The Society of Antiquaries of London’s Online Newsletter (Salon) is a fortnightly digest of news from the heritage sector, focusing especially on the Society and its Fellows and the contribution that they make to public life through their many and varied activities. 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 and feedback should be addressed to the Editor, Christopher Catling.

Subscriptions

The Society’s annual subscription is to be increased next year to £160 in line with the Retail Prices Index. Payment is due on 1 January 2013. If you have changed your bank or credit card details since your last payment, please contact Giselle Pullen in the Society’s finance office (tel: 020 7479 7087) to provide up-to-date details.

Getting to know the Society: introductory tours of Burlington House

Tours of Burlington House designed primarily for new Fellows will take place on 6 December 2012 and on 12 February, 18 April and 20 June 2013. Each tour includes a welcome from the General Secretary, with an overview of the Society and its current activities, followed by an introduction to the Society’s library and museum collections and a tour of the building, concluding with a display of significant items from the Library. Tours start at 11am and last about 90 minutes, followed by an optional light sandwich lunch, for which a charge of £5 is made. Numbers are limited to twenty-five Fellows per tour. To book a place please contact Jola Zdunek, the Society’s Executive Assistant (tel: 0207 479 7080).

Forthcoming meetings

18 October 2012: ‘Collector, dealer and forger: the perils of collecting bookbindings and caskets in the nineteenth century’, by Mirjam Foot, FSA
Bibliophily flourished in nineteenth-century England, but collectors’ enthusiasm was not always matched by bibliographical knowledge, and unscrupulous dealers and forgers took advantage of men like the East India merchant, John Blacker, whose book-collecting passion ‘was like a man’s love for his mistress’. After his death in 1896 it was discovered that the important collection of books on which he spent a fortune of around £80,000 had not belonged to a very important French or Italian sixteenth-century collector, as he had thought, but were forgeries — of excellent workmanship, but historically worthless, nevertheless. This paper unravels the story and describes the attempts to trace the later whereabouts of the forged books, culminating in the discovery of the only casket ever to have come to light of the many that Blacker had made for storing and displaying his revered collection.

25 October 2012: ‘“Rusts and Crusts and Frusts of Time”: an archaeography of Gilbert White’s Selborne Priory’, by David Baker, FSA
Gilbert White’s book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in 1789 and never out of print since, is often abbreviated to The Natural History of Selborne; the ‘antiquities’, largely eclipsed by the ‘natural history’, deserve greater recognition. The ‘interventions’ they inspired at the site of the Priory can be seen as a combination of clerical antiquarianism and emergent archaeological approaches. The history and archaeology of a small Augustinian house, ‘bog-standard’ in many ways but founded late and dissolved early, illustrate the development of the disciplines.

1 November 2012: ‘The British Museum exhibition, “Shakespeare: staging the world”’, by Dora Thornton, FSA, and Jonathan Bate
Insights into the exhibition and its themes by the co-curators and the authors of the exhibition catalogue, which Brian Sewell said ‘should be in every school library in the land’.

8 November 2012: ‘Joseph Moxon: a Restoration polymath’, by Derek Long, FSA
Joseph Moxon was born in Wakefield in 1627. After a period in Holland with his father and brother he established himself in London as a printer, publisher, type-founder and maker of scientific instruments and globes, including pocket globes and the Castlemaine globe. He became Hydrographer to Charles II in 1662. He was well known in Restoration London and acquainted with Pepys, Hooke, Halley and Evelyn, who recorded details of their meetings. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1678, the first and only tradesman to be so honoured.

Moxon published some eighty books, many of great importance. Some, like Spaher’s Anatomy, are splendid examples of publishing skills. In his later years he himself wrote and published The Mechanick Exercises, of which volume I deals with smithing, carpentry, joinery and woodturning, and volume II with all aspects of printing. By giving accurate accounts of these crafts, the traditional secrets of the Craft Guilds were exposed. The lecture includes new information on Moxon and is illustrated with pictures of his globes, extracts from his books and documents relating to his activities in London and Holland. A rare Moxon Pocket Globe and several first editions of Moxon’s publications will be on display for this lecture.

15 November 2012: ‘Monastic foundation and the Anglo-Saxon conversion: new archaeological perspectives from Lyminge, Kent’, by Gabor Thomas, FSA
The Kentish village of Lyminge is well known to Anglo-Saxonists as the site of an early double monastery with an important pagan-period cemetery on its outskirts. Since 2008 the University of Reading has been unearthing rich Anglo-Saxon settlement remains from under the core of the village spanning the late fifth to the ninth centuries AD. Drawing upon insights gained by preliminary post-excavation analysis part-funded by the Society, this paper teases out a series of social transformations that allow the origins and development of Lyminge as an Anglo-Saxon monastic landscape to be charted as a dynamic sequence.

Meeting of Fellows in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset

The next meeting of the Society’s South West Fellows group will be held in Falmouth at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall at 3pm on Saturday 27 October 2012, where our Fellow Professor Robert Van de Noort, Professor of Wetland Archaeology, University of Exeter, will talk about ‘Building a Bronze Age sewn-plank boat’. Fellows from all other parts of the UK (and beyond) are, of course, most welcome to attend: please let our Fellow Professor Ian Netton know if you are coming. The lecture will be followed by an inspection of the boat, which is being built at the museum by shipwright Brian Cumby under Robert Van de Noort’s guidance. A fish-and-chip dinner at Rick Stein’s will follow.

An appeal to Fellow members of the National Trust

Renée LaDue, the Society’s Communications Officer, would like to draw the attention of Fellows who are members of the National Trust to the forthcoming ballot for members of the Trust’s Council. She writes: ‘The National Trust has given notice for election by ballot of appointing bodies to its Council. Twenty-six organisations will have the right to appoint a member to the Council. The National Trust published election information and nominations last month, along with information regarding the Annual General Meeting in November. Fellows are probably aware that the Society of Antiquaries of London, although currently an appointing body and included on the list of 34 ballot nominations, has not been recommended for re-election by the National Trust. We would ask Fellows who are members of the National Trust to carefully consider casting a vote in favour of the Society.

‘We are in a unique position to foster public debate on the management, conservation, presentation, and wider understanding of cultural heritage. Our Fellowship can be called upon to provide invaluable advice, expertise, and knowledge. Additionally, the Society has first-hand experience with owning and managing a historic estate and museum collection at Kelmscott Manor.

‘Please consider promoting our continued partnership with the National Trust by including us on your ballot as an appointing body of the Council. Ballots must be submitted in advance of the National Trust’s Annual General Meeting; online voting closes on Friday, 2 November 2012. Please visit the National Trust AGM website to vote.’

Salon’s editor adds: the background to this ballot is that half of the fifty-two members of the NT Council are elected by the members and half are appointed by a range of organisations with expertise in the core areas of the Trust’s work. The latter list is reviewed every six years by the Nominations Committee; for the first time, NT members were asked to nominate relevant organisations and are being asked to vote on the final slate.

Thirty-four organisations have been nominated for the twenty-six appointed places on the NT Council. In the guidance that the Nominations Committee has made to members, the Society of Antiquaries is one of six organisations excluded from their voting recommendations, along with the Joint Committee of the National Amenity Societies, Sustrans, the YHA, the British Ecological Society and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The World Cities Culture Report

Governments around the world tend to invest heavily in their country’s financial and business sectors, seeing them as engines of the economy. By contrast, departments of culture (and their budgets) tend to be minuscule and ripe for cutting. Now a report on the value and importance of culture to twelve of the world’s leading cities says this is a mistake and that culture is as important as finance and trade and should sit at the heart of public policy.

The World Cities Culture Report 2012 is the biggest international survey of its kind in terms of the level of detail and the amount of data assembled on the supply and demand for culture and the impact of cultural assets and activities. The report highlights the direct and indirect benefits of culture: in many ways the indirect is the most fundamental for, the report argues, ‘culture in all its diverse forms is central to what makes a city appealing to educated people and hence to the businesses which seek to employ them. In the globalised knowledge economy, having a well-educated workforce is the key to success, and such workers demand stimulating, creative environments. It is clear from partner cities’ responses that they are well aware of culture’s role in making their cities attractive to “talent”.’ As for direct benefits, the report shows that ‘the creative industries make up a large and growing share of the economies of large cities’ and argues that ‘the creative industries represent a large source of employment, exports and tax revenue that needs to be better understood by policymakers in both the cultural and economic fields’.

What if anything can and should be done to foster a vibrant cultural sector? The report admits that this is not a simple question, because ‘culture is a mix of the mix of the planned and the spontaneous … only sometimes the result of deliberate cultural policy … often the legacy of education policy, transport policy, planning and licensing laws, migration and housing policy, of philanthropy and commercial hard-sell — mixed together with a variety of cultural assets, public and private’.

Even so, the authors do not recommend leaving it to the market, or letting ‘things just happen’. For a start, governments can begin to act as though they care about, understand and value culture; they also need to understand that the international image of a city is ‘very much shaped by their historic buildings and heritage’; at present, the report suggests, too many cities ‘tend to overlook their historic quarters and buildings’. This can also involve trying to identify and keep hold of the distinctive elements of a city’s culture — a point that will not be lost on those who complain that small proprietor-owned businesses are being driven out by the muscle of international chains, turning urban centres into clones of each other.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has endorsed the report and says ‘culture is central to how we address future challenges’. Sadly the Mayor only has limited powers; he needs now to make sure that his political colleagues give time to reading the report and taking its messages to heart.

Spitalfields: yes to redevelopment of London Fruit and Wool Exchange

Just being in favour of culture does not mean that decisions are easy to make about London’s historic buildings. Last week the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, gave the green light to the redevelopment of the London Fruit and Wool Exchange in Spitalfields, much to the dismay of local people, who had submitted 800 letters of objection, and of leading London historians and architectural champions such as Dan Cruickshank and Ptolemy Dean and our Fellows Simon Jenkins, Gavin Stamp and Marcus Binney, all of whom had campaigned for the retention of the existing 1929 building, arguing that it should be used for small business premises and independent enterprises that are in keeping with the character of Spitalfields.

Boris Johnson stepped in after Tower Hamlets council had twice rejected the redevelopment plans. Using his powers as mayor to over-rule the planning authority, he presided over a public meeting on 10 October 2012 at City Hall to hear the respective arguments for and against the development. He then decided in favour of the development, which will see the long facade of the London Fruit and Wool Exchange retained, but the rest of the site used to build 300,000 sq ft of new office, retail and restaurant space. Boris Johnson said the scheme would ‘regenerate the Spitalfields area with thousands of new jobs, and brand new commercial opportunities. It will also make a vital contribution to the wider London economy and have a significant impact not just on Tower Hamlets but on surrounding boroughs as well.’

Fellow Marcus Binney, President of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, has called on the unlisted Exchange building to be spot-listed, arguing that time is needed to assess ‘the special architectural and historic interest of this fine civic building, which in our view is a superb example of dignified and handsome street architecture sensitive to its context’. SAVE describes the building designed in 1928 by the City Architect Sydney Perks, as comparable to Fortnum & Mason, opposite Burlington House in Piccadilly, which has a Grade II listing and is built in the same materials of warm red brick with an abundance of Portland stone trim — the materials used for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666.

The building houses what was once the largest auction hall in the British Isles, fitted out with mahogany panelling and Art Deco glass, brass handrails and fine parquet flooring. The basement walls are covered with wartime graffiti, a reminder that the building served during the war as a ‘township under the ground’ for 10,000 East Enders during the Blitz. It was here that Mickey Davies, an East End optician, became a popular hero through his work to improve the quality of the shelter by organising medical care, installing beds and toilets and recruiting volunteers to undertake cleaning rotas.

For more on the history of the building, along with a series of recent and archive photographs, see the Spitalfields Life blog.

Buildings at Risk 2012 survey

Left: the atomic bomb store and servicing facility on Thetford Heath is one of the two central stores built in the mid-1950s to coincide with the deployment by the RAF of Britain’s first operational atomic bomb, codenamed `Blue Danube’. The explosive components were stored separately in deep thick walled pits and ringed with watch towers, triple wire security fences and guard posts. Now on the ‘at risk’ register, this site is listed at Grade II* as a legacy of Britain’s role in the Cold War

Announcing the outcome of the 2012 Buildings at Risk survey this week, our Fellow Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, called on local authorities, national parks, heritage and community groups to bid for up to fifteen contracts to carry out pilot studies designed to assess the state of England’s Grade II-listed buildings.

At present, the Buildings at Risk register only highlights the plight of Grade I and Grade II* structures at risk from damaging alterations or dereliction; there is no central register of the condition of the remaining 92 per cent of all listed buildings — some 345,000 structures — though local planning authorities are encouraged to maintain such registers for their own locality.

‘345,000 is not a large number in relation to all the buildings in England’, Simon Thurley said, ‘but it is too many for English Heritage to survey on its own. We need help and are prepared to fund nine to fifteen pilot surveys around the country … the results will help all parties involved, including the Heritage Lottery Fund and other grant-givers, to get rescues underway where nothing has been happening for years.’

English Heritage also announced that it was building Heritage at Risk teams in each of its local offices. Fourteen Risk Support Officers, part-funded by English Heritage, were already in place and more would be appointed ‘where there is a need for extra ground-level support for communities’. These teams will ‘support owners, developers and local groups with heritage rescues so that more buildings and sites can be removed from the Register’.

Organisations interested in running one of the pilot surveys should see the English Heritage website for details of how to apply. This page also has further details of the Heritage at Risk Register 2012. To find out if a building is listed, see the National Heritage List for England.

Stonehenge laser survey

Like a cabinet maker who does not bother to finish the rear of a chest that will be placed against a wall, the builders of Stonehenge focused their labours on shaping and working the faces of those sarsens that would be most prominent in the view of people approaching along the Avenue, facing the direction of the midwinter sunset or with the midsummer sun rising behind them.

This is one of the conclusions of a comprehensive laser survey commissioned by English Heritage of all the surviving stones. The survey has revealed that traces of ancient stone working survive on nearly every surface, and that only five of the stones remain completely unworked: three bluestones, plus the Heelstone and one of the two Station Stones. But clear differences in the degree to which the stones were dressed confirms the importance of the north-east to south-west alignment. The sarsens forming the north-eastern segment of the circle are the largest, most regular and most finely finished, while those on the opposite side, in the south west, are smaller, less regular and their backs, facing out of the circle, have not been dressed. Our Fellow Clive Ruggles commented that ‘the utmost care and attention was devoted to ensuring the pristine appearance of Stonehenge for those completing their final approach to the monument along the solstitial axis. The effect would have been especially powerful at the two times of year when the sunlight itself shone along the alignment — when those approaching had the midsummer rising sun behind or the midwinter setting sun ahead.’

The laser survey has also helped to answer the question of whether the outer Sarsen Circle, which lacks five uprights and twenty-two lintels, was ever finished. Scans of the recumbent sarsens show that all have had significant portions of stone removed in the past, and that they would perhaps have been large enough to serve as uprights and lintels and where the top surfaces have survived, they all have tenons; there is therefore evidence that the Sarsen Circle was once more complete than it is now, if not entirely complete.

The survey found traces of seventy-one hitherto unknown axe-head carvings, depicting a type of axe that was in use in the early Bronze Age (c 1750—1500 BC), bringing the known total to 115; on the other hand, other examples of rock art, including cup marks and a snake, are now thought to be natural features.

You can read more about the results of the survey on the English Heritage website, in Fellow Maev Kennedy’s report in the Guardian and in a feature written by the archaeologists who carried out the survey in British Archaeology.

Pitt Rivers Museum wins Arts Council England funding for ‘Excavating Pitt-Rivers’

Left: drawings of flint arrow-heads collected by General Pitt-Rivers, from the accession books of the Pitt Rivers Museum

Our Fellow Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827—1900) played a significant role in the development of modern scientific archaeology, but the earliest archaeological collections that he made have never been studied. The Pitt Rivers Museum, which he founded, and where these artefacts are held, has now been awarded £76,654 by Arts Council England’s Designation Development Fund to document this important early material.

The collections come from more than fifty prehistoric, Roman and medieval sites across the UK: from excavations at a medieval castle in Kent, from Bronze Age barrows in Yorkshire, from Iron Age hillforts in Sussex, and even from early ‘rescue’ archaeology at Roman sites in central London. The project will also draw upon important unpublished manuscripts, a recent gift from the Pitt-Rivers family to the museum. As well as documenting the collections, the project’s public archaeology programme will collaborate with local archaeologists in the regions from which the collections were excavated.

Our Fellow Dan Hicks, who will lead the project, says: ‘General Pitt-Rivers created the first archaeological collection of national scope to be made through scientific excavation. By documenting this iconic collection, and exchanging knowledge with local archaeologists, the project will explore how these artefacts connect the Pitt Rivers Museum with sites, landscapes and communities across the country.’

Regular reports on the progress of the project will be posted on the ‘Excavating Pitt-Rivers’ blog.

News of Fellows

A scene that Constable painted nearly 200 years ago is about to be re-enacted when a restored ‘lighter’ returns to the River Stour in the spring of 2013. Fellow David Gill, Professor of Archaeological Heritage at University Campus Suffolk, a partner in the restoration project, says that the restored Stour Lighter ‘is a tangible reminder of the heritage of East Anglia and it draws together the strands of art and history’. The lighter, a horse-drawn cargo barge like the one that Constable depicted in Boat-building near Flatford Mill (1815) — shown on the left — was scuttled at Sudbury in 1914 having been used until then for carrying coal, bricks and corn. Rescued by the River Stour Trust in the 1970s, it has finally been restored with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant and will now be used for carrying passengers on interpretative trips along the River Stour.

Our Fellow Henry Cleere has been travelling much further afield: to China, in fact, a country to which he has paid a considerable number of visits since his retirement from the Directorship of the CBA in 1991, first as World Heritage Co-ordinator for the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and latterly as World Heritage Adviser to the State Administrator of Cultural Heritage of the People’s Republic of China. Recently, at a ceremony in Zhengzhou, he was awarded the Yellow River Friendship Prize, ‘in appreciation of his outstanding contribution to the economic development and social progress of Henan Province’.

Meanwhile, further south and east, out in the Coral Sea, the National Cultural Council of the Republic of Vanuatu has bestowed its highest honour on our Fellows Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs by appointing them Honorary Curators of Archaeology at the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (VKS). At a ceremony on 20 August, Deputy Chair of the Council, Ambong Thompson said that Professor Spriggs was the longest-serving archaeologist ever to work in Vanuatu. He started work on Aneityum and Maewo for his PhD in 1978, has been involved in many of the significant archaeological discoveries in Vanuatu, such as the Teouma Lapita cemetery, and is still active thirty-four years later, having recently found Lapita pottery on Aneityum. Many of the other archaeologists who have worked in Vanuatu are his students from the Australian National University (ANU), including Chris Ballard and Meredith Wilson, who, along with the late Douglas Kalotiti of Lelepa, were instrumental in the successful nomination of the Chief Roi Mata Domain for World Heritage Site status.

Stuart Bedford, another of Matthew’s students, first came to Vanuatu as a PhD student in 1995. He is particularly known for his research on Malakula and its offshore islands, such as Uripiv, Vao and Atchin. He was co-curator of the very-successful 2010 Lapita exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, which highlighted pottery from Vanuatu’s Lapita sites. Most recently he has been awarded a prestigious four-year Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to research the ceremonial sites, or nasara, of Malakula, quite a few of which are now threatened by people stealing statues and other relics from them for sale overseas.

Mr Thompson said the appointments of Spriggs and Bedford were strongly endorsed by the filwokas, who form the backbone of the VKS, many of whom were trained in archaeology on digs run by Spriggs and Bedford for the VKS from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

Responding, Matthew Spriggs said: ‘This is indeed a great honour, but we must not forget the pioneers of archaeology in Vanuatu who worked here before Stuart and I did, particularly the late Jose Garanger of France and Richard Shutler of the USA who started serious archaeology here in the 1960s. Both Stuart and I were honoured to have these pioneers as friends and mentors before they passed away. We are very much walking in their footsteps.’

Stuart Bedford added: ‘With the honour comes a great responsibility too, helping ensure that the importance of the kastom and historic sites of Vanuatu are recognised by the public and the Government. Rapid development, particularly on Efate, has led to the destruction of many important sites and we need to be vigilant to preserve those that are left.’

In our excursions around the world we land next in Doha, capital of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Our Fellow Professor Thilo Rehren has recently moved here to help establish UCL Qatar, the first UK university department to be set up in Qatar’s Education City (currently being re-branded as Hamad bin Khalifa University). Thilo says: ‘we are a department of University College London like any other — we just happen to be located somewhat outside the M25. Formally established last August, we enrolled our first twenty-nine students a few weeks ago, across three different postgraduate degree programmes: the MA in Museum and Gallery Practice, the MA in the Archaeology of the Arab and Islamic World, and the MSc in Conservation Studies. We also offer short training courses for mid-career professionals working in the cultural heritage sector: see the UCL Qatar website for further information.’

Finally back in London, congratulations to our Fellow Karen Hearn who has been appointed Honorary Professor in the English Language and Literature department at University College London. This is, says Karen, who was Curator of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century British Art at Tate Britain between 1992 and 2012, ‘a very happy and interesting development’.

Lives Remembered: Patricia Bell, FSA

The Guardian recently published the following obituary by Richard Wildman for our Fellow Patricia Bell (elected on 26 November 1987).

‘My friend Patricia Bell, who has died aged eighty-six, was a former county archivist of Bedfordshire (1968—86) and editor of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society’s publications (1977—91). Patricia came from a farming family in Buckinghamshire. After gaining an external degree from London University, she trained as an archivist in the Hampshire Record Office before moving to Bedford in 1956 as assistant to her distant cousin Joyce Godber. The record office occupied cramped conditions in the Victorian Shire Hall in Bedford, but Joyce planned a new repository in the replacement County (now Borough) Hall, which opened on the other side of the River Ouse in 1969. Patricia was in charge of the office while Joyce worked on her History of Bedfordshire (1969). On Joyce’s retirement Patricia was appointed her successor, in time to supervise the move to the new premises.

‘Patricia and her staff made the record office (now called Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service) a welcoming place to all researchers. She said that archivists live on in the footnotes to the works of authors they have helped. She assisted Joyce as the general editor of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society before taking over that post. She edited two collections of early Tudor wills (in 1966 and 1997) and contributed to other volumes, including a festschrift for Joyce in 1978. Patricia was herself the recipient of a festschrift, which was published as A Bedfordshire Historical Miscellany in 1993.

‘In 1986 she published Belief in Bedfordshire, a history of Christianity in the county, under her own imprint, the Belfry Press. A loyal member of the Church of England (and a former elected lay member of the General Synod), Patricia was very down to earth, and always a stimulating conversationalist. From 1988 to 1993, she was a governor of the Harpur Trust, elected by the staff of Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford. Patricia was also President and later Patron of the Bedfordshire Family History Society.’

Lives Remembered: Glenys Lloyd-Morgan

Fellow Hilary Cool writes to say that Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, who was a Fellow until she succumbed to Alzheimer’s, died on 21 September 2012, at the age of sixty-seven. Formerly Archaeological Assistant at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, Glenys was the author of many small finds reports; she specialised in metal objects, particularly Roman mirrors and cosmetics sets. She served for many years with Hilary on the Roman Finds Group committee. Anyone who would like to contribute tributes and memories to the memorial issue of the Group’s newsletter is invited to contact Hilary, who says ‘Glenys was something of a character and immensely helpful to anyone who needed access to the Grosvenor Museum at Chester. She was also immensely proud of being a Fellow’.

Lives remembered: Eric Ives, OBE, FSA

The Society has been informed that our Fellow Professor Eric Ives, OBE, FSA, died on 25 September 2012, at the age of eighty-one. A memorial service will take place in Warwick School Chapel on 20 October 2012.

Eric Ives was a regular contributor to History Today magazine, which has brought together a selection of his articles by way of a tribute. He was Emeritus Professor of English History at the University of Birmingham and, as well as being an expert on Tudor history, and author of a highly regarded work on the life of Anne Boleyn, he also wrote extensively on the development of modern higher education, often comparing its increasingly bureaucratic machinations with that of the Tudor court.

Lives Remembered: Robert James Sharer, FSA

Our Fellow Robert Sharer (1940—2012) died last month in Philadelphia at the age of seventy-two. Bob Sharer was elected a Fellow on 14 April 2005, and had been Shoemaker Curator of the Pennsylvania Museum’s American Section since 2008, as well as Sally & Alvin V Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1995. He was a major Maya scholar, and author of the encyclopaedic textbook in the field, The Ancient Maya, originally written by Sylvanus Morley, then revised by Morley and Sharer until the fifth edition, which was just Bob, and the sixth, written by Bob with Loa Traxler (his widow). He will also be remembered for fieldwork conducted over a period of four decades at a number of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sites, including Chalchuapa and Verapaz (El Salvador), Quiriguá and El Mirador (Guatemala) and Copan (Honduras), and for his research and publications on the development of complex societies, archaeological method and theory, and the origins and development of Preclassic Highland Maya culture.

Feedback

B minus was the verdict of Fellows on the Richard III report in the last issue of Salon. First, the reference to a ‘scull wound caused by a blade’ had Fellow John Kenyon asking whether Richard III had been an oarsman or ‘wet bob’, while Fellow Robin Milner-Gulland wanted to know whether the archaeologists had found someone who had suffered a mishap on the River Soar, instead of their intended Bosworth victim.

Worse by far, Salon said that the Leicester Greyfriars excavation was sponsored by the Richard III Foundation; in fact it was the Richard III Society (R3S) who paid for the desk-based assessment to start the process off and whose members have been heavily involved in the whole process from the beginning, so apologies are due to Fellow Peter Hammond, President of the Richard III Society and all its members. Peter explains that the R3S was founded in 1924 by, amongst others, Dr Aymer Vallance, who was a Fellow. Our Society and the R3S share a Royal Patron, in the form of the Duke of Gloucester. The aims of the R3S, says Peter, ‘are only to find out the facts about the life and times of Richard III; it does not have such far reaching aims as the Foundation’ (whose aspiration, according to its website, is ‘to strip away the propaganda and present Richard III as he once was: not a villain, not a saint, but a man of his times’.

Salon also mentioned that one of the Society’s two portraits of Richard III alluded to his alleged disfigurement and his defeat (he holds a broken sword) at the Battle of Bosworth, but had been altered subsequently, perhaps in an attempt to rehabilitate the king’s image. Fellow Jill Franklin, who is writing the entry on the portrait for the Society’s forthcoming picture catalogue, writes to elaborate. ‘This portrait of Richard is not entirely as it was when first painted. Conservators have ascertained that aspects of the original composition were subsequently altered. Richard’s left shoulder is shown now, as it always was, disproportionately large, emphasising the physical deformity only openly ascribed to him after his death. But the underdrawing on the panel indicates that Richard’s left forearm and hand, as first depicted, were also out of proportion and strikingly under-sized.

‘As originally conceived, therefore, the image was unorthodox in terms of conventional royal portraiture, in that it alluded to King Richard’s defeat and alleged disfigurement, rather than to his authority as a monarch. The intention had evidently been to portray Richard after his downfall at Bosworth in 1485 as the discredited and misbegotten usurper of Tudor propaganda, complete with withered arm and distorted shoulder. When changes were later made to the king’s hands and left arm in the portrait, the jerkin was also added to conceal these alterations. What was initially intended to be a defamatory portrayal of the king, therefore, focusing both on his disfigurement and his political downfall, was later adjusted by overpainting in an attempt to present a more favourable image.

‘When these alterations to the portrait occurred is a matter of considerable historical interest. Such changes seem like the equivalent in pictorial terms of attempts by successive writers, following the example of Horace Walpole (1717—97), to represent the vilified king in a more positive light. As Walpole was Thomas Kerrich’s older contemporary and social superior in late eighteenth-century north Norfolk, much admired for his antiquarian and artistic interests, suspicion inevitably falls on the 1780s as the period when this intervention might have taken place, and on Kerrich, then owner of the panel, as the perpetrator. In neither case is this justified, however. All the indications are that the alterations took place long after Kerrich’s time, at some point after the publication of Albert Way’s catalogue of the Society’s collection in 1847 and before George Scharf presented the portrait at a meeting of the Society in 1862. These changes were probably restricted to Richard’s garments and left hand, however, as there is no evidence that the sword was ever repainted.’

Fellow Hugh Cheape writes from the Isle of Skye to say that he read the appreciation of Marshall Cubbon in the last issue of Salon with great interest: ‘I met him once, at a Folk Life Studies conference, and really enjoyed his intense enthusiasm for Manx scholarship and research. The account of his life in Salon was admirably full but did not mention his espousal and work for Manx Gaelic. Others will know more about this, but I think he learned Gaelic from one of the last Manx speakers — it might have been Ned Madderel — and then worked hard to rescue the language and raise its status. For the disciplines of Celtic Studies, this was vital work.’

Help wanted with identification of mystery objects

Fellow Robert Waterhouse, Field Archaeologist to the Société Jersiaise, hopes that Salon readers will be able to identify the objects shown in the pictures shown to the left and below. Robert says: ‘a number of these cast bronze objects have been found in Jersey over the past few years by metal detectorists. They are bauble-like hollow fittings, probably cast using the lost wax process. Their fixing holes make them look like the terminals of flagpoles, carriage fittings or horse harness decorations. They are all of the same shape, though their size varies. The sides are often decorated with Renaissance-style cartouches, depicting human figures, sometimes engaged in possibly sexual activities! Traces of gilding are occasionally to be seen, so they would have been very much “on show” wherever they were displayed.

‘The findspots vary, though all are in fields, near settlements but not necessarily in them. We would very much like to know what these objects are, and to what period we should ascribe them.’

2014 World Monuments Watch nominations deadline 1 March 2013

Every two years, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) invites nominations to the World Monuments Watch list of heritage sites at risk; from archaeological sites to architectural masterpieces, cultural landscapes to historic urban centres, the Watch list identifies places of significance at risk and provides an opportunity for publicising the threats to the site and for fundraising. To make a nomination, go to the WMF website.

Events

27 October 2012: ‘Visualising time and nature in Anglo-Saxon England’. The Thirtieth Brixworth Lecture will be given by Professor Faith Wallis, of McGill University, Canada, at 5pm, at All Saints Church, Brixworth.

Cædmon visualised the heavens as a roof. Bede explained earth’s climatic zones by imagining a group of men sitting around an open-air fire-pit. Byrhtferth of Ramsey compared the study of time-reckoning to sailing an unfathomable ocean while glimpsing lofty mountains from afar. For the Anglo-Saxons, cosmos and time could be seen with the mind’s eye, through concrete forms and formulations. This year’s Brixworth Lecture examines some of their strategies for visualising the created world that lay beyond ordinary vision.

Further information is on the Leicester University website.

1 November 2012: ‘Almost forgotten: the International Exhibition of 1862’, an all-day conference organised by the William Shipley Group for RSA History, at the Medical Society of London, Lettsom House, 11 Chandos Street, London W1G 9EB. Several Fellows will be speaking, including Max Donnelly on ‘The medieval court at the International Exhibition of 1862’. For the full programme and booking details see the William Shipley Group’s website.

2 to 4 November 2012: The Roscrea Autumn Conference, at Mount St Joseph Abbey, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, on the theme of ‘The Annals of Ireland’. For a programme and booking form, contact the conference organiser and director, our Fellow George Cunningham. The Roscrea Spring Conference, the fifty-second consecutive conference in the series, takes place on 5 to 7 April 2013 on the theme of ‘Roscrea and the Irish Midlands at the beginning of the thirteenth century: celebrating the first formal record of parliament in Ireland: Roscrea 1213’.

7 November 2012: ‘English and Welsh bishops and their goods in the later Middle Ages’, an address by our Fellow Professor Chris Woolgar, to be given in the Morison Room, Cambridge University Library (on the ground floor of the Library, accessible via the Exhibition Centre), at 3.30pm (tea and biscuits from 3pm) as part of the AGM of the Canterbury and York Society. All welcome.

14 November 2012: ‘Nostell Priory: architectural drawings and exploring authorship’, by Frances Sands, Catalogue Editor (Adam Drawings Project), 6pm for 6.30pm, the Seminar Room, Sir John Soane’s Museum, No. 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Places must be booked in advance by contacting Beth Walker, Head of Education (tel: 020 7440 4254).

Nostell Priory is one of the most important eighteenth-century buildings in northern England. Its fabric received contributions from John Moyser, James Paine, Thomas Perrit, Joseph Rose (senior), Joseph Rose (junior), Robert Adam, Antonio Zucchi, Thomas Chippendale and others. Such a wealth of creative input has resulted in a complex and fundamentally collaborative construction history. Nostell is, however, one of the most richly documented houses within the National Trust portfolio: with a considerable family archive of correspondence and a large collection of extant architectural drawings. This talk will explore how Frances Sands, author of ‘The art of collaboration: Antonio Zucchi at Nostell Priory’ in The Georgian Group Journal, 2011, has used this extant graphic evidence to disentangle the authorship of the various elements of Nostell Priory.

1 December 2012: ‘World Heritage for Tomorrow’, an international conference to celebrate the Fortieth Anniversary of the World Heritage Convention, to discuss the role of World Heritage in the coming decades and to reflect on how the United Kingdom might contribute to broader international debate on the evolving role of World Heritage. The event will be held at the Gustave Tuck Theatre, University College London, and is organised by ICOMOS-UK in collaboration with The Open University, UCL Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. The keynote address will be delivered by Baroness Andrews, Chair, English Heritage, on ‘Engaging with the World Heritage Convention’.

To view the full conference programme and to book a place at on the conference, please visit the ICOMOS-UK website.

August 2012 edition of the National Trust’s ABC Bulletin

Left: the hypostyle hall of the Temple of Isis, Philae, from William John Bankes’s Egyptian Portfolio

The latest edition of the ABC (Arts, Buildings, Collections) Bulletin is available for downloading from the National Trust’s website.

Of potential interest to Fellows in this issue is an article on the recently catalogued Egyptian Portfolio of the explorer William John Bankes (1786—1855), consisting of some 1,700 drawings, measured plans and elevations, and notes recording nearly one hundred sites in Egypt, Nubia, Siwa and the Sinai (the catalogue and a photographic record of the collection is also available online.

Our Fellow Mark Purcell, the National Trust’s Libraries Curator, writes about the library at Blickling and its contents, the cataloguing of which has been funded, appropriately enough, by the proceeds from the sale of second-hand books in Blickling’s excellent bookshop.

There is also a very useful list of special exhibitions at National Trust properties. This demonstrates that National Trust properties are now an important showcase for contemporary art (including Edmund de Waal’s ceramics at Waddesdon Manor or textile pieces from leading artists including Tracy Emin at Greyfriars’ House and Garden, Worcestershire).

Also on show, at Lanhydrock House, Cornwall, are the photographs of Charles Lygon Somers Cocks (1821—85) of south-west England’s architecture, archaeology, house interiors and (from the 1870s, when he was chairman of the committee selecting the stone for the new Truro Cathedral) its quarries.

The life of a benefactor: the eighth Lord Howard de Walden

Left: Bust of Lord Howard de Walden, by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), c 1905–6

An especially entertaining National Trust special exhibition is currently on at Chirk Castle, the family home for thirty-four years of Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, the eighth Lord Howard de Walden (1880—1946). Our Society has particular reason to be thankful to Howard de Walden (known to family and friends as ‘Tommy’) because his gift to our Society in 1945 helped make possible the definitive Dictionary of British Arms, the third volume of which was published as recently as 2009.

Accompanying the exhibition is a lively new biography of Howard de Walden written by his grandson, Thomas Seymour, and edited by Claire Forbes for the National Trust (downloadable for free as a PDF in English or in Welsh. This reveals that Tommy was a serial philanthropist, of a kind that we dearly need at the moment, who used the very substantial fortune that he inherited (based on a portfolio of property in London’s West End) to support any number of cultural causes.

Something of the zest with which Howard de Walden pursued his life can be gauged from these brief extracts from the new book about the final two years of his life. ‘War had broken out again … too old for military service, he had to content himself with running the local home guard with his friend and deputy Colonel Poss Myddelton. Shades of Dad’s Army here: the horsebox placed in the castle gateway, housemaids taught to shoot, village women instructed to hurl methylated spirits at enemy tanks. The castle provided a year’s refuge to two groups of forty women evacuated from Liverpool with their youngsters, a keen and captive audience for Tommy’s displays of model boats on the lake … for light relief he took weekly Welsh lessons, taught his eldest grandsons fencing, tossed off a ballad about the disappearing Earl of Moray with a chorus of elves and asked Holbrooke to set it to music [the composer Josef Holbrooke, with whom he had written an operatic trilogy, The Cauldron of Annwn, based on Welsh mythology, some thirty years earlier].

‘Before the War Augustus John had brought the young Dylan Thomas to meet Tommy, who became Dylan’s patron. On Christmas Eve 1940, homeless and broke, Dylan wrote him a moving letter, seeking further help and enclosing six recent poems. Tommy settled his debts and let him have the Apple House, a stone cottage in the garden. “A really excellent workroom”, Dylan wrote in thanks, towards the end of the War … In February 1946, months before his death, Tommy received a touching present: a copy of the poet’s brand-new volume of poems, Deaths and Entrances, inscribed “To Lord Howard de Walden from Dylan Thomas with every gratitude”.’

Books by Fellows: William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History

Not a new book, of course, as this collection of essays documenting the archaeology and history of Kelmscott parish in general and Kelmscott Manor in particular was published in 2007 to present the results of the Society’s Kelmscott Landscape Project. The reason for including it here is to alert Salon readers to the fact that it is now available from Oxbow Books at the bargain price of just £9.95.

Last chance to order Henry VIII textiles inventory at a discount

Also on sale for the special introductory price of £85 (inclusive of p&p) is the Society’s splendid new second volume of the Henry VIII Inventory, on textiles and dress. The offer runs out on 31 October 2012: to order a copy send an email to Brepols Publishers quoting the code ‘SAL2012’.

Books by Fellows: Iron Age Ritual, a Hillfort and Evidence for a Minster at Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

This excavation report, by Fellow Michael Farley and Gillian Jones (ISBN 9781842174845), looks at an area within the grounds of the Prebendal House, adjacent to the parish church of St Mary, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, that seems to have been the site first of a striking ritual burial, when a young woman and four children were buried with at least twenty-one sheep, early in the fourth century BC. Within a generation or so of the burial, and still within the first half of the fourth century BC, a univallate hillfort was constructed and a human skull with attached vertebrae was deposited on the base of the ditch.

During the Roman period there was only slight use of the hillfort’s interior and of the spur on which the hillfort was constructed, but what survived of the hillfort probably influenced the siting of an early minster church here, with its extensive cemetery, in the early eighth century, from which an unusual piece of Merovingian glass with a moulded cross on its base was recovered from a later medieval context. The site was extensively utilised in the medieval period and was later traversed by a Civil War defence before becoming a formal garden in the eighteenth century, probably when the Prebendal House was occupied by John Wilkes (1725—97), the journalist and radical politician who was elected MP for Aylesbury in 1757 and again in 1761.

Books by Fellows: The Discovery and Excavation of the Roman Shore-fort at Dover

Fellow Brian Philp proudly declares that this new volume in the Kent Monograph Series is published in a limited edition (only available from Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit, New Street, Dover CT17 9AJ, at £24, plus £5 p&p; cheques payable to KARU) and is the result of ‘five years of unfunded research and analysis that will long stand as a tribute and example of supreme voluntary effort’! The 180-page volume covers the discovery of the long-lost shore fort of Dubris, listed in the ‘Notitia Dignitatum’, but whose very existence was being called into question in 1970 when Brian began his thirty-year campaign of excavation in Dover.

Three volumes have already been published on the results of that work: on the Classis Britannica Fort, the Roman Painted House and on Saxon Dover; this one deals with the third-century AD Roman Shore-fort (all four volumes can be purchased from KARU for £60, inclusive of p&p). Of this massive structure, seven bastions were excavated, along with the great defensive ditch and rampart bank, and much of the internal area, with its impressive courtyard, furnace, heated rooms and military bath-house. The volume has 180 drawings, the highlights of which include two fine altars, a statue, two busts, a Persian seal and an ivory plaque.

Books by Fellows: The Roman Cemeteries and Suburbs of Winchester

Another excavation report, this time bringing together the results of investigations that took place between 1971 and 1986 that produced evidence for both the cemeteries and the suburban settlements of Roman Winchester (ISBN 9780861350209; Winchester Museum Service 2012, £35).

Fellow Patrick Ottaway is the principal author and the volume includes a report on the major excavation that he directed at Victoria Road East, just outside the north gate, where the Roman road to Cirencester (Corinium) was found along with a cemetery of 201 cremation and inhumation burial to the east of the road, largely dating from between the third quarter of the first century and the mid-second century AD. The cemetery was succeeded by a series of later Roman timber buildings accompanied by pits and wells, which contained large and important collections of animal bones and pottery.

The volume also includes reports on Roman cemeteries elsewhere in the northern suburb and in the eastern and western suburbs of the Roman town, with a full catalogue of the burials and an extensive gazetteer of Roman discoveries outside the town walls. The quantity and quality of the data generated mean that the results are of considerable importance not only for Winchester itself but also for the towns of Roman Britain and for Roman mortuary studies generally.

Books by Fellows: The Franks Casket

The Franks Casket, by Fellow Leslie Webster, packs an enormous amount of scholarship and fifty informative pictures into a sixty-four page book in the British Museum’s ‘Objects in Focus’ series (ISBN 9780714128184; British Museum Press). The whalebone box known as the Franks Casket — after our former President, Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826—97), who gave it to the museum in 1867 shortly before being appointed by the museum to set up a new collection of British and Medieval Antiquities — was described by another Fellow and former British Museum Director, Thomas Kendrick (1895—1979), as ‘a joyous and inconsequential parade of scenes that were probably intended to have more ornamental than didactic value’.

Not so, says Leslie, as she unpicks the mix of scenes from Germanic, Jewish, Roman and Christian history depicted on the sides and lid and the mix of Old English words and runic script. It is, she argues, ‘a remarkably ambitious object, whose maker created a unique and eloquent idiom for conveying stories from diverse cultures in a new and accessible way’. Rather than randomly selected stories, the scenes depicted on the casket are paired parables, one drawn from Germanic myth, the other from Christian tradition, each illuminating the other. The entire casket is itself metaphorical in being made of whalebone: the casket’s audience would be familiar with the whale in all its symbolic guises in the Bible and in moralising bestiaries, such as the Anglo-Saxon version of the ancient Greek Physiologus. The casket thus invites us to tease out its meanings, rather like solving a riddle, a form of entertainment, writes Leslie, ‘much relished by Anglo-Saxons, but which was also used by the Church as an educational tool, to train agile minds’.

Leslie is not able to provide definitive answers for every puzzle raised by the casket: where it was made (probably Northumbria around AD 700), for whom (exile and kingship are over-riding themes of the casket scenes, but there are several Anglo-Saxon kings and princes whose biographies would fit), what it contained (perhaps the Gospels, perhaps the Psalms) and how it ended up in France, in use as a reliquary at the shrine of St Julian in the town of Brioude in a remote area of the Auvergne. In a way, the lack of answers is satisfying rather than frustrating: it leaves the casket bathed in an appropriate aura of mystery.

Books by Fellows: The Reign of Richard II

The Reign of Richard II: from minority to tyranny 1377—97 (ISBN 9780719038532; Manchester University Press) consists of a collection of sources for the first twenty years of the reign of Richard II. Our Fellow Alison McHardy has selected and translated these from English and foreign chronicles, letters and legal and financial documents to give a chronological portrait of a key period in English history, arranged chronologically, and with helpful commentary and notes.

The introduction provides essential background information and explains the strengths and weaknesses of the sources, as commentary on a dramatic period in English history characterised by war, rebellion, show trials, scandal, murder, the making of England’s oldest alliance and attempts to solve the Irish question.

Published in the Manchester Medieval Sources series, it is the companion to Chronicles of the Revolution, Chris Given-Wilson’s book on sources for the period 1397 to 1400.

Books by Fellows: Sport, History and Heritage

According to our Fellow Jason Wood, one of the three editors of this new book on Sport, History and Heritage (ISBN 9781843837886; Boydell), the heritage and museum communities have been slow to recognise that sport is an integral part of modern life. In fact, it is almost true to say that sport and heritage occupy separate realms — ideologically poles apart — and yet, as some of the papers in this volume argue, they also have much in common, in that both are capable of conveying powerful messages that are core to our culture.

Sport, History and Heritage thus sets out to explore the interplay between the two worlds and to deal with the public representation of sport, its impact on public spheres, the direction of sports heritage studies and what they should be attempting to achieve, the role of museums in sport history, the rise and popularity of sports museums, the collecting of sporting art and memorabilia, and popular concern over the demise of historic sports buildings and historic sports landscapes.

Books by Fellows: Thomas Pringle, South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist

If the title seems familiar, that is because Salon 271 reported on The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle (1789—1834) , and Fellow Randolph Vigne has now followed that volume with a full-scale biography, telling the remarkable story of a man of genius born to a Scottish farming family near Kelso who is today honoured in South Africa both for his spirited opposition to slavery and to laws that paved the way for apartheid and as the father of South African English poetry.

In telling the story of Thomas Pringle, South African Pioneer, Poet and Abolitionist (ISBN 9781847010520; James Currey), Randolph Vigne is seeking to raise the public profile of a man who deserves to be better known in Britain as well for his championing of the ‘great cause’ as Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. This achieved its aim of abolishing slavery ‘throughout the British Dominions’ on 15 June 1834, just six months before Pringle’s untimely death at the age of forty-six on 5 December 1834. Buried initially in London’s non-conformist graveyard at Bunhill Fields, he was reinterred in 1970 in a memorial chapel built in South Africa’s Baviaans River valley where Pringle had lived from 1820 to 1826 as a pioneer cattle farmer. It was here that he wrote the poetry for which he is celebrated, which enraged white South African opinion with its sympathetic portrayal of the indigenous people of the region as intelligent, proud, cultured and noble, while European settlers were characterised as locusts, fiends, spoilers, bandits, dependent for their superiority on matching firearms against club and assegai.

Books by Fellows: Robin Ironside: neo-Romantic visionary

Another heroic character out of his time and difficult to categorise is Robin Ironside (1912—65), the painter, illustrator, designer, writer and curator whose work features in an exhibition (celebrating the centenary of his birth) at Chester’s Grosvenor Museum (to 6 January 2012). Our Fellow Peter Broughton is the co author, along with Virginia Ironside (Robin’s niece) and Simon Martin (Head of Curatorial Services at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, where an earlier version of the exhibition was mounted) of the monograph Robin Ironside: neo-Romantic visionary (ISBN I9781869827113; Pallant House Gallery), produced to accompany the exhibition.

Ironside was Assistant Keeper at the Tate Gallery (1937—46) and Assistant Secretary of the Contemporary Art Society (1938—45) until he gave up paid employment for the precarious life of an artist — a decision made all the more brave given that he was completely self-taught. Even so, his intricate and classically inspired work was considered worthy of being exhibited alongside that of John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon in various exhibitions. As a designer, he worked on schemes for the Festival of Britain, the Edinburgh Festival and sets for the opera and ballet at Covent Garden.

Ironside’s art is almost impossible to sum up in words: his elongated figures are reminiscent of El Greco, while the exhibition’s co-curator Simon Martin says his work ‘belongs to the same idiosyncratic British tradition as Blake, Richard Dadd and Samuel Palmer’. Ironside himself described it as being concerned with ‘the hopes and frustrations of living’. Reviewing the exhibition in the Daily Telegraph), Richard Dorment describes him as ‘a painter of baroque palaces fallen into ruin and the corpses of beautiful youths decomposing in overgrown gardens, of dying poets, escaped madmen and clandestine burials’ — adding that ‘much of this imagery is tongue-in-cheek’.

Peter Boughton will give a lecture on ‘The art of Robin Ironside’ at the gallery on 23 October 2012, and if you miss that, you can join Peter for a tour of the exhibition on 15 December 2012.

Gifts to the Library, July to September 2012

The Society is very grateful to the donors of the following books, given to the Library in the period from July to September 2012. Full records for all can be found in the online catalogue and all the books are now available in the Library.

 From the author, Peter Barber, FSA, London: a history in maps, London Topographical Society publication no. 173, 2012
 From the author, Hugh Cheape, FSA, Bagpipes: a national collection of a national instrument, 2008
 From the author, Peter Fowler, FSA, Paisajes culturales del patrimonio mundial, 2012
 From the author, David Gaimster, FSA, Director’s Choice: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 2012
 From Stephen Greep, FSA, Fouilles et recherches Nos XIII to XVI, Academie Bulgare des Sciences, Institut Archeologique et Musée, 1985—6
 From the author, Ergün Lafli, ‘A new osiriform lamp from Antioch in the Hatay Archaeological Museum’, by Ergün Lafli, Maurizio Buora and Attilio Mastrocinque, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 52, 421—39, 2012; ‘Terra sigillata and red-slipped ware from Hadrianopolis in southwestern Paphlagonia’, by Ergün Lafli and Gülseren Kan Şahn, Anatolia Antiqua, XX, 45—120, 2012; ‘Middle and late Roman glass from the Agora (ninth to fourteenth century) and some thoughts on glass usage and glass production in the Byzantine Empire’, by Binnur Gürler and Ergün Lafli, RGZM—Tagungen, 8, 2010; ‘Roman and late Roman terracotta Unguentaria 1988—2005’, Amorium Reports 3: the lower city enclosure. Finds, Reports and Technical Studies, 2012
 From the author, Arthur MacGregor, FSA, Animal Encounters: human and animal interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War One, 2012
 From the author, John Manley, FSA, The Archaeology of the South Downs National Park: an introduction, 2012
 From Vincent Megaw, FSA, ‘Auf den Spuren keltischer Götterverehrung’, by Manfred Hainzmann, Mitteilungen der Prähistorischen Kommission, 64, 2007
 From Gwyn Meirion-Jones, FSA, Des villes à l’ombre des chateaux: naissance et essor des agglomerations castrales en France au moyen age: Actes du colloque de Vitré (16—17 octobre 2008) under the direction of André Chédeville and Daniel Pichot, Collection: Archéologie et Culture, 2010; La peinture murale Gothique en Poitou, 13th—15th siècle, by Claudine Landry-Delcroix, Collection: Art et Société, 2012; Arthur Regnault, architecte (1839—1932): la quintessence de l’art sacré, by Jean-Yves Andrieux, 2011
 From Ruth Morgan, History Makers: a biographical introduction to the Hunter Archaeological Society, 1912—2012, Hunter Archaeological Society, 2012
 From the co-authors, Tessa Murdoch, FSA, and Randolph Vigne, FSA, The French Hospital in England: its Huguenot history and collections, 2009
 From the editor, Rear Admiral J A L Myres, Praeterita: the memoirs of the late Sir John Linton Myres Kt OBE, 2012
 From the co-editor, Elizabeth New, FSA, Seals in Context: medieval Wales and the Welsh Marches, edited by John McEwan and Elizabeth A New, 2012
 From Derek Renn, FSA, Map of a Nation: a biography of the Ordnance Survey, 2010
 From the author, Neil Rhind, FSA, The Paragon and South Row, Blackheath: a triumph in late eighteenth-century unintentional town planning, 2012; Montague House and the Pagoda: the story of a Greenwich house and its summer pavilion, by Neil Rhind and Philip Cooper, 2012
 From the author, Alan Richardson, ‘The Roman surveyors in Cumberland’, 2007; ‘The Romans in the Manchester area: how they shaped the landscape’, 2004
 From the co-author, Jim Rylatt, How Times Change: Navenby unearthed, by Colin Palmer-Brown and Jim Rylatt, Pre-Construct Archaeological Services Ltd monograph no. 2, 2011
 From Jacob Simon, FSA, Architectural Heritage: journal of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, vols 6—21, 1995—2011; Garden History: the journal of the Garden History Society, vols 1—8, 1972—80, vol 28, no. 1, 2000, and vol 31, no. 3, 2003
 From the editor, Alastair M Small, FSA, Vagnari: the village, the industries, the imperial property, Insulae Diomedeae, 17, 2011
 From the author, Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir, FSA, Reykholt: archaeological investigations at a high status farm in western Iceland, 2012
 From the author, Michael Thompson, FSA, Reading, Writing and Archaeology: an autobiographical essay, 2012
 From Kate Tiller, FSA, A History of the County of Oxford. Volume 17: Broadwell, Langford and Kelmscott, edited by Simon Townley, The Victoria History of the Counties of England, 2012
 From Ronnie Walker, The Romano-British Villa at Box, Wiltshire: a reappraisal and assessment of the archaeological evidence, by Mark Corney, FSA, nd
 From Susan Youngs, FSA, A Fragmented Masterpiece: recovering the biography of the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish cross-slab, by Heather F James, Isabel Henderson, Sally M Foster and Sin Jones, 2008
 From Niamh Whitfield, FSA, A Carnival of Learning: essays to honour George Cunningham and his fifty conferences on medieval Ireland in the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Joseph, Roscrea, 1987—2012, edited by Peter Harbison, FSA, and Valerie Hall, FSA, 2012; Medieval Treasures of County Kerry, edited by Griffin Murray, 2012
 From Alan Williams, FSA, The Sword and the Crucible: a history of the metallurgy of European swords up to the sixteenth century, History of Warfare, 77, 2012

Vacancies

The Geffrye Museum: Trustees; closing date 26 October 2012
The Geffrye Museum is inviting applications for a number of vacancies on its Board of Trustees. The museum is in the early stages of a major capital development, which has Heritage Lottery Fund support, so this is an exciting time to be joining the Board. Applicants should demonstrate a genuine interest in the museum. Expertise is sought in three particular areas: finance and audit, museums and the arts, and fundraising and advocacy. Further information and application details can be downloaded from the museum’s website. Interviews will take place on Thursday 8 November 2012.