decoration was meant to be read with the movement of the sun during the day, we have incorporated a 24-hour son et lumière sequence to allow visitors to experience this key aspect of the iconography.’
Also in the new museum are the highly unusual effigy slabs of abbots and prioresses, clan chiefs and warriors (for a complete catalogue, see Historic Scotland’s Iona website.
Peter is now hopeful that the funding will be made available for a major research pro ject on Iona led by the Glasgow University Archaeology Department, in partnership with Historic Scotland, RCAHMS and the National Museum of Scotland. This will bring together all the archaeological work that has taken place on the island over the last fifty or so years (involving quite a few Fellows in their younger years, including Charles Thomas, Vincent Megaw, Peter Fowler and Richard Reece) as well as the more recent geophysical survey that has been used as the basis for a new reconstruction image of the monastery in its full flowering around AD 750.
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The Mildenhall platter and the real meaning of ‘symposium’
Fellow Richard Reece recently commended the ‘near-perfect mini-exhibition based on the Mildenhall platter, just inside the main front doors of the British Museum to the right’, so Salon’s editor took a look and agrees that it really is worth a ten-minute visit.
The exhibition, in Room 3, is one in a series called ‘Objects in Focus’, sponsored by Japan’s leading daily newspaper, Asahi Shimbun (literally ‘Morning Sun Newspaper’, but the English language edition is called Asahi News). This exhibition uses photographs of frescos, tomb paintings and floor mosaics, combined with quotations from ancient Greek and Roman writers, to build up a sense of what it might have been like to be a guest at a convivium, a prestigious dinner party in late Roman Britain. The exhibition suggests that many of these were fuelled by alcohol (our Greek-derived word for such an occasion, a symposium, originally meant ‘a drinking party’), and that they were often sexually charged, quite unlike the soberly highbrow symposia of today.
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Paper Palaces: the Topham drawings as a source for British neo-classicism
Another personal recommendation comes from Fellow Jean Wilson, who commends the current exhibition in the Verey Gallery, at Eton College. Called ‘Paper Palaces’, this looks at the influence of the drawings in the Topham Collection on the development of neo-classical design. The collection was assembled by the classicist and antiquary Richard Topham (1671—1730) and bequeathed to Eton College in his will. As well as a large number of printed books on ancient architecture, coinage, art and literature, it includes a thirty-seven-volume ‘paper museum’ of original drawings of antiquities and Roman remains, which Topham commissioned or purchased via agents working for him in Italy.
The collection includes work by such artists such as Pompeo Batoni, Giovanni Domenico Campiglia and William Kent. The drawings constitute a systematic record of the contents of the great palaces of Rome in the eighteenth century, including many examples of art and sculpture that were later lost, destroyed or dispersed in sales or as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars.
This exhibition shows a selection of drawings focusing on those that show the Roman frescos, ceiling and wall paintings that were subsequently influential on the neo-classical design movement in Britain. Robert Adam, for example, sent draughtsmen employed by his firm to copy the Topham drawings and he subsequently used the motifs derived from them to create the new decorative style that spread, under Adam’s influence, from Syon House, Kedleston Hall and London’s Portman Square to urban palaces and country houses around Europe, from Lisbon to St Petersburg. The exhibition includes examples of Adam’s own ceiling designs, on loan from Sir John Soane’s Museum, alongside the Topham drawings that inspired Adam, as well as designs by James Wyatt, Henry Holland and Charles Cameron.
The exhibition is open by appointment, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, until 2 November 2013. To make an appointment, tel: 01753 671221 or send an email.
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Lego Acropolis at the Nicholson Museum in Sydney
Thanks to Fellow Michael Turner, Senior Curator at Sydney University’s Nicholson Museum, Salon’s editor has learned about another must-see exhibition, worth travelling a long way to view, in the form of a scale model of the Athenian Acropolis, built out of Lego bricks. Not only is this an astonishing feat of Lego craftsmanship (built in Melbourne by one of only thirteen Licensed Lego Professionals in the world (tough job)), it is also a work of great wit, albeit a little anachronistic in portraying simultaneously a performance by Sir Elton John in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus (as happened in AD 2000) and a fifth-century BC performance of Oedipus Tyrannos (complete with Lego blood) in the Theatre of Dionysus.
Other events and incidents enlivening the scene include Lord Elgin removing his marbles while a Lego Phidias remonstrates with him, Melina Mercouri and a near naked Nikolska, the Hungarian dancer, performing on the steps of the Parthenon, Sigmund Freud pondering his moment of Lego derealisation on the steps of the Propylaia, Alexander the Great discussing Lego sunshine with Diogenes, and Gandalf the Wizard’s arrival in his cart (the conceit is that Tolkien originally wrote ‘Gandalf the Greek’, not the ‘Grey’, a typographical misprint never corrected). Athena and Poseidon are there too, battling for the hearts and minds of a Lego Athens. Next to them, the theme of the Parthenon frieze is enacted as Athenians process to the temple of Athena to hand over the specially made peplos garment used to drape the statue of Athena at the start of the Panathenaic Games.
 Michael Turner hopes that the model will ‘inspire the next generation of classicists’; certainly it has proved popular, with 5,000 visitors coming to see it on the opening weekend alone. For those unable to get there, there are pictures on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website. The exhibition also includes a 1890s plaster model of the Acropolis built in Berlin by the sculptor Heinrich Walger. Restoring this model for the exhibition, it was found that the maker’s name and city had been removed with a scalpel and painted over, presumably during or after the First World War.
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Pride and Prejudice: the battle for Betjeman’s Britain
Another small but perfectly formed exhibition has just opened in the Quadriga Gallery, inside the Wellington Arch, on London’s Hyde Park Corner. This is the third in the English Heritage series of exhibitions celebrating the birth of listing in 1913; this one shows how an effective system of scheduling buildings of architectural and historical interests only developed after the damage wrought by the Second World War and by the post-war reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s. Betjeman in this exhibition stands for the many people and organisations who protested against such wanton destruction, forming organisations such as the Georgian Society, the Victorian Society and so on, lobbying to defend some very handsome and well-designed buildings that would now be regarded as stars in the architectural firmament of our major cities.
Fellows of this Society should be warned, however, that Betjeman had a bee in his bonnet about antiquaries: not only did he think that what he termed ‘the antiquarian prejudice’ was responsible for the prevailing view that few post-medieval buildings met the standard of ‘national importance’, he also accused antiquaries of ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’, reinforcing the point in his surreal first ever BBC broadcast by holding up the branch of a tree and pointing to the skull-like features of a ‘typical antiquary’ drawn in chalk on a blackboard.
John Betjeman’s first ever TV broadcast (‘How to Make a Guidebook’, 1937) was a surreal affair, a sort of cross between Luis Buñuel and ‘Jackanory’, to judge by this picture of the presenter on set. Photograph © BBC Photo Library
Betjeman’s view is not allowed to go unquestioned by this exhibition, which makes clear the many different reasons why we had so little regard for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings at the time, including the modernising zeal of post-war planners and their prejudice against buildings of the elite, matched by the elite view that the state had no right to dictate to private owners and a sense that some buildings, much as we might admire their design, had simply outlived their usefulness. Today’s idea that there are many benefits (not least in terms of sustainability and cost) to adapting historic buildings to new uses is, of course, a message that is still struggling to be heard.
The exhibition was officially opened on 16 July 2013 by the Planning Minister, Nick Boles, who said that it was extremely difficult to be a popular planning minister, because any decision he took was bound to annoy somebody, but that he greatly valued the independent advice he got from English Heritage and from all the individuals and organisations that fight politely but robustly for the heritage.
Referring to the future reorganisation of English Heritage, he wondered whether the National Trust might be jealous of the £80m being invested in the National Heritage Collection to prepare for its conversion to a charity. The National Trust’s Director General, Dame Helen Ghosh, who was present at the launch, responded by saying that the National Trust and English Heritage were not in competition. Nick Boles replied that the plurality of the heritage, including all the many private owners of historic houses open to the public, was one of the country’s great strengths.
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English Heritage budget cut by a further 10 per cent for 2015—16
The good news that English Heritage has secured a one-off sum of £80 million to invest in the National Heritage Collection has been tempered somewhat by the less welcome news of a 10 per cent cut in revenue funding in 2015—16. This comes on top of cuts of more than 40 per cent in real terms in the budget of English Heritage in the last three years. Other areas of the heritage seem to have got off more lightly; DCMS was asked to find savings of 7 per cent in its overall budget: the department passed these on in the form of 5 per cent cuts to the budgets of national museums and galleries and the Arts Council, but 10 per cent to English Heritage, the Churches Conservation Trust and the British Film Institute.
English Heritage put a brave face on it. While describing the cut as ‘very disappointing’, it said ‘the cut will not be effective for two years so we have time to prepare for it. Thanks to the £80 million, and the greater freedom from state control and improved ability to fundraise that comes with charitable status, the National Heritage Collection will need less revenue funding as it works towards becoming self-financing. We shall use the savings in this area to minimise the effect of the cut on the statutory side of our work.’ Our Fellow Edward Impey, Director of Heritage Protection and Planning at EH, said that: ‘our commitment to the National Heritage Protection Plan remains resolute. This is the work we do to identify those parts of the nation’s heritage that matter most to people and are at greatest risk — our advice, research and awareness-raising work.’
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Fellows react to the English Heritage announcements
Our Fellow Mike Heyworth, Director of the Council for British Archaeology, was less sanguine. He said that: ‘separating the potentially self-sustaining “tourist attraction†element of English Heritage from its inevitably poorer, but vitally important cousin, “heritage protectionâ€, is a move which exposes heritage protection and other elements of the current organisation to heavy cuts in the future, leaving it totally dependent on ever-reducing government funds. At a time of heavy cuts to expert archaeology services within local authorities (99.9 per cent of the historic environment is protected not by statute but by the planning process), this could put our heritage at greatest risk since the Second World War.’
Several Fellows expressed concern about the future of heritage protection and research in the light of the report in the last issue of Salon. Paul Drury said that ‘the primary role of English Heritage is to serve as the Government’s adviser on England’s historic environment; the small cost of providing this vital service should not be seen as a burden, but as necessary public expenditure in the public interest, a legitimate payment by the Government to English Heritage for services rendered.’ He also doubted whether the £80m set aside for repairs and improvements to the National Heritage Collection was anything like an adequate sum.
Fellow Michael Hill expressed his concern for the future of ‘the Cinderella of English Heritage, the archive, research and publishing side. Where would this end up? How would it be funded? Surely the excellent work carried out at the NMR (or, as it is now, the English Heritage Archive) must be protected and funded to an adequate level, as should the exemplary Survey of London.’
The editorial in Country Life (3 July 2013) asked similar questions, arguing that the division of English Heritage and the latest round of cuts could have the effect of diminishing the heritage protection side unless it was placed under the wing of a Ministry with teeth. As regards the new charity, ‘it must remain an open question as to whether the projected financial self-sufficiency is anything but bold talk. Most English Heritage properties are liabilities, pure and simple, with no hope of ever being able to wash their faces commercially while being responsibly run.’
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English Heritage seeks to reassure the sector
In response to such concerns, our Fellow Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, sought to reassure everyone, saying that: ‘we have re-organised after the cuts of 2010 and our planning and heritage protection services are in good shape. Despite today’s news [of the 10 per cent cut], it is our intention to enhance the service we provide to owners, developers and the public, ensuring that England’s heritage across the country is understood, valued, cared for and enjoyed.
'The new heritage protection body will speed up research and listing of areas of heritage that are not currently properly protected, such as buildings and structures connected to the First World War, pre-1840 shipwrecks, public libraries and post-war schools. It will improve the efficiency of its advisory service to owners and developers who want to know what they can and cannot do with listed buildings or in sensitive historic settings. It will continue to offer grants, run the Heritage at Risk Register, the English Heritage Angel Awards and to fund Heritage Open Days, and it will enhance public access to all kinds of heritage data, including the nation’s archive of 10 million photographs of historic buildings and places.’
Fellow Edward Impey wrote to the members of the National Heritage Protection Plan Advisory Board to spell out in greater detail how the split will be managed: ‘English Heritage’s responsibilities vis à vis the whole of the rest of England’s historic environment will continue to be managed directly by the HBMCE. This will operate under a new name, yet to be identified, but for the moment we are using the working title of the National Heritage Protection Service (NHPS). This will continue, of course, to develop the National Heritage Protection Plan and fulfil all but the properties-related parts of (what is now) the English Heritage Action Plan; it will continue to carry out the functions of the existing Designation, Heritage Protection, and National Planning and Conservation Departments, and include the Resources Group — providing essential corporate services — and the National Advice and Information Group. For a period, corporate services will be provided by the NHPS to English Heritage.
‘The fundamental mission of English Heritage’s current non-properties work will not change, and it is important to emphasise this. However, the NHPS will need to establish and promulgate its new identity firmly and speedily, and while its business plan will essentially be the NHPP Action Plan, we will be taking formal soundings from the historic environment sector, not simply on the future form of the Plan, but on the services we provide and how we do so. However, it is our intention to take the fullest possible advantage of the opportunity to enhance the remit of the NHPS, actively using our resources of expertise, data and archives to engage the public in the appreciation of the historic environment — in the language of the “Heritage Cycle†to help people understand, value, care for and enjoy it.’
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Tall buildings in King’s Lynn and London
The historic house in King’s Lynn that is home to Fellow Simon Thurley and his wife, Anna Keay, was featured in Country Life last week (3 July 2013) in an article written by our Fellow John Goodall, the magazine’s Architectural Editor. Simon and Anna bought the house in 2005, and are overseeing the gradual restoration of a merchant’s home and warehouse complex (the latter in separate ownership). Apart from the fourteenth-century vaulted undercroft, the sixteenth-century brick tower attached to the early eighteenth-century house is the oldest part of the complex.
The five-storey tower has architectural details in common with a similar tower at Freston, which has been dendro-dated to the 1570s. That is about the date when a merchant called George Walden was recorded as living in a house on the King’s Lynn site; a man of status, made Freeman of King’s Lynn in 1548 and Alderman in the 1570s, he is likely to have been the builder of the tower, and his death in 1579 provides an end date for the construction. Panelling that was stripped out of the tower in 1889 and sold to a US buyer hid earlier decorative schemes that have now been rescued from under layers of whitewash and restored, including wall paintings imitating textile wall hangings.
One wonders whether trade with Tuscany inspired such towers: the skylines of cities such as Pisa and Florence bristled with these symbols of wealth and status, their owners competing with their neighbours to build the highest. In more modest England they seem to have been regarded as vainglorious structures, demeaning of the neighbours, insensitive to their desire for privacy, competing brazenly with church towers and those of civic buildings for attention on the City skyline.
In his late sixteenth-century A Survey of London, John Stow recounts with relish the fates of two presumptuous tower-builders: Sir John Champneys, Lord Mayor of London in 1534, was ‘punished with blindnesse’ having spent the huge sum of 2,000 marks in 1541 building ‘an high tower of bricke, the first that I ever heard of in any private mans house to ouerlook his neighbours in this Citie’; and the young Richard Wethall, who ‘builded an fayre house, with an high tower ... of tymber’, who became a short time afterwards ‘so tormented with goutes in his joynts of the hands and legges that he could neither feede himselfe, nor goe further than he was led, muche less was he able to climbe and take the pleasure of the height of his tower’.
If such punishments awaited the builders of trophy towers, it is no surprise to learn that the King's Lynn tower is such a rare example.
Clifton House is open to the public on Saturday 27 July 2013, from 11am to 4pm. For further details, see the Clifton House website.
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The case of St Wandregesilius church, Bixley, Norfolk
Fellow Michael Sayer, Trustee and Treasurer of the Norfolk Churches Trust, wishes to draw to Fellows’ attention to the cautionary story of the church of St Wandregesilius, which has important implications for the use made of insurance payments by Church of England dioceses. St Wandregesilius, dedicated to the Merovingian saint who founded the abbey of St-Wandrille, in Normandy, in AD 649, lies adjacent to the deserted medieval village of Bixley. Rebuilt in 1272, the listed church suffered a serious fire on 14 May 2004. The insurers wrote a cheque for £450,000 — sufficient to pay for the church to be reroofed, and the interiors, including four important monuments to members of the Ward family ranging in date from 1584 to 1771, to be repaired. Norfolk Churches Trust offered to lease the building and take on the repair work. All the major heritage agencies and amenity societies, including English Heritage and the SPAB, supported the scheme, and informal discussions took place with the Norfolk Archaeological Trust and the Orthodox Church about the possibility of their using the church.
The project ground to a halt, however, in 2009, when members of the Diocesan Advisory Committee opposed the scheme, on the grounds that the money should be spent on ‘the needs of the church today in the benefice’. Many attempts have been made since to make progress, but nothing has happened, causing the SPAB to highlight the case recently in its Cornerstone magazine. The insurance money sits unused, emergency repairs have been cancelled and the church deteriorates, the damaged monuments remain in limbo, and the members of the working group convened to supervise the work have all resigned.
Had this been a secular building, the local authority would probably have made it subject to a repairs notice by now. Many questions and concerns are raised by the case, but most of all, says the Trust, the question of whether insurance payments should be used for the repair of the fabric or treated as a windfall for general use by others outside the parish.
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Lives remembered: George Charles Henry Victor Paget, the seventh Marquess of Anglesey, FSA
Above: Lord Anglesey, with the prosthetic leg of his ancestor, the first Marquess, who lost his right leg while commanding the cavalry at the Battle of Waterloo. Photograph: Howard Barlow
The seventh Marquess of Anglesey, one of the Society’s longest-standing Fellows (elected on 6 March 1952), died on 13 July 2013 at the age of ninety. The Daily Telegraph’s obituary said that Lord Anglesey (known as Henry Paget) ‘came from a family of distinguished soldiers, and honoured the memory of his ancestors by writing a magisterial eight-volume History of the British Cavalry 1816—1919’. In this work, ‘Lord Anglesey combined a nose for a good story with academic rigour, taking enormous trouble to be accurate in his facts and balanced in his judgements. He established a perfect combination of tactical assessment and personal reminiscence, drawing on memoirs, unpublished diaries and letters, regimental histories and official archives to formidable effect. The cavalry was placed not only in its military but also in its social context.’
London's Evening Standard said that Lord Anglesey had been one of the very few people left alive, apart from the Queen herself and the Duke of Edinburgh, who had witnessed the 1953 Coronation at first hand. Apparently many of the guests in the Abbey on that day were already middle-aged and elderly at the time, quite a number having witnessed the Coronations of Edward VII (9 August 1902) George V (22 June 1911) and George VI (12 May 1937). (The attempts of Salon’s editor to verify this have failed, but a Buckingham Palace press release of ten years ago, put out on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, said that there were then 240 people still alive who had been at the Coronation.)
In its obituary, The Times also paid tribute to Lord Anglesey’s formidable skills as a military historian and biographer, saying that ‘he succeeded his father at the age of twenty-five, at which point he exchanged a life of military service for a literary career. His first publication — The Capel Letters (1955) — the correspondence between Lady Caroline Capel and the Dowager Countess of Uxbridge from 1814 to 1817, illustrated his family’s marked facility for letter writing and political observation of the Waterloo period and its immediate aftermath on the Continent. This was followed in 1961 by the biography One-leg: the life and letters of the 1st Marquess of Anglesey, in which the competing attractions of military life and those of the heart and the bedroom, received full rein — for despite losing his right leg while commanding the cavalry at the Battle of Waterloo, the 1st Marquess lived a full life. Two more publications followed — Sergeant Pearman’s Memoirs (1968), an account of service in the Sikh Wars of 1845 and 1848, and Little Hodge (1971), edited extracts from the diaries and letters of Colonel Edward Cooper Hodge written during the Crimean War.
Lord Anglesey subsequently embarked on his eight-volume A History of the British Cavalry 1816—1919 and its Epilogue 1919—1939, a definitive history of the final phase of the British cavalry, establishing his reputation as a military historian and bringing many distinctions and responsibilities, not least that of President of the National Museum of Wales (1962—8), Vice-Chairman of the Welsh Committee of the National Trust (1975—85), member and subsequently Chairman of the Historic Buildings Council for Wales (1977—92) and member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
He was also a founder member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, a supportive member of the Ancient Monuments Society and patron of the Redundant Churches Fund, always (in the words of our Fellow Matthew Saunders) ‘ready to take an active role lobbying Ministers and Archbishops’.
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Lives Remembered: Ruth Megaw, FSA
Vincent and Ruth Megaw admiring the famous ragstone head head from Msecké Zehrovice, in the Czech Republic (about which they wrote in Antiquity 62: 630–41) on the occasion of the publication of the second edition of their Celtic art from its beginnings to the Book of Kells in 2001. Photograph: Multimedia Unit, Flinders University
Our Fellow Vincent Megaw has let us know of the sudden death of his wife, our Fellow Ruth Megaw (née Miller), on 13 July 2013, at the age of seventy-five, in an Adelaide nursing home. ‘Ruth managed to re-invent herself several times in a distinguished academic career’, Vincent writes. ‘Born in Kilsyth, Stirlingshire, to a Welsh teacher and a Scottish minister of the Kirk, she was Dux of Hutchesons’ Grammar School for Girls and went on to obtain a first-class honours degree in History from Glasgow. In 1959 she sat the British Civil Service examination and was placed second for the whole of the United Kingdom. Becoming the youngest Third Secretary in the UK Foreign Office, she was first sent to Poitiers to study French language and culture, gaining the Diplôme d’Etudes Françaises with a “Mention Très Bien, avec Félicitations du Jury†(the equivalent to a starred first).
‘Ruth’s first experience of archaeology in the raw was on Charles Thomas’s legendary Gwithian excavations, the downside being that as a result of marriage — to Vincent Megaw — she had to resign from the Foreign Office. Major move no. 1 was when the Megaws, plus infant son, moved to Sydney. Ruth juggled bringing up baby with the demands of a post-graduate scholarship, which led to her successful completion of a PhD on the early days of US-Australian relations and to a succession of appointments in her field.
Move no. 2 was when the Megaws returned to the UK and Vincent to the Chair of Archaeology at Leicester. Towards the end of a decade in the East Midlands, when Ruth had established a new American Studies Department at what was then the Nene College in Northampton, she also decided to help Vincent out when he was suffering something of a writing block, and thus began some twenty-five years of collaborative writing.
‘Move no. 3 was when the Megaws returned to Australia, this time to Flinders University in Adelaide, where they developed a joint interest in Indigenous Australian art while continuing to publish widely in the field of early Celtic art. Following the first publication in 1989 of their Celtic Art from its Beginnings to the Book of Kells — where more than half of the text was written by Ruth — and in a monograph on the famous Base-Yutz find which the Society produced in 1990 as volume 46 of its Research Reports series, Ruth announced that: “now we should do something seriousâ€. She proposed writing a supplement to Paul Jacobsthal’s magisterial Early Celtic Art (Clarendon Press, 1944). The Oxford University Press Delegates received the proposal with enthusiasm; the project awaits completion ...
‘Some ten years ago the tell-tale signs of short-term memory loss began to appear, and Ruth had to move from the family home — the oldest standing domestic structure in the district — just over a year ago. Elected to the Society’s Fellowship in 1997, she remained, at her death, an Honorary Visiting Fellow at Glasgow, confirming that you do not need a degree in archaeology to be a successful archaeologist.’
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Feedback
Further to the commemoration of Mick Aston that appeared in the last issue of Salon, Andrew Selkirk reports that Mick’s funeral was, ‘as so often with the best funerals, a very good party, a chance to meet many old friends: Mick would have approved’. Fellow Paul Stamper says that he simply considered Mick to be a ‘great mate’, a sentiment that is probably echoed by hundreds of others! Meanwhile a further obituary has been published in the Guardian, written by our Fellow Christopher Dyer, which discusses Mick’s early development as a scholar, analyses the appeal of ‘Time Team’ and conveys a sense of Mick’s commitment to adult education, of which ‘Time Team’ was an extension.
Fellow Alison McHardy wrote to Salon to say that she was especially saddened to read about the death of our Fellow Constance Mary Fraser, ‘whose work I have known and admired for years. Her work on petitions was especially admirable and pioneering. Petitions were presented to parliament from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, and a characteristic of them was that they were undated. That did not matter while they were kept with the records of the parliament to which they had been presented, but in the nineteenth century some twerp at the Public Record Office decided to rip them out of context and to put them all together into an artificial class (SC 8) where their lack of dating has been a barrier to research ever since. Professor Mark Ormrod of York secured funding to digitise those records and to employ research assistants who summarised their contents and who did the best they could to date these documents. So you will see descriptions like: “c1290—1340 based on the handwritingâ€, which is frustrating given that we could once have assigned them to the year and even month when they were presented. But Constance Fraser fearlessly plunged in before the recent research project, and showed what wonderful material there was there. Her work is an inspiration to all who have mined this rich seam of material ever since.’
Fellow David Parsons says he enjoyed Salon’s report on his book, The Anglo-Saxon Church of All Saints, Brixworth, Northamptonshire: survey, excavation and analysis 1972―2010, and ‘had not thought that the colour-coded elevations would ever be hailed as beautiful!’. He goes on to say that ‘we published an experimental one in JBAA in the mid-1980s, but their present form is due entirely to Christina Unwin, our principal illustrator, who has made a tremendous contribution to the publication. We intend to lodge our research materials with the ADS in due course, and I hope that Chris can make all the colour-coded pix interactive, which will mean that anoraks will be able to analyse the stone distribution patterns for themselves — and perhaps come to alternative conclusions. The interactives were indispensable for my analyses on which the interpretation was based, and the scanning of the survey drawings and Chris’s input were worth every penny they cost.’
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‘New Insights into Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century British Architecture’ call for papers: deadline 15 August 2013
The fourth conference on ‘New Insights into Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century British Architecture’ will be held on Saturday 25 January 2014, at the Society of Antiquaries in London. Proposals in the form of short abstracts (up to 250 words) are invited for papers of 30 minutes in length and should be sent to Paula Henderson or Claire Gapper by 15 August 2013. While the emphasis remains on new developments in architecture, proposals are welcomed on related themes, such as decorative arts, gardens, sculpture and monuments. The final programme will be announced in September.
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Construction History Society call for abstracts: deadline 15 August 2013
 The Construction History Society has announced that its first national congress will be held on 11 and 12 April 2014 in Queens’ College, Cambridge. The organisers are now calling for abstracts for papers on all aspects (both technical and non-technical) of construction history, including such topics as the history of construction materials and components, buildings, infrastructure, building form, construction processes and plant, funding, organisations, company history, labour, education and historical sources. The conference is not, however, planning to include papers about the refurbishment of existing buildings or engineering structures.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should include the title of the proposed paper and the author’s name and contact details (with university affiliation, if any), as well as an indication of where the paper sits within current literature on the subject and how the paper makes a contribution to the subject. Abstracts should be emailed by 15 August 2013, and will be peer-reviewed; the successful applicants will be asked to submit their final papers by 1 December 2013.
The final papers will be 8 pages in length in the proceedings, including notes, references and legends, with a maximum of 8 figures. All accepted papers will be published in the peer-reviewed proceedings, which will be published in time for the conference itself. A condition of inclusion in the proceedings is that you attend the conference and present your paper in person. Any queries, please contact our Fellow Dr James Campbell.
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Movable Religious Heritage call for abstracts: deadline 8 September 2013
The organisation called Future for Religious Heritage Europe is organising a seminar on movable religious objects and interiors that will take place in Utrecht on 4 and 5 November 2013, in partnership with the Museum Catharijneconvent and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. This will address such questions as ‘what happens to the movable heritage when a building ceases to serve a religious function’ and ‘how do we protect against theft and displacement’? Abstracts of 5-minute mini-presentations are now being sought and conference registration is now open.
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Seminars in the History of Collecting 2014 call for papers: deadline 9 September 2013
This well-established seminar series, organised by our Fellow Jeremy Warren, forms part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to research into the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. As in previous years, a series of around ten seminars is planned for 2014, and contributions are now being sought on such topics as the formation and dispersal of collections, dealers, auctioneers and the art market, collectors, museums, inventory work and research resources.
Papers are generally 45 to 60 minutes long, and the seminars are normally held on the fourth Monday of the month, between 5.30pm and 7pm. Proposals of up to 750 words, including a brief CV and an indication of which month you are free to speak, should be sent by 9 September 2013 to Carmen Holdsworth-Delgado, Curatorial Assistant at the Wallace Collection.
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Events
29 July 2013: St Olav’s Day Heritage Walk: the annual St Olav’s Day walk was established in 2008 as a mirror to the main pilgrimage, which has taken place in Norway to celebrate the Feast Day of Norway’s Patron Saint for more than 500 years. The English version (filmed last year for the BBC TV programme ‘The Great British Story: a people's history’, presented by our Fellow Michael Wood) is a way of celebrating the Viking Christian heritage of Cheshire and the Wirral. This year’s walk of about nine miles will go from the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port along the Shropshire Union Canal to the Chester city wall and then to St Olave’s Church on St Olave Street. Further details are on the St Olav’s Day Heritage Walk website. Please let Steve Harding know if you intend to participate.
7 September 2013: The 2013 Deerhurst Lecture will take place at 7.30pm at St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire. The lecture will be given by our Fellow Dr Paul Barnwell, of the University of Oxford, under the title of ‘Locating Baptism in Anglo-Saxon and Norman Churches’. Tickets will be available at the door from 7pm and cost £5 (students £3), to include a glass of wine and cheese.
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Books by Fellows: The Roman Agricultural Economy
 Edited by our Fellows Andrew Wilson and Alan Bowman, this is the kind of book that, one imagines, will be published in an open-access format before too long, given that it results from an AHRC-funded research programme, with the umbrella title of ‘The Economy of the Roman Empire’. The ten papers in this volume are concerned with the agrarian economy between 100 BC and AD 350, from mechanical irrigation and the transport of goods to markets and consumers to the evidence for the production of such foodstuff staples as oil, wine, grain, beans and pulses and meat, plus such crops as flax, flowers, herbs and pharmaceuticals, thatch and forms of other building material.
Within this broad structure, many sub themes are pursued: for example, the degree to which the economy was based on villa estates versus village-based systems, the relationship between rural economy and urban markets, and the financial aspects: capital investment, revenues and taxation. Some very broad conclusions emerge: agricultural production in some regions of the Roman Empire achieved levels of output never seen before and never seen again until the early modern period; and this has implications for future studies concerned with the way that the resulting wealth was controlled and deployed.
The Roman Agricultural Economy: organisation, investment and production, edited by Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson; ISBN 9780199665723; Oxford University Press, 2013
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Books by Fellows: Rome, Portus and the Mediterranean
 This chunky monograph contains twenty-three papers that seek to redress what Fellow Simon Keay, the volume’s editor and Director of the British School at Rome’s Roman Ports Project, calls the imbalance that results from the fact that Ostia has been extensively studied but Portus not, even though it was the principal maritime port for Rome for most of the Imperial period. Redressing the balance by focusing purely on Portus would simply create another imbalance, so this volume focuses on Portus as part of a commercial maritime network embracing a network of ports around the Mediterranean basin.
In the hierarchy of ports, Portus is nevertheless different, because it was the principal destination for so much that was carried from the other ports, ranging from Cretan wine to the costly coloured marble and granite, destined for public buildings and the sarcophagi of wealthy private clients; more humble exports out of Portus consisted largely, it seems, of timber and bricks produced in the upper Tiber valley. Just as important as the inanimate cargo is the human traffic and the cultural exchange that is an integral part of a port network, as our Fellow Barry Cunliffe has shown: this book offers tantalising hints of the way in which small-scale links can add up to a very important chain of cultural relationships that contribute to the Roman world’s unusually cosmopolitan character.
Rome, Portus and the Mediterranean, edited by Simon Keay; ISBN 9780904152654; British School at Rome Archaeological Monographs 21, 2012
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Books by Fellows: Support for the Fleet
 Another empire — this time British — also sustained by a maritime network — this time of naval bases — is the theme of Fellow Jonathan Coad’s book on the distinctive architectural character of the Royal Navy’s bases in Britain and around the world from 1700 to 1914. This is a period during which the Royal Navy expanded to achieve the global dominance that it enjoyed through much of the nineteenth century, and, as Jonathan points out, many of the buildings and docks constructed during that period are still in use today, either for their original purpose, or as conserved historical monuments around the world, from Chatham to Sydney by way of Bermuda.
Jonathan emphasises that these dockyards were major industrial complexes, larger, more complex and more versatile than most civil concerns, and that the buildings cannot be considered in isolation from the activities that went on inside them: the construction of warships, a complex task involving a large number of different trades and skills that evolved as ships changed from sail to steam and from wood to iron and steel; the fitting out and maintaining of the ships; not to mention the hospitals, barracks, training establishments, the ordnance yards and the coaling and victualling stations. These different functions led to the development of a range of distinctive buildings that are illustrated here through numerous yellowing plans and drawings, contemporary paintings and scale models, archive photography and more recent photography of archaeological excavations and standing buildings.
What they show may come as a surprise to anyone who thinks of naval architecture as utilitarian: Samuel Bentham’s unrealised plans for Sheerness were, to use Jonathan’s words, ‘conceived on a heroic scale’, their grandeur and modernity astonishing given the date (1812). Some of the most striking buildings in the volume are those built overseas, using local materials and combining English Georgian and Victorian with indigenous architectural styles. Turning the pages of this grand parade of buildings and ships makes you realise why it is absolutely right that every effort should be made to preserve the historic ships and bases that helped to shape the world’s naval history.
Support for the Fleet: architecture and engineering of the Royal Navy’s bases 1700—1914, by Jonathan Coad; ISBN 9781848020559; English Heritage, 2013
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Books by Fellows: Historical Perspectives in Preventive Conservation
 Edited by our Fellow Sarah Staniforth, this is the sixth volume in the Getty Conservation Institute’s ‘Readings in Conservation’ series, each containing an anthology of texts that have been influential in the development of thinking on the topic under consideration — in this case, the conservation of the cultural heritage, from antiquity to the present day. Sarah has selected sixty-five extracts from the writings of such inspiring figures as John Ruskin and William Morris, but also from such less well-known works as early housekeeping books and the manuals of eighteenth-century archivists on day-to-day maintenance and cleaning regimes of the time.
Recent scholarship is well represented, as are writings from non-Western traditions such as India and Japan. The quotations are gathered under nine headings: ‘Philosophies of Preventive Conservation’, ‘Keeping Things’, ‘The Early Years of Conservation in Museums’, ‘Relative Humidity and Temperature’, ‘Light’, ‘Pests’, ‘Pollution’, ‘The Museum Environment and Risk Management’ and ‘Future Trends’. Each reading is introduced by short prefatory remarks explaining the rationale for its selection. There is also a bibliography.
Historical Perspectives in Preventive Conservation, edited by Sarah Staniforth; ISBN 9781606061428; Getty Conservation Institute, 2013
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Books by Fellows: The Anglo-Saxon World
 Many books surveying the Anglo-Saxon period deal in summary fashion with the fourth to seventh centuries before settling on the firmer ground that is characterised by kingdoms, laws, charters and Christianity. This book, by our Fellow Nicholas Higham and Martin Ryan, rightly devotes almost a third of its pages to discussing how we got from being Romano-British to being Anglo-Saxon. This is an exciting time to be reviewing this period, as more and more discoveries are made (including those of metal-detectorists whose brooch finds are throwing up new and unexpected distribution patterns), and as DNA and isotopic analysis begin to help us answer questions about the extent of migration (of animals as well as of people) to Britain from the Continent and from Ireland and from Britain to Brittany.
Nicholas Higham reviews almost all of the latest thinking; the book was perhaps already well advanced by the time that Guy Halsall’s book, Worlds of Arthur, was published earlier this year, proposing that the first Saxon migrants (foederati) were employed in Britain earlier than has been thought, and that they were garrisoned not on the northern, eastern and south-eastern fringes of Britain, but right in the middle, around the edges of the villa zone, thus upsetting previous ideas about the slow westward creep of Anglo-Saxon influence from Kent and East Anglia.
Other than that, the chapters on ‘Britain in and out of the Empire’ and on ‘The Origins of England’ weave together a range of evidence ― literary/historical, linguistic and archaeological ― in a way that shows that Anglo-Saxon England was the result of long, slow trends combined with the occasional short sharp correction.
Perhaps the most important change was not in material culture ― as Fellow Leslie Webster has shown in her recent book on Anglo-Saxon art, there is as much continuity with the Roman past as there is barbarian novelty in early Saxon metalwork. No, the big change is in the position of the individual in society: ‘in late Roman Britain, citizenship, religious identity and legal status were all individual’, Nicholas Higham concludes. The establishment of Anglo-Saxon England ‘involved a significant shift in favour of the family, with personal status subordinated to that of the lineage and kindred’.
That is ‘the major fault line’ that separates a relatively homogenised pan-Continental Roman culture from the tribal identities of the early Anglo-Saxon period, and it goes a long way to explaining how and why we became English-speaking Anglo-Saxons so quickly and so decisively, if survival meant subordinating your individualism to the will of the family, tribe or gang.
The Anglo-Saxon World, by Nicholas Higham and Martin Ryan; ISBN 9780300125344; Yale Books, 2013
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Books by Fellows: The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry: Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother
 One of those who brought about the end of the Anglo-Saxon world was Odo de Conteville, the younger half-brother of William the Conqueror. Fellow Trevor Rowley sets out in this book to restore to public awareness the role played by Odo in the planning and implementation of the Norman Conquest of England, after which, as Earl of Kent, he was second only to William in wealth and power, serving both as Chief Justice of England and, on occasion, acting as regent when William was in Normandy.
In his own time, the ‘battling bishop’ was a notorious figure of controversy, portrayed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a ravening wolf, a thuggish suppresser of all opposition, a tyrant who abused his authority for personal gain and acted without regard for equity and law. On the other hand, he was an important patron of the arts, remembered today as the probable patron of the Bayeux Tapestry and of the new cathedral church at Bayeux and the abbey of St-Vigor, three of the most remarkable cultural achievements of their day. Trevor Rowley does a splendid job of unravelling the complexities of the man and his times, revealing the curious mix of vice and virtue, good and bad, wisdom and injustice of this forceful and energetic man.
The Man Behind the Bayeux Tapestry: Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, by Trevor Rowley; ISBN 9780752460253; History Press, 2013
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Books by Fellows: The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance
 Some of the topics that have flickered in and out of Salon over the years are addressed in this book of essays concerned with Anglo-Florentine political, social and artistic contact in early Tudor England (mainly during the reign of Henry VIII). Thus, a sense of just how splendid the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey (later that of Henry VIII) would have been if it had been completed can be gained from the essay by Francesco Caglioti on two bronze candle-bearing angels that the author has discovered and that he believes were made for the tomb by Benedetto da Rovezzano. On the same subject, Giancarlo Gentitlini and Tommaso Mozzati write about Baccio Bandinelli’s part in the design of a magnificent mausoleum for Henry VIII that would, if it had been executed, have had a life-size bronze statue of the king at the top of a staircase lined with 143 life-size figures in bronze and relief panels depicting events in the life of the king ― a brave conception indeed! There are also essays on the Florentine Pietro Torrigiani, whose notable works include the monument in Westminster Abbey to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
Fellow Martin Biddle has contributed an essay on the architecture and decorative schemes at Nonsuch Palace. Fellow Susan Foister writes about Antonio Toto, the now all-but-forgotten Florentine painter who worked in England from 1519 and who held the post of Serjeant Painter for ten years from 1544 until his death in 1554, but whose work has been eclipsed by that of his contemporary, Hans Holbein. Our President Maurice Howard reveals the extent to which Florentine military engineers were involved in the design of Henrician forts, using the long career of Giovanni Portinari as an exemplar (long before concrete dishes were set up at Dover to listen for German bombers during World War II, Portinari experimented with the use of mirrors on the roof of the Dover Castle Great Tower to spy on ships off the French coast ― another brave conception).
This is just a selection of the twelve essays in the volume, all of which contribute to the rather melancholic conclusion that, unlike so many cities in Tuscany and beyond, where the art of the Renaissance plays a living part in the life of the contemporary city, the earliest manifestations of the Renaissance in England are all but invisible, needing to be sought out in the records of ambitious projects never realised or palaces destroyed and known only from fragments recovered by archaeologists, or of artists and military engineers forgotten or under-appreciated, or in a handful of exquisite tombs. As Martin Biddle says of Nonsuch Palace, though the quality of the Renaissance artistry that went into its design was of the highest order, comparable to the best in France or even Italy, there was to be no ‘School of Nonsuch’, no ‘Nonsuch style’. Instead, after this confident beginning, it was another eighty years before the Renaissance truly took root in England through the agency of Inigo Jones and his Whitehall Banqueting House.
The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: art for the early Tudors, edited by Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis Aldman; ISBN 97803001176087; Yale Centre for British Art, 2012
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Vacancies
University of Sidney: Lecturer in Archaeology
Salary: $104,600 to $124.200; closing date 28 July 2013
Requirements include: a background in the archaeology of Aboriginal Australia and a research specialisation in economic archaeology, preferably in archaeozoology or archaeobotany, with the capacity to teach and research into the economy of Aboriginal groups in prehistoric times. For further information, visit the University of Sydney website and search for job ref. 1036/0513.
Society of Antiquaries: Collections Manager
Salary: £25,000, 12-month contract; closing date: 5pm on 9 August 2013
Our Society is looking for a Collections Manager to manage and improve access to the museum collection at Burlington House and to provide support for collections care at Kelmscott Manor. Key tasks during the twelve-month contract period will be to prepare the Society’s Accreditation renewal application and review existing documentation systems.
Further details and an application form can be downloaded from the Society’s website.
English Heritage Advisory Committee (EHAC)
Not remunerated although meeting expenses will be paid; closing date: 21 August 2013
EHAC members (most of whom are Fellows) give advice to English Heritage, on request, on historic environment issues that are novel, contentious, exceptionally sensitive, technically or intellectually complex or that raise broader policy issues (the list of members and the Terms of Reference can be seen on the English Heritage website. EHAC now has vacancies for two new members with expertise in the areas of local government historic environment management and of maritime heritage.
If you would like to offer your services, please send an e-mail to Stephanie Jenner, Commission Secretariat Manager, English Heritage, by 21 August 2013, explaining, on no more than two sides of A4, why you are interested and attaching your CV. EH also asks you to say how you heard of the vacancy. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to meet the Committee Chair and staff on 3 October 2013.
English Heritage: Historic Properties Director
Salary: £90,000; closing date 31 August 2013
The person appointed to this post will have operational management responsibility for the 114 staffed properties in the English Heritage historic properties portfolio that are run as visitor attractions. The challenge will be to ensure that the ambitious growth and income targets set by English Heritage are met, while achieving the highest standards of customer care and presentation and ensuring that the historic estate is well maintained and conserved. Further details are to be found on the English Heritage website.
European Heritage Heads Forum: Administrative Secretary
Salary: up to €40,943; closing date 16 September 2013
The European Heritage Heads Forum (EHHF) is an informal network that brings together the heads of the European state heritage authorities (built heritage, landscapes and archaeology) to share ideas about the management of the historic environment. The EHHF plans to establish a permanent secretariat in Brussels and is looking for an Administrative Secretary: a PDF giving further information can be downloaded from the EHHF website.
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Propose a lecture
Please email the Communications Officer at the Society of Antiquaries 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 News and Events section of our website.
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