Fellow Richard Barber Urges Support for Kelmscott & Morris: Past, Present and Future

The forthcoming print volume (97) of The Antiquaries Journal will publish in November 2017. If you cannot wait until November, you can access the latest papers in FirstView via the Fellows’ Area of the Society’s website.

Phil Harding FSA was in Bury St Edmunds recently, giving a presentation on work at West Kennett Farm, near Avebury. To an enthusiastic audience, Phil spoke about the discovery of a massive, fan-shaped flint core found at the site and which he, with co-author John Lord, discusses in the latest paper to be published online by The Antiquaries Journal, ‘Thoughts on Massive Flint Cores from Wiltshire and East Anglia, the Movement of Flint and its Role in Late Neolithic Britain’. The paper considers the implications of this discovery at the site (where nodules of this type are absent) with others from East Anglia, linking them with the movement of flint across Britain, and concludes by discussing the role of these ‘mega-cores’ with current thinking on the function of stone in Neolithic Britain.

In Bury St Edmunds, the topic generated a lot of interest – so much so that Phil has since received an email from a colleague in East Anglia 'telling me of another large core of exactly the same type, of which I was unaware. That’s life I’m afraid, although it would have been nice to have included it. Sadly, it pushes West Kennett Farm into fourth place!'

Phil would also like to point out that the enclosures at West Kennett Farm were thought to be of Late Neolithic date when the paper was written. However, since then the enclosures have been re-dated to Middle Neolithic by Bayliss et al in The Neolithic of Europe: Papers in Honour of Alisdair Whittle, edited by P Bickle, V Cummings, D Hofmann and J Pollard (Oxbow 2017).

We hope to see Fellows back at Burlington House for our first autumn Ordinary Meeting on 5 October. Please note that the lectures for 5 October and 2 November as advertised in the recent Meeting and Events card (posted in July) have been switched! See details below.

The Society has the largest antiquarian library in the country, with a collection spanning items from the 10th century to present day, reflecting 300 years of research and scholarship into the history and material remains of Great Britain and other countries.

Aimed at early-career researchers and students currently undertaking or about to begin postgraduate studies, participants will spend the day learning about our collections and resources that can help them with their research. They will hear from Fellows of the Society who are experts in their respective fields and have the opportunity to network with other early-career researchers and postgraduate students. The Library will be open late to encourage participants to spend time exploring our collections.

Please share this event with colleagues or students who may be interested. More information about the day, including how to register, can be found on our website (www.sal.org.uk/events). Lunch provided! Free, but advanced registration is required.

Click here for a printable A4 flyer.


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Symbolic Codes From Personal Heraldry to Corporate Logos
A Public Symposium by the Society of Antiquaries of London (6 November)

This conference will consider ways in which identity since c. 1100 has been, and continues to be, expressed in outward visible formats, principally heraldry. The opening address will be delivered by Dr Claire Boudreau, Chief Herald of Canada. In this 150th anniversary year of the nation’s confederation, Dr Boudreau will explore how Canada has integrated imperial, European, and native emblems to help establish its own visual symbolic identity. Dr Boudreau will also discuss the challenges facing the Canadian Heraldic Authority with regard to competing forms of symbolic identity in the 21st century. The formal part of the proceedings will end with a round-table discussion (including Elizabeth Roads, Snawdoun Herald at the Court of the Lord Lyon) on 'Branding or Blazon? Examining the Role of Heraldry in a Corporate World Dominated by Logos'.

There will be an opportunity to view a special display of the Society of Antiquaries of London’s rare heraldic manuscripts and to buy some of its heraldic publications. Lunch will be provided and the day will end with a wine reception.

More information, including booking, is available on our website: www.sal.org.uk/events.

Philip Bennett FSA, archaeologist, died in September.
 
Robert Thompson FSA, librarian and numismatist, died in September.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below. The section also contains a further notice on the late Robert Hardy FSA.
 
The Guardian has published an obituary of Kate Hamlyn, writer, activist and chair of the Thanet branch of Stand Up to Ukip, and wife of Mark Samuel FSA. She died in July. ‘Though not a Fellow,’ says Samuel, ‘she was a driving force in my career, active editor and co-author in historical works and a Classics graduate (UCL 1979).’
 
The funeral of Stephen Croad FSA will be at Taunton Crematorium, at noon on Monday 9 October. Those intending to go are asked to tell vivian.upton.vu@gmail.com for catering purposes for a reception afterwards.

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Three distinguished Fellows have ben honoured by the British Academy. James Curl FSA (right), Professor at the School of Architecture and Design, University of Ulster, has received the Academy’s President’s Medal 2017 for his ‘contribution to the study of the history of architecture in Britain and Ireland’. John Gowlett FSA, ‘the leading UK archaeologist actively researching in the internationally competitive world of our earliest African origins’ and Professor of Archaeology and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Liverpool, was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Eszter Bánffy FSA, Director of the Romano-Germanic Commission, German Archaeological Institute, was elected a Fellow of the British Academy for her work on ‘the archaeology, bioarchaeology and geoarchaeology of Neolithic Europe, research into historic landscapes and cultural heritage preservation.’

Peter Marsden FSA was admitted to the Freedom of the City of London in September, says Philippa Glanville FSA, who was a colleague at the Museum of London ‘many years ago, and I have always admired his energy and creativity’. ‘I conducted the ceremony’, writes Murray Craig, Clerk of the Chamberlain’s Court. ‘Peter read his declaration very well indeed. The Freedom today is largely symbolic, but it remains as a potent slice of London history as its origins date back to the 13th century. It was presented to Peter as a means of recognition for his long and distinguished association with the Museum of London Archaeology Service. He was nominated by Vivienne Littlechild CC, the Chairman of the City of London Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committee and by Sara Pink, Head of Guildhall and City Business Library and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.’

Yorkshire West Riding: Sheffield and the South, by Ruth Harman FSA and Nikolaus Pevsner FSA, is the latest title from Yale in their updating of Pevsner’s Buildings of England series. ‘Major examples of every period of English architecture are represented,’ says the blurb, ‘from Selby Abbey to the palatial country house of the Earls Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse, and from Halifax Town Hall to Sheffield’s Park Hill flats and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield.’  In a review in the Times (September 30), Marcus Binney FSA writes, ‘this volume describes one of the great architectural treasure grounds in Britain. While it is perceived as urban and industrial, the area contains much natural beauty, ranging from the Pennine moors, to deep-cut valleys and marshes beyond, abounding too in fast-flowing rivers great and small.’

A variety of Late Bronze Age items, including bronze armrings, ring money, pottery, worked bone and quantities of human remains, mostly of children, has been retrieved from the Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea in Moray; archaeologists have suggested, after analysing the remains, that human heads were displayed at the entrance. At the foot of a rugged coastal cliff, the cave has now been digitally recorded. Archaeologists at Bradford University have used laser scanning and structured-light scanning to build a 3D model, which will be used for research and museum displays; an animation of passages and Pictish wall engravings can be seen online. The model ‘ensures that we can preserve the cave and the carvings digitally for future generations to study’, said Ian Armit FSA in a statement. Rebecca Jones FSA, Head of Archaeology & World Heritage at Historic Environment Scotland, said, ‘It’s such a valuable resource as the cave can often be difficult to access.’

Britain’s 100 Best Railway Stations, by Simon Jenkins FSA, is, says his publisher, ‘The perfect new gift, from the bestselling author of Britain's 1000 Best Churches’ and ‘the foremost expert on our national heritage’. In a book that is ‘Beautifully illustrated with colour photographs throughout, this joyous exploration of our social history shows the station's role in the national imagination; champions the engineers, architects and rival companies that made them possible; and tells the story behind the triumphs and follies of these very British creations.’ Despite Gavin Stamp FSA’s feeling that ‘some of the railway history is dodgy’, in his review for the Evening Standard he writes that Jenkins is ‘the perfect person to [tell the story] because, in 1984, he founded the Railway Heritage Trust, which has done so much to cherish and restore the best examples of our railway architecture.’

David Attenborough FSA is gently promoting Blue Planet II, a new TV series to be broadcast by the BBC. He told the Guardian that when he first joined the BBC, ‘you had to be guarding against propaganda or guarding against grinding axes’. Now he feels more relaxed about expressing his views. ‘Thirty years ago people concerned with atmospheric pollution were voices crying in the wilderness,’ he told Unearthed. ‘We aren’t voices crying in the wilderness now.’ How do we stop climate change? It can only be done globally. ‘You have to work by and large with politicians, or through politicians, and it’s up to us all in a democratic society to do what we can to persuade our politicians to do something about the dangers which we see.’ ‘All we have to do’, he adds, ‘is go along declaring the facts as we see the facts and producing the evidence whenever we can. The trouble is that there are a lot of vested interests and a lot of people who it suits, economically, to deny it.’ He is also concerned about Brexit. ‘The decision to call a referendum for a Brexit was an abrogation of the principles of parliamentary democracy in my view, because we didn’t know the facts. We weren’t presented with the facts. I still don’t know the facts really!’
 
Billed as ‘the first full biography of Richard III in over fifty years by “one of our brightest young historians” (David Starkey FSA)', Richard III: Brother, Protector, King, by Chris Skidmore FSA, follows his book on the battle of Bosworth (2013), which was described by Leanda de Lisle in the Spectator as ‘the definitive account of the battle’. In the biography, says the blurb, Skidmore ‘strips back the legends that surround Richard's life and reign, and by returning to original manuscript evidence, he rediscovers the man as contemporaries saw him’. This is a traditional historian's book, with no reference to recent archaeological work on the battlefield and in Leicester. Ahead of his talk at BBC History Magazine's Winchester History Weekend on 8 October, Skidmore was asked by History Extra, ‘What job do you think you would be doing now if you weren’t a historian/author?’ ‘My history writing is now my hobby,’ he replied: ‘my real full time job is actually as Member of Parliament for Kingswood near Bristol, and as minister for the constitution in the Cabinet Office.’
 
Cormac Bourke FSA draws our attention to an early medieval iron hand-bell, which was stolen from the church at Fortingall, Perthshire, in early September. The bell is said to date from around AD 800 and to have belonged to St Adamnan, the biographer of St Columba, who came to the area from Iona as a missionary: taken at face value, for this to be possible Adamnan would have to have lived for over 150 years, but there seems little doubt that the bell has been associated with Fortingall for many centuries. It had been kept near the front of the church in a metal-fronted alcove. The door had been opened with something like a screwdriver, leaving no obvious damage. ‘The Fortingall bell is of significant local, regional and national importance,’ said David Strachan, Director of Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust. ‘Its loss is tragic, and while it has little financial value, in terms of our shared heritage, it is priceless.’
 
The roads close to Stonehenge have been in the news again. On 11 September Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announced that, following a public consultation, it had been decided to adopt the principle of a dual-carriageway tunnel aligned near the existing A303; the proposed scheme brings the tunnel closer to that road. Historic England, the National Trust and English Heritage welcomed the news, saying they ‘remain committed to working with and constructively challenging Highways England to deliver a final design that protects and enhances the World Heritage Site.’ David Jacques FSA told the Radio 4 Today Programme that the project would compromise the ‘unutterably precious’ archaeology. Andy Rhind-Tutt, President, Salisbury and District Chamber of Commerce and Industry, wrote in the Times that £1.6 billion was to be spent to ‘save less than eight minutes on a 100-mile journey’, and that the better solution was to route the A303 in a 20-mile diversion back. The next day Tom Holland, President, Stonehenge Alliance, told the Times that ‘Future generations will not forgive us for desecrating the most significant prehistoric landscape in Europe.’ Over the following few days the paper published a further five letters on the topic. The tunnel, said Peter Saunders FSA, ‘will not “destroy one of the world’s great landscapes”, as claimed by Andy Rhind-Tutt, but enhance, protect and reunite it to the benefit of archaeology, biodiversity and public enjoyment.’

Lavinia Porter, the Society’s Publications Manager and Editor of the Antiquaries Journal, has news of a book by Alasdair Hawkyard FSA, The House of Commons 1509–1558: Personnel, Procedure, Precedent and Change. In this, she writes, the author presents ‘a ground-breaking study of the English House of Commons in the mid-Tudor period, using new scholarship, archival research and never-before-published images to aid understanding. Chapters deal with all aspects of the institution, including elections and electoral practices, membership, organization, the House in session, and legislation. Turbulent though it was frequently, with outbursts that sometimes brought business to a standstill, the Tudor House of Commons emerges as a major element in 16th-century government, a dynamic body evaluating and addressing issues as they arose, with a capacity to adapt and change whenever necessary.’

The Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, has announced an exhibition dedicated to the 20th-centruy English artist Edward Bawden, to run between May and September 2018. ‘This will be an ideal summer show here in the idyllic setting of Dulwich Picture Gallery,’ said Jennifer Scott FSA, Sackler Director of the gallery. ‘Following in the footsteps of our spectacular Eric Ravilious exhibition in 2015, visitors can expect to be transported through Bawden’s extraordinary works to a characterful world full of humour and innovation.’ An extensive full-colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Nicholas Orme FSA has written The History of England’s Cathedrals. His story begins in Roman times (the first map shows cathedrals up to AD 800), and ends with the 20th century. ‘The Cathedrals of England are institutions older than the realm itself,’ writes Diarmaid MacCulloch FSA in the blurb, ‘and are perhaps more cherished and flourishing now than they have ever been, as this richly enjoyable volume makes clear. There can be no-one better qualified than Nicholas Orme to present the full range of their long history.’ The book, continues the publisher, provides the first rounded account of the whole of their 1700 years, explaining the layout of their buildings, the people who ran them, their worship and music, their links with learning and education, and their outreach to society. It relates their history to the history of England and shows how they adapted to change and weathered disasters.

Jonathan Musgrave FSA has donated 15 fragments of a 13th-century manuscript to the University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections. The pieces have quite a story, as the delighted university explains. Musgrave’s sister gave him one as a birthday present in February 2013. Intrigued, Musgrave went to the source, Steven Harmer, an antique dealer in Eye, Suffolk, where he discovered there had originally been eight matching leaves in a coffer bought in the Midlands; all had been sold. He managed to track down all but one of the leaves, which had been torn or cut from a larger sheet. Teresa Webber FSA, Reader in Palaeography at the University of Cambridge, identified them as having come from Book I of an abbreviated copy of Gratian's Decretum, a canon law text compiled in the mid-12th century: an English or French 13th-century manuscript had been dismembered and used in a bookbinding. In 2014 the coffer’s original owner offered the dealer eight more leaves, which Musgrave also acquired.
 
In September Dan Hicks FSA was presented with the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2017 Rivers Medal. It was founded in 1923 in memory of William Halse Rivers, and is awarded annually to mark a recent body of work making a significant contribution to social, physical or cultural anthropology or archaeology. Hicks, who is Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Associate Professor in the Archaeology of the Modern Period, and is currently on secondment as the Junior Proctor of the University of Oxford, received the medal in recognition of his ‘wide contributions across the fields of archaeology and anthropology’. The medal recognises ‘the continued validity of understanding Archaeology and Anthropology as mutual enterprises,’ said Hicks in a statement. ‘The ongoing task of refreshing and re-imagining the cognate nature of our two disciplines is reflected in this intellectual tradition. This task is what lies at the heart both of my own research, and also of how we teach Arch and Anth as a joint degree at Oxford.’

Architecture That Speaks: S C P Vosper and Ten Remarkable Buildings at Texas A&M, by Nancy T McCoy and David G Woodcock FSA, was published in September. The book describes the building of the Land Grant University that opened in 1876, and the design of ten Depression Era buildings created between 1929 and 1934. Vosper was a Beaux Arts-trained architect from New York, who developed an exuberant and occasionally witty approach through his work on theatre design. The buildings for what was then called the A&M College of Texas, reflect the college's agricultural and mechanical background, and specifically draw on the functions of the individual buildings. Vosper’s exterior use of tile, stone and ornamental metals, and faux finishes on the interiors continue to inspire to this day. The book is lavishly illustrated, says the blurb, by colour photographs by Carolyn Brown, an architectural and art photographer from Dallas, Texas. ‘Texas A&M University’, writes Woodcock, ‘is now a Tier One Research institution with over 60,000 students, a far cry from Vosper’s time when it had 2,000 enrolled, but the “ten remarkable buildings” are still in use and much admired.’

A collection of essays by Adrian Leak FSA, Nebuchadnezzar’s Marmalade Pot, and Other Reflections, is drawn from his time as a country parson. ‘Brilliantly observed,’ says Roger Lockyer FSA in the blurb, ‘his reflections will appeal not only to Anglicans, including lapsed ones, but also to the large number of people who, while they have not been blessed with the gift of faith, care deeply for the Church of England.’ As a parish priest Leak wrote many monthly ‘letters’ for the Withyham and Blackham Parish Magazine, inspired by the wide and colourful experience of life as a country parson. The book consists mostly of edited versions of those letters, as well as a few adapted sermons.
 
 

Philip Bennett FSA died on 11 September aged 60. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in February 2006, listing his interests as ‘prehistoric Britain and prehistoric woodland management’. Until he was made redundant in 2016, he had been Culture and Heritage Manager at the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, where he was actively involved with the area’s archaeology and community for many years.
 
Phil Bennett was archaeological manager of Castell Henllys Iron Age hillfort, a unique project where several round houses have been reconstructed in wood, thatch and mud in the footprints of excavated prehistoric structures. As he explained to Phil Harding FSA in a Time Team Special in 2008 (Swords, Skulls, and Strongholds), they are the longest-standing experimental Iron Age house in Britain, originating in the early 1980s. He presented a film about Castell Henllys, A Celtic Fort In The Iron Age, issued as a DVD (2009). The hillfort was also the setting for the BBC’s Surviving the Iron Age (2001), a seven-part series in which ‘volunteers attempted to live for seven weeks as their Iron Age ancestors did over 2,000 years ago in authentic roundhouses’. The reconstructed houses, he told the BBC, ‘are very efficient buildings, and are capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions when more modern buildings nearby suffer structural damage.’
 
After school in Norwich, Bennett studied Welsh language, Ancient History and Archaeology at Cardiff University (1987–91).

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Robert Thompson FSA died in late September aged 71. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 1997. Librarian to both the Royal Numismatic Society and the British Numismatic Society, he was presented with the latter’s Sanford Saltus Medal in 1999. He had been elected to the society as a junior member, and had written his first numismatic texts as a schoolboy, when, he said at the presentation, he had ‘badgered’ the Keeper of Archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, Hubert Savory FSA on the subject. He found George Boon FSA, who arrived as Assistant Keeper of Archaeology in 1957, more sympathetic.
 
Peter Clayton FSA writes:
 
‘Our Fellow Robert Thompson was recently found dead in his home. Robert was a Chartered Librarian who spent most of his professional working life with Hackney Borough Council, retiring as Reference Librarian. He was an eminent numismatist, a member of the British Numismatic Society, especially noted for his expertise and research on 17th-century British tradesman’s tokens and a prolific author of papers on the series and the issuers’ backgrounds. He was the author (with M J Dickinson) of the eight-volume catalogue of The Norweb Collection: Tokens of the British Isles 1575–1750 (Sylloge of the Coins of the British Isles, Spink 1984–2011). This was the largest private collection of British 17th-century tokens and, as the collection was dispersed after the publication of each volume, the British Museum was gifted many examples to augment the national collection. Robert left a number of research projects he was working on, notably on David Ramage, responsible for producing the dies for many of the 17th-century tokens.’
 
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Andy Brown and Paul Stamper FSA would like to add ‘a short addendum’ to Salon’s appreciations of Robert Hardy FSA, who died in August:
 
‘In 1994, prompted in part by the construction of the A14 across the Naseby battlefield, English Heritage set up its Register of Historic Battlefields to give a measure of protection to England’s principal battlefields. Support and advice came from a panel of expert supporters, among whom, from the outset, was Robert Hardy. He was urbane, charming, enthusiastic and genuinely an expert: Andy remembers him in memorably fine form when the panel visited the battlefield of Homildon Hill on the border with Scotland, where the English longbow had featured largely. He served on the panel for almost 20 years; quite exceptional, and selfless, service.’

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The following lists obituaries of Fellows published in recent journals. I would be pleased to hear of such references for inclusion in future Salons.
 
Christopher Brooke FSA: Northamptonshire Past and Present 69 (2016), 89–91.
 
Ronald Brunskill FSA: Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 16 (2016), 1–4.
 
Sarnia Butcher FSA: Cornish Archaeology 54 (2015), 283–88.
 
Rosamond Hanworth FSA: Surrey Archaeological Collections 99 (2016), 299–301.
 
Ivor Noel Hume FSA: Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 27 (2016), 213–14, and London Archaeologist 15.1 (2017), 8–9.
 
Gerard Leighton FSA: Somerset Archaeology and Natural History 159 (2016), 313–14.
 
Ken Neale FSA: Transactions of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History 6 (2015), 2–4.
 
Charles Thomas FSA: Cornish Archaeology 54 (2015), 261–81.
 
Randolph Vigne FSA: Huguenot Society Journal 30 (2016), 592–94.
 
Geoff Wanwright FSA: Wiltshire Studies 110 (2017), vii–viii.
 
Archaeology International 19 (2016), 12–17, features short notices on Beatrice de Cardi FSA, Juliet Clutton-Brock FSA, Sheppard Frere FSA, Nancy Sandars FSA and Charles Thomas FSA.

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