All of our lectures are live streamed and are open to anyone to join us online, Fellows and Non-Fellows.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Summer Miscellany and Reception
The Society looks forward to welcoming Fellows, Affiliates and guests to our annual soirée, with Pimms and Wine reception afterwards. The reception follows the Society’s summer miscellany of papers.
The L’Estranges of Hunstanton, Norfolk and Life in the English Republic by Anna Keay OBE, Director of the Landmark Trust
The decade of republican rule in Britain and Ireland, the 1650s, is often overlooked or caricatured as a time of bleak prohibition. The remarkable surviving archives of the L’Estrange family of Hunstanton Hall – covering subjects like food and music, building and gift-giving – make it possible to reconstruct the world of a county family, 100 miles from the capital and through them to see what worked and what did not about the constitutional experiments of the mid-17th-century.
Born in the West Highlands of Scotland, Anna was educated at Oban High School in Argyll and Bedales in Hampshire. She read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she won two academic scholarships. Her PhD on court ceremonial in the reign of Charles II was supervised by Professor John Miller at Queen Mary, University of London
From 1996 to 2002 Anna worked as a curator for Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace and the Banqueting House in Whitehall. From 2002 until 2012 she was Properties Presentation and then Curatorial Director of English Heritage, responsible for curating and presenting to the public 420 historic sites across England, from Stonehenge to Kenwood House. She is now Director of The Landmark Trust.
Alice the Adamite and Penelope Punk: An Unusually Riotous History of the English Revolution by Dr Jonathan Healey, Associate Professor in Social History, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
During the English Civil War of the 1640s, ordinary people found their political voice like never before. Newspapers, protests, petitions, pamphlets, and religious meetings sprung up across London and the rest of the country. But what political role did these play? Did ordinary people help drive the crisis that brought the country towards revolution? And how did these new voices affect the republic that arose out of the ruins of the old monarchy?
Jonathan Healey is Associate Professor in Social History at the University of Oxford, where he teaches local and social history at the Department for Continuing Education. The Blazing World, his history of seventeenth century England, is out now from Bloomsbury.
James II’s Coronation Cup: The Coronation Procession and the Barons of the Cinque Ports by Dr Tessa Murdoch FSA and comments from Dr Dora Thornton FSA
The flat-chased Chinoiserie figures carrying a canopy on James II’s Coronation Cup demonstrate the original purpose of its recycled silver: they reflect the decoration of canopies carried by barons of the Cinque Ports over the heads of the newly crowned monarch and his consort – Queen Mary of Modena. This talk will place James II’s Coronation Cup in the context of surviving Coronation silver and furnishings in the V&A Collections and elsewhere including canopy bells and staves, tankards, cups, a punch bowl, a counter box, George II’s canopy and George IV’s footstool.
The silver gilt cup, made from perquisites of office acquired by two members of the same family Cresheld and Gawden Draper representing Winchelsea, is on display in the V&A’s Whiteley Silver Galleries. It was repatriated in 2008 with grants from the Art Fund and the NHMF.A silver tankard made from perquisites acquired by the senior Baron, Tobias Cleve, who represented Sandwich at the Coronation of Charles II, is now in the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and will be available, by kind arrangement with Dr Dora Thornton FSA, Curator of the Goldsmiths’ Company Collection, for members of the audience to view at Burlington House on Thursday 18th May.
Dr Tessa Murdoch FSA is an independent scholar with 40 years curatorial experience at the Museum of London and the V&A. She serves on the Art Council AIL Panel, advises the NHMF and the National Trust and is a member of the Contemporary Craft Committee at the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. In January 2023, Tessa was appointed Associate Research Professor in the Institute of Humanities, University of Buckingham. She is Acting Chair of the Huguenot Museum, Rochester and has been a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries since 1988.
Dr Dora Thornton FSA is the Curator of the Goldsmiths’ Company Collection.
Entry to the Reception is by ticket only (£10.00 per person). Please book in advance for the Reception below.
Schedule for the evening:
16.15 – Tea (Fellows and Guests welcome)
17.00 – Summer Miscellany of papers
18.30 – Reception (Fellows and Guests welcome)
Admission to the Miscellany is free as usual but we recommend that you register in advance. We hope Fellows, Affiliates and guest will join us for the Reception, following the miscellany meeting. Admission to the Reception is by ticket only (£10 per person). Guests are welcome!
This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]