SALON - the Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter

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

Forthcoming meetings

The full meetings programme for January to July 2012 can be seen on the Society’s website.

16 February 2012: ‘Collector, dealer and forger: the perils of collecting bookbindings and caskets in the nineteenth century’, by Mirjam Foot FSA

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 many of the books on which he spent a fortune of around £80,000 were not, as he thought, once owned by royalty and famous figures from the past. This paper unravels the story and describes the attempts to trace the later whereabouts of the forged books, which culminated 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.

23 February 2012: ‘Westminster Abbey re-examined: archaeology and research since 2000’, by Warwick Rodwell FSA

Among the finds that will be discussed in this paper are the earliest structural remains known on the site, almost certainly part of Dunstan’s ‘West Minster’ of the 960s, revealed by excavations for a new restaurant, evidence that part of the east cloister range probably dates from Edward the Confessor’s reign, the oldest door in the UK still in use (dated by dendrochronology to c 1060) and a series of hitherto unrecognised decorated floor tiles of the eleventh century.

Newly studied aspects of Henry III’s new church include the unfinished suite of upper-level chapels in the triforium, the site of his demolished Great Sacristy and key furnishings. Major advances in knowledge have accrued during conservation work on the Cosmatesque pavement in the sanctuary (1268), the Westminster Retable and the Coronation Chair, and further detailed research has been carried out on the chapter house and Pyx chamber. A study of the crossing, from the eleventh century to the present day, has revealed a remarkable succession of schemes for towers, lanterns, spires and domes, some begun and partly built, and others existing only as drawings and models.

1 March 2012: ‘Megalithic studies in Wales: a review’, by Frances Lynch FSA

The Society’s meeting on St David’s Day takes the form of a joint meeting with the Cardiff Archaeological Society and the Monmouthshire Antiquarian Association (the senior county archaeological society in Wales). It will be held at 5.15pm (and not at 5pm as previously advertised) in the Julian Hodge Lecture Theatre, Julian Hodge Study Centre, Colum Road, Cardiff CF10 3EU (part of the main Humanities block of the university: see the map on the Cardiff University website. Fellows and guests are invited to a reception after the lecture, from 6.15pm to 7.30pm; those who wish to attend the reception are asked to inform Fellow Alan Aberg.

Summarising the paper that she will give, our Fellow Frances Lynch says: ‘having been a participant in some of the major excavations of megalithic tombs in western Britain in the late 1960s, I will take a somewhat rueful look at new approaches and developments since then, and especially in the last twenty or thirty years. In a well-known group of monuments there has, until very recently, been little new factual data but efforts have been made to squeeze new insights from them and their surroundings and, perhaps more fruitfully, from a re-examination of excavation and museum records. Cadw’s splendidly old-fashioned and pragmatic project on “Prehistoric Funerary and Ritual Sites” has brought in some new sites so that at least one group of tombs, the Cotswold Severn long cairns, is now ready for some re-assessment.’

8 March 2012: ‘Inigo Jones, the Surveyors of the Works and the “Parliament House”’, by Alisdair Hawkyard FSA

Neither of the Houses of Parliament figure prominently in the canon of works undertaken in the early seventeenth century by Inigo Jones, but close scrutiny of the works accounts, taken together with a series of prints, drawings, medals and enamels, yields a far more substantial picture. Architectural historian Alisdair Hawkyard explores how Jones’s lost buildings can be reconstructed from a variety of sources. The picture that emerges reveals a team of architects anxious to resolve problems of design and open to innovation.

Ballot results 2 February 2012

We welcome the following new Fellows who were elected in the ballot held on 2 February 2012: Richard Meager, Archaeological consultant; Nicola Stacey, Senior Properties Historian, English Heritage; Joanna Mattingly, Museum Development Officer for mid-Cornwall; Reuben Grima, Archaeologist, University of Malta; Daniel Paul Swift, Archaeologist at Archaeology South East; Jody Joy, Curator of the European Iron Age collections, British Museum; Margaret Lane Ford, Head of the Department of Books and Manuscripts at Christie’s; Errol Manners, dealer in seventeenth- and eighteenth-ceramics; Tom Oliver Licence, Lecturer in Medieval History, University of East Anglia.

Art Fund Prize 2012 longlist

Ten museums are in the running to win £100,000 and the prestigious title of ‘Museum of the Year’ in the 2012 Art Fund Prize longlist, published on 7 February. The ten listed museums are all ones in which Fellows are engaged, and Chris Smith, Chair of the judging panel (whose members include our Fellows Lucy Worsley and Sir Mark Jones), said they are ‘a showcase for the best of British culture, from local history to contemporary sculpture, encapsulating the vitality and dynamism of a part of our nation’s cultural life that continues to innovate, push boundaries and engage the public, even in these straitened times’.

The shortlist of four museums will be announced on 14 May, and the Museum of the Year will be named at a ceremony at the British Museum on 19 June. On the longlist for 2012 are: M Shed in Bristol, Turner Contemporary in Margate, the Hepworth Wakefield, Glasgow’s Riverside Museum, Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, the National Museum of Scotland, Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, the Holburne Museum in Bath, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Watts Gallery in Surrey.

Further information on all these can be found on the Art Fund’s website.

Clore Award longlist announced

Running alongside the Art Fund Prize is the Clore Award for Museum Learning, with a £10,000 prize, awarded for quality, impact and innovation in museum learning initiatives. This year’s longlisted projects are: Camden Arts Centre, Get The Message; Florence Nightingale Museum, Our Generation’s Re-interpretation; Jersey Heritage, My History Scrapbooks and Discovery Days; Leicestershire County Council Heritage and Arts Service, Held in the Hand and Touch Tables; Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Treasures from the Earth; The Geffrye Museum of the Home, Stories of the World: London; The Quilt Museum and Gallery, Unfolding the Quilts; The Whitworth Art Gallery, The Manchester Early Years Partnership; the Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A Schools Team Collaboration with Seymourpowell; Yorkshire Museum, Celebrating Severus.

A myth in the making

The last issue of Salon reminded us of an instance in the Pickwick Papers where a modern carving was taken for an ancient inscription (for more on this, see ‘On false inscriptions and forged antiquities’ below). Could it happen today? The story this week about the discovery of a Viking axe suggests that it could (only this time, the antiquaries were not taken in).

The BBC, along with several newspapers, reported last week that a Viking axe head had been found in a Gloucestershire village that ‘could be evidence of a battle more than 1,100 years ago, according to archaeologists’. The report went on to say that the ‘wrought-iron object, found in Slimbridge in 2008, has now been identified as being of Viking origin. Historians say a band of Vikings sailed up the River Severn and fought against the Anglo-Saxons in 894 AD. Archaeologists say where the axe head was found is where they could have tied up their ships.’ The finder of the metal object, Mr Hunter Darling, reports that archaeologists had visited the farm where he lives and that his find ‘had got the experts “quite excited”’.

The constant repetition of ‘historians say’ and ‘archaeologists say’ gives the whole report the air of credibility that it would not have if it were just ‘according to gossip down at the local pub’ (if Slimbridge is fortunate enough still to have a pub). Detail is piled on detail until we have a fully fledged myth that takes wing when the report continues: ‘According to historians [again] King Alfred the Great fought the Vikings in a bloody battle at Minchinhampton, about 10 miles from Slimbridge, in AD 894. Three Viking princes were killed in the battle, and fighting could have ranged over a wide area of the Berkeley Vale. For over a century archaeologists have speculated where the Vikings could have moored their ships. “They realised my driveway would have been creek in those days before there was a sea wall on the River Severn,” said Mr Hunter Darling. “The boats could have tied up at the bottom of my garden.”’

The report ends by saying that members of Slimbridge Local History Society now want to gather further evidence of Viking activity in the village and are asking residents who may have found other Viking objects to come forward. A lovely final touch, which lends even further momentum to the story, is the quote from Peter Ballard, of the Local History Society, who says: ‘A member of a local family claimed he found a Viking sword in a ditch by the River Cam many years ago, but that has now been lost’ (isn’t that always the case with such local myths — that the crucial evidence ‘got lost’, or the person who witnessed it ‘died last winter’?).

Fellow Mark Horton, who has been excavating at nearby Berkeley in search of a Saxon minster for several years, was not taken in: ‘There is no way that this is a Viking axe head’, he told the BBC some days later; they look completely different. As to the claim that there was a major battle at Minchinhampton in the tenth century — these I’m afraid are the product of an over-fertile antiquarian imagination. There was certainly Viking activity on the River Severn during this period but this is a case of two plus two equalling five.’

So what do archaeologists and historians really make of the find? Archaeologist Kurt Adams, from Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, said: ‘It’s definitely an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century woodworking tool — a heavy duty woodworking axe. Axes can be quite difficult to date because the form fits the function — but, having said that, Viking battle axes are quite distinct.’

But Slimbridge folk don’t have a very high regard for experts who try to downplay the significance of their find; there is almost a tone of ‘what do they know; we’re sticking to our version of events’ in the final comment of Peter Ballard, he of the Slimbridge Local History Society, who said: ‘We’ve decided to call it the “Slimbridge axe head” because we don’t know whether it’s Viking or eighteenth century.’ At this point, any further comment and analysis is best left to anthropologists and historians of folk mythology.

The end of an era: resignations from ‘Time Team’

Another subject fit for anthropological study is the way that tensions can develop within a small, apparently solid and successful group that eventually lead to its collapse — as we have seen with The Beatles, Pink Floyd and now ‘Time Team’. Well, ‘Time Team’ itself hasn’t come to an end yet, but it will surely never be the same again now that our Fellow Mick Aston has resigned from the programme, one year short of its twentieth anniversary series. According to the tabloids, Mick resigned because he didn’t get on with a new presenter, Mary-Ann Ochota. Ms Ochota herself reinforced this view with her comment, ‘I was very excited to be working with Mick — he wasn’t so keen!”

This is nonsense, of course. Mick is not like that at all — he is generous to a fault and sees the best in everyone. In any case, Mick never was a presenter on the programme: that is Tony Robinson’s job, and those who watched the recent series will perhaps have felt that the real on-screen rivalry was between Robinson and Ochota. That is one of the many ways in which the last series had ceased to be primarily about archaeology and had instead begun to evolve into some sort of ‘Big Brother’ reality show with the cast and their interactions as the main theme and archaeology as the side-show.

Why does any of this matter? Let those who live by the media die by the media. It matters because ‘Time Team’ was for many years the flagship programme for archaeology on TV, a powerful advocate for the discipline. It was also a programme that had a particular appeal for young people, many of whom have gone on to become the next generation of archaeologists. Our Fellow Mick Aston has done us all a massive favour in getting archaeology on TV and then anchoring it so firmly in archaeology, bringing the programme back to archaeological questions again and again, showing viewers how the discipline works. In this he was aided by an entertaining and loveable bunch of fellow (and Fellow) archaeologists whose skill in communicating and their ability to bring the subject to life gave the lie to Tony Robinson’s constant claim (repeated most recently on ‘Desert Island Discs’) that archaeologists talk a private language and that his role as interrogator / interpreter is essential in interpreting the code.

Mick sets out his real reasons for resigning from the programme in the latest issue of British Archaeology, in an interview with our Fellow Mike Pitts, the magazine’s editor. Mick makes it very plain that his resignation was the result of growing dissatisfaction with the dumbing down of the programme: the fact that, for example, our Fellow Stuart Ainsworth, the ever informative landscape archaeologist, was dropped in favour of people dressing up as monks — but in the wrong habit.

Again, does it matter? Mick says it does, telling Mike Pitts that: ‘unless the general public are told about archaeology, and find it exciting and interesting, we’re finished … professional archaeologists will disappear if the public is not interested … politicians will only find it important if the public are agitated … and the forces of darkness and evil are stalking the land again.’

Mick is right; though it is sad that he also believes that ‘Time Team hasn’t worked’. The fact that archaeologically informed and inspired programmes are now on television virtually every night is down to Mick, as is the fact that ‘Time Team’ itself has now lost its unique selling point (arguably ‘Digging for Britain’ has now taken over as the programme on TV that best represents archaeology in Britain today). As our Fellow Francis Pryor said, reacting to the news of Mick’s resignation, ‘archaeology in Britain was a narrow specialism; now it is a national pastime. Mick’s legacy is guaranteed’. Or, as Philip Davies, ‘Time Team’s’ Executive Producer, said: ‘Mick embodied the essence of “Time Team”. He has left an extraordinary legacy.’

Several Fellows have written to Salon to express support for Mick and admiration for his achievements. Fellow Warwick Rodwell says that he has written to Channel 4 to say that recent changes have ‘wrecked a much-loved programme’. He questions whether, without the archaeological expertise of Mick and others, ‘Time Team’ will be trusted to excavate major sites in future. In the past, says Warwick, he has ‘let the team into Westminster Abbey and persuaded the authorities in Jersey to allow excavation of the most famous icon in the Channel Islands (Mont Orgueil Castle), confident that behind the flippant facade that TV programme makers seem to think is essential, there were seriously competent people who could be trusted. That is no longer the case, and there is no way that I will lend my support for a lightweight and irresponsible circus gaining access to royal or other nationally important sites.’

The answer that Warwick received says much: though he signed his letter ‘Professor Warwick Rodwell OBE’, the reply was addressed to ‘Mr Warwick’, and said: ‘Please be assured your complaint has been logged and noted for the information of those responsible for our programming. Thank you again for taking the time to contact us. We appreciate all feedback from our viewers; complimentary or otherwise.’

Operation Nightingale

Let us turn to a positive and inspiring example of the value of archaeology: in this case the excavation of East Chisenbury midden by soldiers injured in Afghanistan in a pioneering project supervised by Sergeant Diarmaid Walshe of the 1st Battalion, The Rifles, and our Fellow Richard Osgood, Senior Historic Adviser with the Ministry of Defence. The project, codenamed ‘Operation Nightingale’, builds on the skills that are common to soldiers and archaeologists — not least the ability to cope with hard manual work, often in inclement weather conditions. The soldiers who took part were given the task of recording and analysing material exposed by badgers burrowing into the Late Bronze Age midden, which lies at the heart of the MoD estate on Salisbury Plain and that spreads for several hectares, to a height of 2.7m.

After a training period that included visits to Butser Ancient Farm and a flint-knapping workshop led by Fellow Phil Harding that helped participants recognise the differences between worked and natural flint debris, the soldiers excavated the large mounds of soil thrown out of badger setts, plotted every find, and used flotation tanks to recover smaller bones and environmental material. Among the finds were some 4,000 pottery sherds, a loom weight and spindle whorls, pieces of worked bone and a small amount of iron slag, linking the midden, which has been dated to c 700 BC, to early experiments in iron-making.

‘A key conclusion’, says Richard Osgood, ‘is that soldiers make excellent archaeologists! Archaeologists are often asked “what is archaeology for?” Twenty-five injured soldiers from 1 Rifles would now be able to provide a very positive answer.’ Several of the participants have gone on to undertake work placements with Wessex Archaeology, Canterbury Archaeology Trust, English Heritage and the Army’s own archaeological team. Richard adds: ‘four Riflemen are now embarking on archaeology degrees at Leicester University — a superb result. One of the men, badly wounded a couple of years ago, is still looking for funding for his place. He has a certain amount from the army but not enough to do his degree. Any thoughts on sources of funding or sponsorship would be hugely appreciated’ (Salon’s editor will happily pass on emails to Richard).

On false inscriptions and forged antiquities

Fellow Bernard Nurse reminds us that the piece from The Pickwick Papers that Fellow Mike Stammers drew to our attention in the last issue of Salon is discussed in the essay on ‘The development of the Library’ that Bernard contributed to Visions of Antiquity, the Society’s tercentenary essay volume. Here (on pages 205—6), Bernard writes: ‘The Society’s role in recording antiquities discovered was well enough known to the outside world to be gently satirised by Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers [chapter 11]. Mr Pickwick’s lecture on an ancient stone with an indecipherable inscription [later deciphered as “BILL STUMPS HIS MARK”] was followed up by “a faithful delineation of the curiosity which was engraved on stone, and presented to the Royal Antiquarian Society and other leaned bodies”.’

Bernard adds that ‘Dickens’s source was almost certainly the hoax by George Steevens which deceived the Society’s Director, Richard Gough, and concerned a faked inscription. Dickens may have come across this in the Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1834 where it is mentioned in the obituary of Francis Douce. There is a good account of this and other antiquarian hoaxes in Robert Chambers’s Book of Days, vol 2, 688—91 (various editions from 1863; the free ebook version on Google is wrongly dated 1832).’

Here Chambers writes (disapprovingly) of the ‘most malicious’ trick ‘concocted by George Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, to revenge himself on Gough, the Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and author of the great work on our Sepulchral Monuments … the trick on Gough was the fabrication of an inscription purporting to record the death of the Saxon king, Hardicanute, and was done in revenge for some adverse comment Gough had pronounced on a drawing by Steevens … who obtained the fragment of a chimney-slab and scratched upon it an inscription in Anglo-Saxon letters to the effect that ‘Here Hardcnut drank a wine horn dry, stared about him and died’. It was alleged to have been discovered in Kennington Lane, where the palace of the monarch was also said to have been.

‘The stone was placed carelessly among other items in a shop where Gough frequently called. He fell fairly into the trap; and brought forward his imagined prize, as a great historical curiosity, to the notice of the Society of Antiquaries. One of the ablest members of the association, the Revd S Pegge, was induced to write a paper on the subject. Schnebbelie, the draughtsman of the Society, was employed to draw the inscription carefully, and it was engraved and published, in vol. lx of the Gentleman's Magazine … luckily, before its publication in the magazine, its history was discovered; but as the plate contained other subjects, it was nevertheless issued, with a note of warning appended. Steevens, however, followed up his success with a bitter description of the triumph of his fraud, and the impossibility of Gough’s “wriggling of the hook on which he is so archaeologically suspended”.’

The Field of the Cloth of Gold on Radio 4

When in 1771 our Society produced two large prints chosen to illustrate scenes of national historical importance, the first of the works chosen for reproduction was the Royal Collection’s painting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The original painting will be the subject of episode 2 in ‘The Art of Monarchy’, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30am on 18 February, when Jennifer Scott, Curator of Paintings at the Royal Collection and author of The Royal Portrait: image and impact, will discuss various theories put forward to explain why Henry VIII’s head was repainted in the scene depicting him on horseback riding in procession to the Field of the Cloth of Gold to meet his French counterpart, Francis I, in June 1520.

Though the painting is traditionally dated to c 1545, one possibility is that it was completed much earlier, before Hans Holbein painted Henry VIII’s portrait as part of the Whitehall mural in 1537. The replaced head of Henry in the Field of the Cloth of Gold strongly resembles Holbein’s portrait and the king may well have asked for the original head to be replaced with a newer version based on his favourite Holbein image.

An intriguing alternative theory explored in the programme is that the painting was defaced by members of the Spanish ambassador’s entourage when they visited James I at Whitehall in 1621. A contemporary letter mentions that aides to the Spanish ambassador attacked several of the paintings at Whitehall while the meeting took place, and Henry’s head may have been hacked from the Field of the Cloth of Gold during this attack, and subsequently repainted.

Future episodes of the BBC Radio 4 series highlighting the treasures of the Royal Collection will feature several Fellows who work for the Royal Collection in an archival or curatorial capacity, including Jane Roberts, Jonathan Marsden, Martin Clayton and Kate Heard.

Harmondsworth Barn saved for the nation

The magnificent medieval barn at Harmondsworth, west London, dubbed the ‘cathedral of Middlesex’ by heritage campaigner Sir John Betjeman, has been bought for the nation by English Heritage after the owners agreed to sell the barn in settlement of repair debts.

The oak-framed medieval barn, built in 1426 by Winchester College as part of its manor farm at Harmondsworth, is a masterpiece of carpentry, contains one of the best interiors of the medieval age and, for its age, is remarkably intact. It has, however, suffered serious neglect in recent years, threatened by now-abandoned plans to expand Heathrow Airport and owned by companies hoping to benefit from the increase in land value and from the money to be made from dismantling and selling the barn if the airport plan had gone ahead.

English Heritage finally issued an Urgent Works Notice in 2009 and then stepped in to make the barn wind- and watertight. While settling the costs of these repairs with the owners, English Heritage succeeded in negotiating the purchase of the barn for £20,000. Our Fellow Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, said: ‘We will complete the repair of this masterpiece and, working with local people, will open it to the public to enjoy from April 2012.’

A local group, the Friends of the Great Barn at Harmondsworth, has long campaigned to secure the barn’s future and will now undertake the day-to-day care of the barn and its opening to the public. Our Fellow Justine Bayley, who lives in Harmondsworth and is Secretary of the Friends, said: ‘If we had a pound for everyone who walks in here and says “wow!” we could have repaired the building twice over. It’s really the only appropriate response.’

Photo: copyright English Heritage; photographer Boris Baggs

Hot seats

Two conferences are planned in March on seating, pews and benches in historic places of worship: one on 2 March 2012 organised by the Chapels Society, to be held in Birmingham, will look at nonconformist contributions to the story of pews, benches and chairs; the other, ‘Sitting in church: past, present and future’, is being organised by the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust, and will be held in Wolfson College, Cambridge, on 17 March 2012.

One of the speakers at the Cambridge conference is Luke Hughes, who designed and made the benches in our Society’s Meeting Room. Luke is also one of the sponsors of the Church Chairs Competition (see Salon 269), inviting designers to submit a new chair design that is sympathetic to historic interiors. Catherine Townsend, of the Cathedral and Church Buildings Division of the Church of England, says that some small amendments have been made to the competition rules in response to feedback, including the announcement of a cash honorarium of £1,000, an extension of the deadline to 16 April 2012, incentives for professional designers and agreement that designs already in production may be submitted. See the ChurchCare website for full details.

Survey of IT usage in the heritage sector

The Information Management Special Interest Group (IMSIG) of the Institute for Archaeologists (IfA) is carrying out a survey twenty-five years on from the publication of the IfA’s previous survey on Computing in British Archaeology. Unlike the earlier survey, which targeted organisations, this survey is looking for individual responses from those using IT in the heritage sector and those in the IT sector who have been involved in heritage projects. Results of the survey will be presented and discussed at the IMSIG's session at the IfA conference on 18 April in Oxford (see the IfA’s website for details). Fellow Martin Newman, who has designed the survey, says that it will run until 10 April 2012, and should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

News of Fellows

Fellow David Woodcock has been named Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Texas A&M University. David’s teaching career began at the University of Manchester in 1960, and he taught at the Kent College of Art and Design in Canterbury, England, before joining the faculty at Texas A&M in 1970. He served as Head of Architecture for a total of eleven years and led the development of graduate work in heritage conservation. He continues as a Preservation Consultant and Director Emeritus of the Center for Heritage Conservation.

Fellow Ted Buttrey (depicted left) has been awarded the medal of the Institut für Numismatik of the University of Vienna. Professor Buttrey is Honorary Keeper of Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, as well as being a member of the Cambridge Classics faculty.

Fellows Archie Walls and Donald Hankey have recently completed a ‘Concept for the Archaeological Master Plan for Central Sharjah’, written to complement environmental proposals for the creation of a national park within Sharjah, the third largest member of the United Arab Emirates. Located along the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Sharjah includes such internationally important archaeological sites as al-Madam and Mleiha, whose prehistory dates back at least 125,000 years. ‘Nowhere else in the Emirates are there sites that provide such a wide variety of evidence from Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, Iron, pre-Islamic, Islamic and modern ages’, says Archie, whose three reports, produced over the last eighteen months, have considered future heritage objectives, threats from development, and administrative needs, with suggested solutions to be considered in greater detail as part of the Master Plan.

Feedback

The gremlins seem to have got well and truly inside Salon’s attempts to report on the listing of Victor Pasmore’s Pavilion. Salon’s attempts to amend a previous error led to two further mistakes: ‘Passmore’ should have been Pasmore and he was not ‘Professor of Architecture at what was then King’s College, University of Durham’. Writing to set the record straight, Fellow Peter Willis says: ‘I was a student in the School of Architecture at King’s College, Newcastle, in 1951—6 when the Professor of Architecture was the much-loved Wilfrid Bythell (‘Teddy’) Edwards (1898—1964). I remember Pasmore from those years, during which he was Master of Painting in the King Edward VII School of Fine Art at King’s College, then headed by Lawrence Gowing (1918—91) as Professor of Fine Art (1948—58).’

Second, in reviewing Towards World Heritage, edited by our Fellow Melanie Hall, Salon 270 attributed the concluding essay, subtitled ‘an anti-history of the preservation movement in Britain’, to Peter Mandle. That should, of course, have been Peter Mandler (as the erratum slip that went out with the book makes clear), current President of the Royal Historical Society (and a contributor to another book reviewed in this week’s Salon: see Tudorism below).

Fellow Diarmaid MacCulloch, Kt (who was to be heard, along with our Fellow Eamon Duffy and Jill Kraye (Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London), discussing the life and legacy of the Dutch humanist scholar, Erasmus, with Melvyn Bragg this week), says that, apropos of William Price’s sense of unfairness with regard to the styling of ordained knights, ‘it can be noted that Antipodean clerical knights (who include the Rt Revd Sir Paul Reeves, Governor General of New Zealand and a Maori) made it clear to all and sundry that they weren’t going to be deprived of the pleasure of being called Sir, and Garter King of Arms never seems to have dared to stop them.

‘They were a formidable bunch, and as my Australian colleague in religious history, Dr David Hilliard, tells me: “there were around sixteen of them, all of them now dead. It began with the knighting of Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane in 1959 — he had been the Roman Catholic archbishop since 1917. At that stage I think the only other prelate in the Empire with an imperial knighthood was Archbishop Gonzi in Malta. Then Duhig’s Anglican counterpart in Brisbane, Reginald Halse, got one too and, from the late 1960s until imperial honours were abolished here in 1986, there was a steady flow: Marcus Loane in Sydney, Frank Woods in Melbourne, Grindrod in Brisbane, five or six Methodists and Presbyterians, and a lot of Romanists: whose episcopal/cardinal knights outnumbered the Anglicans. Even one of the last Irish-Australian tribal leaders, James O’Collins of Ballarat, was pleased to accept! One day it’s worth a (short) study. These days, church leaders usually get an AO: Officer of the Order of Australia”.’

In a not dissimilar vein, our Fellow Dai Morgan Evans has been scrutinising the just-published list of refuseniks who have declined honours in the past. Dai says that ‘I was interested because I had been told that Ralegh Radford [who had been awarded an OBE but never used it] had been offered a CBE but turned it down on a matter of principle. However, his name does not appear — perhaps he made it clear before he was nominated. I was interested to see three further Fellows in the list: Iorweth Peate (who would have refused on Welsh nationalist grounds), James Lees-Milne and Ivan D Margery (of Roman Roads). I have no idea of why the two latter refused. Any suggestions from other Fellows?’

And while you are in the mood for challenges, here is one from Fellow Norman Hammond, who took the picture (shown above) of the monument to a Fellow — Robert Masters, BD, FSA (1714—98) — which can be found outside the east wall of the chancel of All Saints, Landbeach, Cambridgeshire, where he was ‘the faithful and diligent Rector’ for forty-one years. ‘This presents an interesting problem’, writes Norman, ‘for the arms are in a different, white, marble or limestone from the yellower freestone slab into which they are set: while the lettering is consonant with a 1798 date, its freshness suggests that it could have been copied from an earlier slab from which the arms were detached and remounted. What is more intriguing, however, is the Classical triglyph used as a pedestal. Does any fellow-Antiquary know anything about the Revd Masters, and why he should have this unusual base to his tombstone?’

Fellow Pamela Jane Smith writes to follow up Salon’s report on her Personal Histories project to say that transcriptions are now available of the Personal Histories of Primatology event held at Cambridge in April 2011 with Jane Goodall, Robert Hinde, William McGrew and Richard Wrangham, and that these can be accessed in the form of pdf files from the Cambridge Archaeology Faculty website (Part 1 and Part 2).

Finally, following up our ‘Books by Fellows’ report on David Breeze’s book on The Frontiers of Imperial Rome, Fellow Martin Henig writes to commend the recent bumper edition of the Bulletin of the Association for Roman Archaeology, edited by Grahame Soffe, which not only includes plenty of news, photographs, reports and reviews of Fellows’ activities, and a useful account of the ARA’s 2008 field trip to Bulgaria, it also includes Martin’s own paper on the ‘the original purpose of Hadrian’s Wall: that is Hadrian’s obedience to the “divine precept” laid on him by the gods to keep the Empire within limits — to draw a line in the sand, or more properly across bogs and over hills, to mark the boundary of the oikoumene, and separate the Empire from the forces of Chaos beyond.’

‘I suggest’, continues Martin, ‘that the Rudge cup, Amiens Patera and Ilam pan, all of which record forts on the west end of the Wall, are religious items (strictly trullas rather than paterae), employed for libations, votives from a temple or temples on the northern boundary of the Empire. We know there was a temple near Cadiz marking the western boundary of the oikoumene. Of course Bewcastle (Fanum Cocidi — The Shrine of Cocidius) is a very special place but I suspect there was something bigger and more official at Carlisle where the tourists came, and perhaps bought their trullas! Whatever Hadrian’s Wall ultimately became, the initial motivation was religious and not military.’

Lives Remembered: Paul Minet (1937—2012)

Salon regrets to announce that our Fellow Paul Piers Brissaut Minet died on 6 February 2012 at the age of seventy-five. His funeral service will take place at St Mary’s Church, Ticehurst, East Sussex, at 2pm on 22 February and at Tunbridge Wells Crematorium (Benhall Mill Road, Royal Tunbridge Wells TN2 5JJ) at 3.30pm.

Paul was elected a Fellow on 25 October 2001, at which time he was President of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ABA) and of the Huguenot Society; he was very active in fundraising for libraries, archives and research into English Huguenot history, and was proud of being a Fellow in succession to his ancestor, Daniel Minet, elected a Fellow of our Society in 1767. Paul wrote about his life as a bookseller in two volumes of engaging memoir: Late Booking: my first twenty-five years in the second-hand book trade (1989) and Bookdealing for Profit (2000).

A fortnight before he died, Paul was awarded honorary membership of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association in recognition of his exceptional service to the antiquarian book trade. This included his founding in 1974 of the book trade journal, Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, which he ran for many years as well as serving as its star columnist, and his contributions to the ABA’s centenary history, Out of Print & Into Profit (2006; see ‘Books by Fellows’ in Salon 161).

Lives Remembered: Jean Bingen (1920—2012)

Jean Bingen, the eminent Belgian papyrologist, also died on 6 February 2012, at the age of ninety-one. Jean Bingen had been Secretary-Treasurer (1961—92) and Honorary President (1992—2012) of the International Committee of Papyrology and was elected an Honorary Fellow of our Society on 24 November 1988. Jean specialised in the economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt (the subject of his first publication, Papyrus Revenue Laws (1952)), in Greek and Roman archaeology, epigraphy, papyrology and numismatics, and is perhaps best known for his work as Director of the international excavation programme at Mons Claudianus, Egypt, from 1987 to 1993 (published in two volumes in 1992 and 1997, with our Fellow Walter Cockle as one of the co-authors).

Lives Remembered: Richard Harper

Fellow Richard Harper (elected on 30 April 1970), who died at the end of January, was a well-known figure to British scholars visiting the British schools in Ankara and Jerusalem, writes Fellow Lisa French, who has contributed the following tribute.

‘Richard will always be remembered for his bluff good-natured kindness and for going way beyond the expected to help with almost anything. He was Assistant Director at the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) in the 1960s (under Michael Gough) when we (my first husband and I) were excavating at the late-Neolithic settlement of Can Hasan and subsequently, when the BIAA was assisting in the rescue project preceding the building of the Keban Dam on the Euphrates. In Ankara he was in charge of the library and the hostel — the canonical duties of an Assistant Director in the archaeological world, but in his case carried out with great enthusiasm. Typically it was Richard who, for example, would travel to Istanbul to clear whatever equipment we had ordered for environmental work at Can Hasan through the vagaries of importation and customs, always coming back with a wealth of stories.

‘When he left Ankara he took part in another rescue project on the Euphrates: this time in Syria, at Dibsi Farag, a Roman and medieval site which gets an unusually thorough entry in Wikipedia). We visited there but it was some years after that before I met him again. When invited to the conference in 1995 in Jerusalem in honour of Trudy Dothan I arranged to go a few days early and stay at the (then) British Institute in Jerusalem where Richard was in charge. The site of his friendly bulk on my arrival at Tel Aviv airport was most reassuring. He arranged for me to give a couple of lectures, including at Bir Zeit University, and we visited a wonderful variety of sites from Herod’s Garden to the Church of the Nativity — all with running commentary. Later on a free evening during the conference he invited an assortment of delegates to the Institute for an informal and delightful dinner.

‘We are hoping to collect funds from which a contribution could be made to the Library of the Society of Antiquaries in Richard’s memory. If Fellows would like to contribute, please send cheques made out to me, Elizabeth French, in an envelope marked ‘Richard Harper Memorial’ and addressed to Dr Elizabeth French FSA, 26 Millington Road, Cambridge CB3 9HP.’

Professor Stephen Mitchell, Honorary Secretary of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, adds this account of Richard’s research and fieldwork. ‘Richard Harper graduated from the University of Durham. During the middle and later 1960s, as Assistant Director of the BIAA, he did epigraphic survey work, mostly in the region of Kayseri and Nevsehir, but concentrating above all on the site of Comana of Cappadocia (Şar), publishing a corpus of all the Comana inscriptions in a series of articles in Anatolian Studies in the late 1960s. He subsequently co-directed an excavation at Şar, and reported the results in Anatolian Studies, in collaboration with Dr Ince Bayburtluoğlu, the classical archaeologist and Assistant Director at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara.

‘In 1968 he accepted the general invitation that went out to archaeologists in Turkey to undertake rescue excavation in the Keban Dam area, and chose to excavate the late Roman fort at Pağnik, on the west bank of the Firat. In the early 1970s he expanded the range of his epigraphic work, collaborating with Umit Serdaroğlu to work on inscriptions at Cibyra and Euromos, sharing the results with his Durham contemporary Malcolm Errington, now Professor of Ancient History at Marburg, in Germany, who published some of the Euromos texts in Epigraphica Anatolica in the 1990s.

‘After his tenure as AD of the BIAA ended, and after the flooding of the Keban Dam, he accepted an invitation from Dumbarton Oaks (Washington) to direct an excavation at another late Roman site on a section of the Euphrates due to be flooded, at Dibsi Faraj, in northern Syria. Soon after that excavation finished, he was appointed to the British School in Jerusalem, and held that position for many years. His projects there included work at Zohar (a late Roman site, published in 1995) and at Belmont (the Crusader site, excavated in collaboration with our Fellow Denys Pringle, now of Cardiff University.’

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Lives Remembered: Brian Shefton

Our Fellow Vincent Megaw adds some memories of Fellow Brian Shefton, whose death on 25 January 2011 was reported in Salon 270.

‘Born Bruno Benjamin Scheftelowitz in Cologne in 1919, in a family that had rabbinical antecedents on both sides, the young Bruno nevertheless went to a Catholic school. When his father, Isidor, a distinguished Iranologist, was sacked by the National Socialists from his university post, Bruno left Germany with his parents in 1933 (fortunately for them, and unlike the fate of my Dutch grandparents and many others).

‘“The Life of Brian”, to quote the title of a celebratory display mounted in the University of Newcastle to mark his eightieth birthday, started again in Britain with two years’ schooling, followed by Oxford, where he met other academic refugees such as Paul Jacobsthal [see ‘Persecution and survival: a wartime refugee’s story’, also in Salon 270]. With a change of name, he undertook war service from 1940 to 1945. On completion of his degree and a period of travel (something Brian never failed to do), he held a Lectureship in Classics at Exeter for five years before moving to Newcastle in 1955, from where he retired holding a Personal Chair only in 1984.

‘I was a student when I first met Brian when he was giving a Munro Lecture, an experience which as projectionist (unpaid) I can recall as probably holding a world record for the most lantern slides (as they were then) changed in an hour. Not much later, when I was working at Thames & Hudson, John Boardman suggested Brian to me as someone who could translate the original German text of Arias and Hirmer’s A History of Greek Vase Painting. John said, “Brian will do a thorough job”, which, after the event, I realised was code for “Brian will completely revise and considerably enlarge the whole text” (still a major and invaluable source).

‘Thereafter I met Brian frequently in London at lectures, but more frequently in Frankfurt, Bern, Sofia and Hampstead Tube Station. When visiting anywhere that was near a museum (and where was not?), Brian would head off with a pair of opera glasses and a small camera (latterly a digital model) the better to obtain on-site records, whether on not he had been able to obtain prior permission.

‘It was, of course, the Newcastle Greek Museum that was established by Brian and which, in 1994, was renamed “The Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology”. Brian's ability to spot bargains and obtain sponsors, together with an intimate knowledge of the antiques market (something which, it was rumoured, counted against his candidature for the Keepership of the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum) made his museum a must for any student of the classical world.

‘Honours (finally) came his way; he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985 and (perhaps something that gave him the greatest pleasure) the University of Cologne, the city of his birth, granted him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, honoris causa, in 1989. In 2005, the year after Brian received a Festschrift, Greek Identity in the Western Mediterranean, Newcastle bestowed a further honour on him as one of the University’s first Honorary Fellows. On that occasion Sir John Burn, Professor of Genetics, closed his oration with the words: “When it comes to the stuff of which a university is made, there’s nothing like a steady predictable member of staff — and Brian Shefton was and is nothing like a steady predictable member of staff. Rather, he is the stuff of what great academic institutions are built; imaginative, bold and irrepressible.” That indeed was the life of Brian.’

Call for papers: Humour and the Individual in Site and Museum Archives: 23 March 2012

The idea for this workshop came from a session on archaeology and humour that our Fellow Joe Flatman and Hilary Orange ran at TAG 2011. This identified a number of themes worth exploring further, including the loss of the individual voice from official archives, the absence of humour and anecdote and the absence of informal records and communal memories (diaries, photographs, audio and visual recordings, site songs) and the potential role of humour in communicating archaeology to different audiences. Much of this connects to changes to recording practice, the professionalisation of archaeological services and the greater use of digital technology and standardised templates.

Papers are now sought for the workshop that will explore such ‘marginal’ expressions of individuality — not only because they tell us something about the way projects developed but also because they remind us of ‘what fuels archaeology: togetherness, thirst, lust and dreams’ (Duncan Brown, TAG 2011). The papers presented in the workshop will explore the subtleties of humour and how we deal with both the preservation and the continuation of such memories to ensure that we do not end up with an airbrushed view of archaeological practice, in which the realities of life in the field are removed from final archives and formal publications.

Joe Flatman and Hilary Orange are happy to answer questions about the workshop and welcome proposals for papers, with a deadline of 23 March 2012. Registration for this free event, which will take place on 26 May 2012, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, in London, is now open.

Events

28 March 2012: Ornamental Embroidery workshops, perfect for beginners. Fellow Lynn Hulse will be joining up with Royal School of Needlework tutor Nicola Jarvis to provide a series of taster workshops in historic needlework techniques at The Oak Studio in Hampstead, London NW3, this spring, starting with crewel work, on 28 March, then canvas work on 27 April and silk and gold on 23 May. For more information about the workshops and how to book a place, see the Oak Studio’s website.

27 April 2012: From Mêlée to Opera: the metamorphosis of the chivalric tournament, a conference at the Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB, organised by our Fellow Sydney Anglo. To register please contact warburg@sas.ac.uk. The speakers include our Fellows Tobias Capwell, on ‘Violence and elegance: changing priorities in the joust, c 1200—1625’, Iain Fenlon, on ‘Martial Monteverdi’, and Sydney Anglo himself, on ‘The history of the history of tournaments’.

Books by Fellows: Twentieth-century Architects

The RIBA, in partnership with the Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage, has embarked on an excellent series of small, affordable, well-illustrated and insightful monographs on the architects and practices behind some of the finest buildings of the last century. Fellow Elain Harwood is one of the series editors (as is Fellow Alan Powers) and Elain’s book on Chamberlin Powell & Bon (ISBN: 9781859463970; RIBA Publishing) is also the first title in the series, announcing its subject with a cover showing the ladder-like sequence of boat-edge balconies forming the Barbican’s Cromwell Towers, completed in 1973 (and looking very different from when the Barbican was first opened; where have all the swags of balcony geraniums gone that used to hang from every balcony, adding scarlet and green hues to the honey-coloured concrete?).

Lively writing guides us through a biography of the practice and some of their key ideas (creating light and colour in architecture, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of concrete, and master planning — thinking through the architecture of entire landscapes rather than just individual plots, and thinking through the impact of that landscape on the people whose lives will be led within it). The final chapters analyse in detail two of the projects for which the practice is best known: Leeds University and the Barbican Centre/Golden Lane state. Elain’s compelling account of the latter leaves us astonished that the project ever got off the ground, dogged as it was by petty bureaucracy, insisting on building regulations designed with Edwardian terraces in mind, militant and violent trade unionists, poor ground conditions that meant constant revisions to the foundations, constant trimming of some of the key features of the original design; through it all the practice stayed faithful to its pioneering concept of ‘a new type of urban life’, and what Christof Bon called ‘exploiting the third dimension, to liberate planning and architecture from the tyranny of the road pattern’.

The subject of the second book in the series, written by Anthony Symondson, is our Fellow Stephen Dykes Bower (1903—94) (ISBN: 9781859463987; RIBA Publishing), whose love of rich surface patterning could not be more different from the stark sculptural forms beloved of Chamberlin Powell & Bonn. Dykes Bower’s work was often carried out within existing historic buildings — the high altar and baldacchino in St Paul’s Cathedral are his, for example, constructed as a war memorial to the people of Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth who gave their lives in two world wars, as is the American War Memorial Chapel behind the high altar.

These works, combining carved wood, gilded iron and black and white marble, are fittingly sombre: normally the word that springs to mind when Dykes Bower’s name is mentioned is ‘colour’ — radiant combinations of heraldic reds, blues and gold that he poured into the designs of carpets, organ cases, painted ceilings, vestments, stained glass, the restored Confessor’s tomb in Westminster Abbey and that he also intended for the abbey’s entire nave, in a controversial plan — eventually withdrawn — to replace the time-worn stone slabs with a floor of Cosmatesque polychrome marble.

Anthony Symondson’s affectionate portrait examines the four new churches that Dykes Bower designed, of which perhaps the best known are St Edmundsbury Cathedral, where his sympathetic extensions converted a fine medieval church into an even finer modern cathedral, and St John’s, Newbury (1957), pictured on the front cover, where he fully explores the potential for patterning in brick.

Books by Fellows: Episodes in the Gothic Revival

Dykes Bower was, in many ways, one of the last of the Gothic Revivalists, and he would probably have been very comfortable working with any of the six architects that are the subject of this book, Episodes in the Gothic Revival: six church architects (ISBN: 9781904965343: Spire Books), edited by our Fellow Christopher Webster.

The book begins with a paper on our Fellow John Carter (1748—1817), presented as a Gothic Revival pioneer because of his struggle for authenticity in the restoration of medieval buildings. Our Fellow Michael Port then writes about Thomas Rickman (1776—1841), famed for his work in turning the confused state of knowledge about the development of English Gothic architecture into a systematic classification of the ‘progression of styles’, from Norman to Perpendicular. Christopher Webster himself writes about Thomas Taylor (1777—1826), who was one of the first nineteenth-century architects to specialise in designing new churches in Gothic Revival style, and who was considered by the critics of his day to be far superior for archaeological accuracy and spirited design than a certain A W N Pugin. Our Fellow Neil Jackson tackles G E Street (1824—81), in a paper subtitled ‘an architect on holiday’ that tracks down some of the medieval buildings on the continent that might have been the inspiration for the work of this most eclectic of architects.

The final two papers are on R C Carpenter (1812—55) and John Thomas Micklethwaite (1843—1906), the latter also a Fellow and Vice-President of our Society who ‘rarely missed a meeting’ and was a frequent contributor to Archaeologia; he is described as one of the most archaeologically strict of the Gothic Revivalists, a great friend of William Morris, though he never accepted Morris’s attempts to recruit him as a member of SPAB’s committee. He also brings us full circle because his paper of 1871 dedicated to ‘the shade of Sir Christopher Wren’ calling for the completion of the interior of St Paul’s prophetically paved the way for Dykes Bower’s work eighty years later.

Books by Fellows: Georgian Architecture

Pugin and his fellow Gothic Revivalists rejected much that our Fellow James Stevens Curl celebrates in this new, fully revised and newly illustrated edition of his classic work (first published in 1993) on the architecture of the British Isles during the reigns of the first four Georges: Georgian Architecture in the British Isles 1714—1830 (ISBN: 9781848020863; English Heritage).

Professor Curl’s book is not just about the classically inspired architecture that we associate with the Georgian age, and that Pugin disliked as foreign, pagan and sham (because much of the classical detail was applied, not structural; by contrast, he claimed that form and function are unified in Gothic architecture, because column, arch, rib, vault, buttress and pinnacle are not just decorative: they are the means by which the building stands up).

Instead the book reveals the sheer variety of an age that embraced both romanticism and classicism, those two great opposing systems of thought and feeling, and that was capable of producing both Cumberland Terrace (shown on the book’s cover) and the Pagoda in Kew Gardens; or to choose some further contrasts, the onion-domed Sezincote, thatched estate cottages in Milton Abbas, bow-windowed shops in York, Brighton Royal Pavilion, Devonport’s Egyptian-style former Civil and Military Library, Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Sir John Soane’s almost Art Deco Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing.

Sheer inventive exuberance then is the real character of Georgian architecture, and this book illustrates that theme beautifully, along with a text that explores how archaeology and the search for uncorrupted examples of true classical architecture, a growing interest in medieval remains and a taste for the exotic and for ideas borrowed from the most distant parts of the growing Empire all combined to produce a flowering of architectural invention in Britain and Ireland.

Books by Fellows: The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle (1789—1834)

In editing this volume of letters, our Fellow Randolph Vigne has brought back to life a man who is celebrated in South Africa as a champion of press freedom, as the father of South African poetry in English and as a pioneer of slavery abolition and the rights of indigenous people. In his native Scotland, he is remembered, if at all, as the founding editor of Blackwood’s Magazine (1817), moving to the rival Edinburgh Review later that same year when the publisher William Blackwood blamed him for the lack of the journal’s success and fired him. Pringle’s stay at the Edinburgh Review, under the unsympathetic ownership of Archibald Constable, was equally brief.

Disillusioned with literary life, he took advantage of the Government’s offer of free passages and grants of land to emigrate with his family to the Cape Colony. These passionate and engagingly written letters from that period (1820—6) tell us about the many projects he threw himself into, as farmer, editor, journalist, poet, librarian, founder of schools, social reformer and abolitionist, and the inevitable hostility that all this liberalism attracted from the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, leading to Pringle’s financial ruin and his return to Britain.

Here, as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, he dedicated the remaining eight years of his life to the abolitionist case, living just long enough to see the Slavery Abolition Act given Royal Assent in August 1834, abolishing slavery within the British Empire and its colonies. During those final years he was also a central figure in literary life, as a poet and journalist, friend of Thomas Campbell, John Clare, Coleridge, James Hogg and Samuel Rogers, and a publisher of the young Ruskin and Tennyson.

The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle (ISBN: 9780981426426) is published by the Van Riebeeck Society, whose website has sample letters, and an interview with our Fellow Randolph Vigne introducing the work, a copy of which has been donated to the Society’s Library.

Books by Fellows: Knossos Excavations 1957—61: Early Minoan

From 1957 to 1961 the British School at Athens undertook an extensive programme of stratigraphical excavations at Knossos under our Fellow Sinclair Hood, then Director of the School. This report, co-written with our Fellow Gerald Cadogan, publishes in detail the results of investigations into Early Minoan levels, which shed much new light on the era before the ‘Old Palace’ was established. The three excavations comprised: an Early Minoan I deep well, the oldest at Knossos; trials on the north side of the Royal Road, with Early Minoan II—III house remains; and similar trials in the Early Houses below the South Front of the Palace, which included investigation of the South Front House of Early Minoan III.

Copiously illustrated with line drawings and photographs, the volume provides invaluable data on the types and phased development of pottery in this major settlement site of the third millennium BC, a period when much of our Cretan evidence derives from tombs. It also helps to chronicle the expansion of Knossos during the Early Bronze Age, and offers new insights into the material culture of Prepalatial society, including possible feasting in Early Minoan I, new evidence for olives and wine production, and well-dated Early Minoan III seal impressions of the Parading Lions group. A valuable addition is a chapter devoted to other Early Minoan pottery from Knossos, held in museums in Europe and the USA.

Knossos Excavations 1957—61: Early Minoan (ISBN: 9780904887648) is published by the British School at Athens as BSA Supplementary Volume 46 and distributed by Oxbow Books.

Books by Fellows: Myos Hormos

Edited by our Fellow David Peacock and Lucy Blue, assisted by Julian Whitewright, Myos Hormos — Quseir al-Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on the Red Sea (ISBN: 9781407308630) is the sixth volume in the Southampton Studies in Archaeology Series, published and distributed by Archaeopress as BAR S2286.

If the name of the site is known only to a few, it should be better known as a result of this report, showing that Quseir al-Qadim (on the western shores of the Red Sea, 8km north of the modern town of Quseir in Egypt) is, in all probability, not the site of the minor port of Leucos Limen, as had been previously thought, but none other than Myos Hormos, the port that, together with its sister harbour at Berenike, was the basis for Roman trade with India and the East from the third century BC until their abandonment in the fourth century AD.

This report concentrates on the finds made during excavations carried out by the University of Southampton between 1999 and 2003, drawing together in its concluding chapters an overview of what is now known about the nature and function of Myos Hormos — Quseir al-Qadim and a discussion of the outstanding questions that only further fieldwork can resolve.

Books by Fellows: Consumption, Trade and Innovation

By coincidence, Quseir al-Qadim is also the subject of a new study of the ancient spice trade and the food practices of those engaged in this trade written by our Fellow Marijke van der Veen: Consumption, Trade and Innovation: exploring the botanical remains from the Roman and Islamic ports at Quseir al-Qadim, Egypt (ISBN: 9783937248233; Africa Magna Verlag). Quseir al-Qadim acted as a transshipment port in the Indian Ocean spice trade during both the Roman period (AD 1—250, then called Myos Hormos) and in the medieval Islamic period (AD 1050—1500, as Kusayr). This monograph describes the botanical remains recovered during the University of Southampton excavations of 1999 to 2003. Spectacular preservation conditions meant that food remains and wood were found in abundance, including fragments of onion skin, citrus rind, garlic cloves, aubergine seeds, banana skins, wooden bowls, spoons and combs, as well as many of the Eastern spices traded through the port, such as black pepper, ginger, cardamom and betel nut.

Marijke discusses these under three overarching themes: trade, agricultural innovation and food consumption. The results provide significant new evidence for the Eastern trade and for the changes in agriculture that indirectly resulted from it and allow real insights into the lives of those working in the ports, showing the changes in the nature and scale of the Indian Ocean trade between the Roman and Islamic periods.

Books by Fellows: The Archaeology of Post-Medieval Religion

The Archaeology of Post-Medieval Religion, edited by Chris King and our Fellow Duncan Sayer, is Monograph 6 in the series published by the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (ISBN: 9781843836933; Boydell Press), in this case jointly with the Society for Church Archaeology and arising from the conference that the two societies held in Norwich in 2008 to explore the material evidence for change in religious spaces, buildings and landscapes after the Reformation (post-1550).

Theologically, this period saw the emergence of a plurality of religious beliefs, as well as the transformation of practice within the established Church and in the Roman Catholic Church (initiated by the Council of Trent) so there was no part of religious life and practice that was not affected by change. What archaeology can add to the picture is shown in this book by essays on post-medieval burial practices and funerary customs — a subject almost uniquely archaeological — but also on iconoclasm and new kinds of church furnishings, on the role of religious minorities and immigrant groups in early modern cities (Calvinist migrants from the Low Counties living in Norwich, for example) and on the architectural and landscape context of nonconformity (in Cornwall, Wales, the Isle of Man and New England).

One paper also reminds us not to neglect popular religious practices, as distinct from the formal practices of any faith group, with an examination of the funeral garlands, crowns or crants traditionally made for deceased virgins (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the priest objects to Ophelia’s burial in the churchyard with ‘virgin crants’ and ‘maiden strewments’ on the grounds that her death was suicide). Some seventy extant examples survive from as far back as 1680, and documentary records, including photographs, suggest that the custom did not die out until the early twentieth century, surviving with the permission of some local clergy who saw them as ‘emblems of innocence’, rather than as the profane and superstitious ‘gew gaws of the fonder sort of folk’ condemned by others.

Books by Fellows: A Monastic Community in Local Society: the Beauchief Abbey Cartulary

Salon recently drew attention to the new book by Fellows Paul Everson and David Stocker on the Premonstratensian abbey at Barlings in Lincolnshire. Now along comes another study of another Premonstratensian abbey in the Midlands in the form of a monograph in the Camden Series of the Royal Historical Society under the title A Monastic Community in Local Society: the Beauchief Abbey Cartulary (ISBN: 9781107016460; Cambridge University Press), edited by David Hey, Lisa Liddy and our Fellow David Luscombe.

Interestingly, medieval Derbyshire, unlike medieval Yorkshire, did not attract great Benedictine monastic foundations but it did host three abbeys of regular canons, at Darley, at Dale and at Beauchief, the latter now a beautiful spot within the boundaries of the city of Sheffield. The charters of Darley and Dale are already published. This new edition of the cartulary of the abbey of Our Lady and St Thomas (Becket) at Beauchief completes the roster, and brings to life the activities of the benefactors of the abbey from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, both near the abbey and further afield in the east Midlands. The cartulary sheds valuable light on land holding and management and on farming and industry, especially to the south of Sheffield, and enables locations and persons to be identified with a precision hitherto unavailable. The canons were clearly able to attract significant and regular gifts over a long period, and this suggests that their services to the community and to local parishes were far from being unappreciated during the period covered by the cartulary.

Books by Fellows: Tudorism

In the year in which we celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, this is an appropriate moment in which to contemplate the theme of Tudorism, which our Fellows Tatiana String and Marcus Bull define, in their new edited volume of that name (ISBN: 9780197264942; Oxford University Press), as the use made in subsequent ages of ‘representations, images, associations, artefacts, spaces and cultural scripts that either have, or are supposed to have, their roots in the Tudor age’. Our Fellow Roy Strong, who himself has been a powerful force for Tudorism over several decades, recently touched on some prime examples in an article in the Daily Telegraph in relation to the Diamond Jubilee: on 6 February 1952, writes Sir Roy, ‘I recall a memorable cartoon by Giles in the Daily Express. On a photograph of the young Queen stepping from the plane that brought her back from Kenya on her accession, a cloud hovers from which Gloriana proffers her namesake the sceptre of the kingdom. Not long after, in one of her Christmas broadcasts, she distanced herself from any notion of a new Elizabethan age, saying that, unlike her virginal predecessor, she had been blessed with both a consort and children.’

Despite this apparent drawing back from a linkage between two eras, we have lived through a period when Tudorism has thrived, and the essays in this volume analyse some of the many ways in which Tudorism has been made manifest in the fields of stage and film drama, in popular history (think ‘Horrible Histories’), in vernacular architecture (our fondness for timber-framing, perhaps most memorably crystallised in the revelation during the scandal over MPs’ expenses that John Prescott, then Deputy Prime Minister, had claimed for the cost of applying stick-on timbers to the front of his house to make it look Tudor — something that John Betjeman mocked, of course, in his celebrated poem Slough, in which he writes of the denizens talking ‘of sports and makes of car / In various bogus-Tudor bars’. Tudorism is also evident in education (where critics of the narrowness of the history syllabus claim it is all ‘Henry and Hitler’), and in the thriving Shakespeare industry that has seen the immense success of the Globe and the rebuilding of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre — not to mention what promises to be one of the highlights of the Jubilee year, the British Museum exhibition on Shakespeare that opens in August 2012, co-curated by our Fellow Dora Thornton and Jonathan Bate.

Given the ease with which such examples of Tudorism spring to mind, and given how numerous and pervasive they are in contemporary culture, it is astonishing to realise that this book represents the first coining of the term (by contrast with the much more familiar ‘medievalism’) and the first serious academic study. And if the words ‘serious’ and ‘academic’ sound off-putting, do not be deterred: this is a thoroughly enjoyable book — how could it not be when the themes addressed range from Harry Potter, Hornblower and Georgette Heyer to steamy sex scenes featuring a svelte Henry VIII in ‘The Tudors’.

Books by Fellows: The Book and the Transformation of Britain c 550—1050

The title of Fellow Michelle Brown’s new work, The Book and the Transformation of Britain c 550—1050 (ISBN: 9780712358286; British Library), makes a very bold claim: that far from being a Dark Age of illiteracy, the early medieval period in Britain was perhaps not so different from our own age. There has been no ‘decline’ in literacy rates in our own time, and nor was there then. Instead there is a spectrum of different levels of literacy. If we discount ‘reading’ tabloid newspapers and magazines, tweets and the image-rich internet, then the proportion of the population that counts as ‘literate’ today may not be so different from the proportion of people with high-level literacy skills in the past. What proportion of people alive today, for example, have read Virgil, Homer or the Bible (in any language) compared with the past?

Pursuing this thought, Michelle’s book leads us through all the evidence for both scholarly and popular literate culture in Britain in the period of her study, drawing together an impressive amount of evidence for reading, writing, oral transmission, writing systems and book production, and for the astonishing fact that whatever else might have crumbled to ruin in the early sixth-century Britain of Gildas, an omnivorous approach to learning survived, characterised by the desire to master the ancient sacred language of Latin alongside the vernacular.

Of course, it is one thing to cultivate literacy amongst the cloistered few, but to persuade the gang leaders who ruled the petty kingdoms of Britain to embrace literacy was also an astonishing achievement. As the ‘transformation’ of this book’s title implies, the wider impact of the litterati of the age came about by convincing the super-thugs of the day to realise why they needed learned individuals, and to understand the benefits of literacy alongside brute force and skill with a sword. Alfred is the great exemplar here, the ‘warrior-scholar king’, who, says Michelle, deserves his special place in the hearts of all Anglo-Saxonists, even if, as she discusses in a fascinating analysis of the works in the Alfredian canon, he may never have put quill to parchment, nor written or translated any of the works attributed to his name.

Books by Fellows: Belzoni: the giant that archaeologists love to hate

Salon is very grateful to our Fellow Peter Clayton for the following review of the new book by our Fellow Ivor Noël Hume, Belzoni: the giant that archaeologists love to hate (ISBN: 9780813931401; University of Virginia Press).

It is over half a century since the last good book on Giovanni Belzoni was published (Mayes, 1959). Here, written by a noted archaeologist and former Director of Colonial Williamsburg archaeological research programme, is a splendid and up-to-date story of the, literally, giant (2m tall) and pioneer Egyptologist. Many writers of recent years have had a tendency to denigrate Belzoni and his work, but Howard Carter wrote that his work in the Valley of the Kings was the first large-scale excavations in the Valley, and ‘we must give Belzoni full credit for the manner in which they were carried out … on the whole the work was extraordinarily good’. Belzoni’s detractors fail to recognise the ethos of the period in which he worked, and they should be mindful of Matthew 7:1 [‘judge not lest ye be judged’]. Noël Hume’s new biography puts Belzoni firmly in his place as a pioneer who really thought about his discoveries — he was no rabid collector like his rival Drovetti without any thought for interpretation or context.

From humble beginnings in Padua via the fairgrounds of Europe, fate cast him into Egypt where, against all initial adversities, he found a calling and followed it. Some of the finest sculptures in the British Museum, notably the colossal 7.5 ton head of Ramesses II, and much else, the sarcophagus of Seti I in Sir John Soane’s Museum, the lid of the sarcophagus of Ramesses III in Cambridge, are all due to his endeavours. Added to that, he retrieved the Philae obelisk for William John Bankes (now at Kingston Lacey) whose inscription was to be vital in Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822. He was the first European to enter the Second Pyramid, of Chephren, at Giza, and the first to find the entrance to the Great Temple at Abu Simbel and, five years before Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, realised that the ‘hero’ depicted on the walls there was the same he saw in Thebes, i.e. Ramesses II.

Noël Hume brings Belzoni to life in his own words and the world in which he carried out his explorations, and adds much new insight into that life as well as his own pertinent observations. He particularly puts more flesh onto the person of Belzoni’s long-suffering but devoted wife, Sarah. It is ‘S..’s Law’ that on excavations the best finds turn up on the last day, and Noël Hume has been similarly bedevilled. Belzoni died at Gato in Benin in 1823, and Sarah in Jersey in January 1870. Mayes (1959) did not know where she was buried and both Noël Hume and the reviewer (unbeknownst to each other) have for years been trying to locate her grave via Jersey local newspapers, radio and personal contact, to no avail. As, literally, the book was finished and published word came that her grave and inscribed tombstone had been found (see ‘Postscript’). Now the chase is on for details of how and who provided for her burial. Egyptological research, even after a couple of centuries, always has surprises and goals to pursue.

Postscript. Several people have searched for the grave of Sarah Belzoni in Jersey but recently, by a happy case of serendipity, Anna Baghiani (Education Officer with the Sociétié Jersiaise St Helier, Jersey) stumbled on Sarah’s name in the records of the Channel Islands Family History Society in the Jersey Archive. It was an erroneous entry by an unknown subscriber but it provided a date and place of burial. With the help of Vic Geary, the cemetery supervisor who held a detailed plan of the cemetery from the time, she and Dr John J Taylor (Tutor in Egyptology) were able to find the grave. John Taylor had walked past it many times on bright sunny afternoons when it was in deep shadow, but on a sunny morning the inscription became partly visible, and there was no doubt of it reading: ‘Sarah, widow of Giovanni Baptista Belzoni’. The original small foot stone reads: ‘S. B, 1870’. Permission is now being sought to clean the stone and restore the lettering. A photo of the grave in sunlight is reproduced in Ancient Egypt, vol 12, no. 3, issue 69, December 2011/January 2012, p 16.

Vacancies

National Museums Scotland: Keeper of Art and Design
Salary: £53,000 to £61,700; closing date: 27 February 2012
An inspiring leader is sought to take charge of and shape the newly created department of Art and Design. This collection of European decorative art — sculpture, metal work, ceramics, glass, furniture, woodwork and dress and textiles — is the most comprehensive in the UK outside the V&A, and the most significant in Scotland. This is an important opportunity for a candidate who combines relevant scholarship with museum professionalism to engage with and raise the profile of these collections to national and international audiences.

Further information from the National Museums Scotland website.

Cambridge University: University Lectureship in Greek Prehistory (GE12302)
Salary: £36,862—£46,696; closing date: 5 March 2012
This post is open to those with a primary research interest in Classical Archaeology and preference will be given to applicants specialising in the Bronze Age and/or Iron Age of the Aegean and adjacent areas. Further particulars are available from the Classics Faculty website.

The Fitzwilliam Museum: Keeper, Department of Coins and Medals
Salary: £49,539—£52,556; closing date: 7 March 2012
Responsibilities include the leadership and management of the department and the care and development of the Coins and Medals Collection. Further requirements are research and teaching within the University of Cambridge and beyond and the representation of the Museum and the University at a national and international level. In addition, responsibility for the security and safety of the collection as well as the organisation of exhibitions form an integral part of the position. The successful candidate will cultivate lenders, donors and supporters of the Department of Coins and Medals’ holdings and will raise funds for research, publication, display and exhibition projects. Acting within a teaching Museum, the post holder also has responsibility for the supervision and teaching of a range of students either solely or jointly with other members of the department or with academics from various other faculties.

Further information from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s website.

National Galleries of Scotland: Director, Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience; closing date: 8 March 2012
Candidates are sought with substantial and demonstrable experience in relevant roles in heritage or cultural institutions and a good working knowledge of a relevant subject area such as British/Scottish art and/or history, plus outstanding people management skills, and proven financial management, planning and budgeting experience. Further details from the Odgers Berndtson website.

Edinburgh World Heritage: Chair and Trustees; deadline: 9 March 2012
Edinburgh World Heritage, the charity run by our Fellow Adam Wilkinson, is seeking new trustees to add to the board (particularly those strong in the fields of urbanism/sustainability, conservation and human resources) and a Chair to succeed Professor Charles McKean, who is stepping down in September 2012. Edinburgh World Heritage is funded by charitable donations, the City of Edinburgh Council and Historic Scotland, and has the role of protecting, conserving and promoting the interests of the Old and New Towns of the Edinburgh World Heritage Site. Its work includes the conservation and repair of buildings, monuments and spaces, the adaptation of historic buildings to modern life, learning, outreach and promotion of the World Heritage Site and influencing decision-making.

Further information and application forms can be found on the Edinburgh World Heritage Site website.