BBC4’s Digging for Britain, broadcast at 9pm on Wednesday 20 November, features local archaeologist Julian Richards in a report from the SAVED Project at Shaftesbury Abbey. This innovative scheme, part-funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has involved an extensive radar survey of the Abbey grounds, the training of volunteers in archaeological techniques, and the participation […]
Deborah Jones is Secretary of the Burney Society UK and definitely a fan. The best known of the family, Frances (Fanny) Burney, was a writer of novels, plays and a revelatory diary in an age when women weren’t encouraged to write or publish. During the Revolutionary Wars with France she married a French exile and […]
The Shaftesbury Remembers website, created by Gold Hill Museum with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to reflect the locality during World War 1, has become established as a source of reference on an international scale. Volunteer Chris Stupples, who has researched many of the soldiers’ stories featured on the website, is now seeking information […]
Oxford Professor Steven Gunn gave a polished and pacy Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture to an appreciative audience in Shaftesbury Town Hall on 24 September. Based on his findings from the Everyday Life and Fatal Hazard in sixteenth century England Research Project, Steven was able to cite several local examples. Robert Mitchell was killed by a […]
Members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society should have received a bumper September mailing including the Byzant Newsletter, the 2019-20 Lectures & Events Programme, and a separate illustrated pamphlet on the 1919 Sale of Shaftesbury written by member Matthew Tagney. There is still time to see the exhibition on the Sale, curated by Matthew, […]
Professor Steven Gunn of Merton College Oxford is leading a project to sift through 9,000 sixteenth-century coroners’ reports from all over England held in the National Archives and has found that most fatal accidents occurred between April and September. On Tuesday 24 September at 7.30pm he delivers the Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture in Shaftesbury Town […]
The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society chose one of the hottest days of the year for their Annual Garden Party on Tuesday 23 July. At the preceding AGM, Chairperson Elaine Barratt paid tribute to the indispensable contributions of numerous Society members and volunteers, including retiring Trustee Claire Ryley who would continue to volunteer for both […]
July 2019. Intestinal worms were an unpleasantly common affliction in sixteenth-century England. In his book on horsemanship in 1566 Thomas Blundeville explained that one of the three kinds of worms affecting horses was ‘long and rounde, even lyke to those that children do most commonly voyde’. In June 1580 at Lawshall in Suffolk fourteen-year-old Anne […]
June 2019. Rock samphire is a succulent coastal plant, nutritious to eat but dangerous to harvest. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar and Gloucester look down from a cliff and spot ‘one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade’. John Pantridge was practising that trade at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight on 18 June 1576 at a […]
The 2019 Summer Outing for members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society took them to two Dorchester Museums, one presently closed for a massive redevelopment and the other recently opened in 2018. The Dorset County Museum received one of the last large Heritage Lottery Fund grants of £11 million. Members were able to view […]
