The ninth century Alfred Jewel was unearthed by the ploughing of a field at North Petherton, Somerset, in 1693. It was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 and is now one of the Ashmolean Museum’s most prized treasures. North Petherton lies between Bridgwater and Taunton, six miles from King Alfred’s reedy Athelney hideaway in the marshes of the Somerset Levels. Here c.878 the refugee Alfred allegedly “burned the cakes” while planning a successful Saxon counter-attack on the marauding Vikings. Part of his strategy was to build a network of fortified “burhs”, of which hilltop Shaftesbury was one.

A number of replica Alfred Jewels were made in 1901 to mark the Millennium of Alfred’s death (actually in 899). In 1964 a replica was presented to Gold Hill Museum by Major Meyrick-Jones of Layton House, Layton Lane, Shaftesbury. As Dave Hardiman writes in a well-researched article in the most recent Byzant magazine: The accession book notes that the replica had an “Ashmolean look about it”. With King Alfred’s great association with Shaftesbury due to his foundation of the Abbey and installation of his daughter as the first Abbess, the replica jewel was proudly displayed for some 20 years until, sadly it disappeared, believed stolen, and has never been recovered. (Security was tightened as a result of the theft).

In 2015 the present writer queued for an hour at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton to snatch a brief and not very satisfactory look at the original Alfred Jewel while it was on temporary loan. Now, thanks to the generosity of S&DHS member Phil Proctor, you can enjoy a much more leisurely and rewarding inspection, for free, in Room 1 of a high quality replica. Phil was inspired by Dave’s article to buy a replacement for the stolen piece and donate it to us. This follows his kind gift last year of a Shaftesbury-made longcase clock.

The Ashmolean Museum’s online description begins: The Alfred Jewel is a masterpiece of goldsmith’s work formed around a tear-shaped slice of rock crystal. Its inscription: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN – ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’ – connects the jewel with King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) making it among the most significant of royal relics. Other contextual evidence tends to strengthen the identification with Alfred. Apart from proving his military prowess by victories over the Danes, Alfred was a considerable scholar and believed passionately in the merits of Christian education. In the Preface to his translation from Latin to Old English of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care he writes: When I reflected on all this, I recollected how – before everything was ransacked and burned – the churches throughout England stood filled with treasures and books. Similarly, there was a great multitude of those serving God. And they derived very little benefit from these books, because they understood nothing of them, since they were not written in their own language.

Accordingly Alfred ordered that translations of texts he considered most needful for all to know, should be distributed to churches throughout his kingdom. In the particular case of the Pastoral Care each copy of the (handwritten illuminated) book was to be accompanied by an aestel worth fifty mancuses. And in God’s name I command that no one shall take that aestel from the book, nor the book from the church.

An aestel was a pointer used to follow a line of text in scripture, an aid to reading out loud. Alfred’s aestels were expensive as a mancus was a gold coin worth 30 silver pence, equivalent to a month’s wages for a skilled worker. It is reasonable to assume that the Alfred Jewel is one of six surviving aestels. The functional part of the pointer, made of wood or ivory, would be clamped into the dragon’s mouth at the base of the Jewel. There has been much speculation as to the identity of the enamelled figure: Christ; St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; Alfred himself? and the symbolism intended. In her recent book Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It Dr. Janina Ramirez suggests that The Alfred Jewel, meant to accompany books that spread wisdom, may depict not sight, as in eyesight, but rather insight; the pursuit of knowledge.

The “pursuit of knowledge” of Shaftesbury’s history is available every day for free until late October at both Gold Hill Museum and Shaftesbury Abbey and Gardens.

Click here to listen to Fontmell Magna native Dave Hardiman, interviewed on the Alfred Daily, describing a forthcoming village Archive Society Exhibition on the theme of the Parish at Work. It’s at Fontmell Village Hall for the weekend starting 26 July 2024.

At 2.30p.m. on 09 April at Gold Hill Museum, the National Trust’s Collections and House Officer at Stourhead, Hannah Severn, will give an illustrated talk on The Life and Work of Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838): Artist, Antiquarian, and Traveller. While it was the two Henry Hoares, Richard’s great-grandfather and grandfather, who first built the Palladian mansion and then created its magnificent landscape garden, he made significant additions and alterations to both, as well as proving to be an accomplished artist, archaeological pioneer and author of compendious Histories of Wiltshire. In pursuing these interests his life intersected with those of William Beckford and John Rutter, key figures in the history of Shaftesbury and District. The talk is free to members of The S&DHS, and seats should be available from 2.20p.m. for non-members on payment of £3 at the door.

The money to finance the purchase of the Stourton estate in 1717 came from the profits of Hoare’s Bank, founded in 1672 – early customers were Samuel Pepys and Queen Catherine of Braganza. Not all private banks flourished; many went under at the time of the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, and in the wake of the share-buying frenzy of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. (The South Sea Company had been granted a monopoly of the supply of African slaves to the islands in the “South Seas” and South America.) Henry Hoare II was determined to separate the finances of the Bank from those of the Stourhead estate, so that the latter would remain in the family if ever the Bank failed (it is still in business). Therefore Richard Colt Hoare inherited Stourhead in 1783, on condition that he severed all connections with the Bank, where he had been working. In the same year he married the lively Hester Lyttelton.

In 1785 Richard’s world, already subject to family tensions over his inheritance, fell apart when Hester died after giving birth to their second child, who did not survive. Within weeks Richard left for an extended Grand Tour of Italy, France and Switzerland, which lasted until 1791. From having been one of the most settled men in the world I am become the most fickle. I hardly know where I shall sleep the next night. (Later) there is so much work for my pencil that I know not when I shall be able to get away.

Richard filled the shelves of his new Library with bound volumes of sketches and commentaries, plus topographical works on the countries he had visited. He now undertook similar tours of Britain and Ireland. His 1802 exploration followed the interesting and highly curious itinerary of Giraldus Cambrensis through north and south Wales in the year 1188 [with] drawings to illustrate it. Gerald of Wales was an ambitious Norman / Welsh monk who accompanied Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, on a seven-week, 600-mile recruiting campaign for the Third Crusade. Colt Hoare’s translation from the Latin, published in 1806, brought Gerald’s quirky description of Welsh manners and wildlife to a wider audience, and is still an entertaining read. The furnishings of the new Library and Picture Gallery, including the ornate carved frames of massive Old Master paintings, were the work of Thomas Chippendale the Younger.

In January 1797 one of the three standing trilithons at Stonehenge collapsed. William Cunnington was one of the antiquarians attracted to the scene, and began investigating what had been beneath the stones. He probably met Colt Hoare through a mutual friend, William Coxe, Rector of Stourton, and all three were interested in trying to understand the ancient landscape of Wiltshire. Colt Hoare became patron of a team in which Cunnington, Stephen Parker and son John, all from Heytesbury, did most of the digging, and Philip Crocker produced impeccable maps and artwork of their finds. According to Julian Richards Between 1803 and 1810 Cunnington and his team opened 465 barrows in Wiltshire, nearly 200 of them in the area around Stonehenge. (Stonehenge; The story so far Historic England, 2017, p78) Modern archaeologists probably wish that they had not done so, but this was more than mere treasure-hunting, and Colt Hoare published his findings in his multi-part Ancient History of Wiltshire 1810-21. It is still, along with Cunnington’s original notes and correspondence, a valuable resource for today’s students of prehistory. (Richards, p85).

There were even more instalments of The History of Modern Wiltshire, to which he contributed from 1822. Some of this was published by Shaftesbury printer John Rutter, whose Delineations of Fonthill, to which Colt Hoare was an early subscriber, appeared in the wake of Beckford’s sale of Fonthill Abbey in 1822. Colt Hoare had long been interested in what the reclusive Beckford was building and furnishing behind his high stone walls, but was warned off associating with the social pariah. Joseph Farington wrote in his diary for October 1806 that Sir Richard Hoare of Stourhead applied to Mr. Beckford to see the Abbey … the neighbouring gentlemen took such umbrage at it … that a gentleman wrote to Sir Richard in his own name and that of others to demand of him an explanation.

Members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society will be presenting their own historical findings to the informal setting of a Tea and Talks event at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 06 February. Among the proposed topics are photographs by Elizabeth Upfield (1854-1903); the Abbess of Shaftesbury’s Farmhouses in the Nadder Valley; and local Sheep Washes. All will be illustrated and promise to shed new light on aspects of local history. Non-members are welcome when seats are available after 2.20p.m. Please be prepared to make a donation towards the cost of refreshments.

Claire Ryley and Ann Symons are well known locally for their presentations of images from the Museum’s (Albert) Tyler Collection. They have begun to identify an increasing number of photographs taken by a female contemporary, Elizabeth Upfield. Research, Ann writes, has established that Mrs Upfield was born Elizabeth Frances Hale in 1854 in Farlington, Hampshire. She became a dressmaker and milliner. In 1882 she married James Hooper, a draper with a shop in Shaftesbury High Street. James died leaving her with 3 young children. She married Albert Upfield in 1898. They continued to run the shop as “drapers and milliners” in the High Street. It was listed in the 1903 Kelly’s Directory as: “New Photographic Studio (all communications & invoices to be addressed to E.F. Upfield, proprietress), High Street.” In the same year Elizabeth Frances Upfield died on 7th August and was buried at Holy Trinity Church.

The image above is of a print in an E.F. Upfield mount. It shows the town en fete, possibly for the Prince of Wales’s seven-minute-long royal visit on 21 October 1899. But there were other celebratory occasions at the turn of the century.

Martin Shallcross will cast a farmer’s eye over evidence of the Abbess of Shaftesbury’s Farmhouses in the Nadder Valley. Perhaps the best known example is Place Farm Tisbury with its spectacular Tithe Barn. Alan Carter brings his vet’s eye to the evidence of local Sheep Washes.

On Tuesday 09 January at 2.30p.m. popular speaker Dr Amy Frost makes a welcome return to Gold Hill Museum to provide an update on the progress of the restoration and reinterpretation project at Beckford’s Tower and Museum at Lansdown, Bath. During her compelling 2022 Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture on William Beckford After Fonthill, Amy confessed that she had sufficient material to fill another lecture – and this is it. More to the point, a number of exciting discoveries have been made during the year-long closure of Beckford’s Tower, where Amy is Curator.

The aims of the part Heritage Lottery Funded Project included the physical restoration of the Tower, which was being damaged by water ingress, and bringing the story of William Beckford’s complex and controversial life to a wider contemporary audience. The Beckford family fortune, which had funded the building of first Fonthill Abbey and then the Tower, was created by slave labour on sugar plantations in Jamaica. Beckford’s bi-sexuality had led to his status as a social pariah, with none of the movers and shakers of Georgian society being willing to visit Fonthill until Beckford had put the estate up for sale and left for Bath.

Beckford’s morning routine, once he had built the Tower, was to ride with his dogs from his home in Lans- down Crescent through a landscape maintained by his gardeners, to stables at the Tower. En route were a tunnel under a public path and a fashionable rock-cut grotto, which has been excavated during the Project. Having only ever seen one partial historic drawing of the Grotto steps prior to the excavation, uncovering the extent of them, Amy observes, has been a wonderful surprise for us all – and a real career highlight for me.

For the past several years, Amy has been excavating the Beckford archive in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. She has made hitherto unsuspected links between Beckford’s letters and sketches to surviving artefacts and paintings of interiors, showing his meticulous planning and positioning of items of furniture and artworks. This 1845 painting of objects in Beckford’s collection was one of several commissioned by his daughter after his death. The higgledy-piggledy arrangement would have been intolerable to her father.

Most recently Amy has published an article on Beckford’s Doodles in volume 29 of The Beckford Journal. Many were scribbles on the address pages of letters just received by Beckford and may reflect his immediate response to the content – boredom perhaps? – and some were quite elaborately drawn town or landscapes. There is no danger of any tedium in Amy’s animated and enlightening presentations. Her talk is free to members of The Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, while seats should be available from 2.20p.m. to non-members on payment of £3 at the door.

Historian and broadcaster Dr Vivien Newman will shed new light on the experience of children across the combatant nations in her illustrated talk at Gold Hill Museum at 2.30p.m. on Tuesday 07 November. The story of (evacuee) British children in World War Two is familiar, but their part in the First World War is much less well known. Evacuees then were mainly Belgian and French. Few British readers [Viv writes] are aware that 499,137 French people (including approximately 150,000 children) from the ten wholly or partially Occupied French Departments (counties) were either forced or permitted to leave their homes. They were circuitously transported via Germany and Switzerland before being deposited once again in France, primarily in Evian on Lake Geneva.

British schoolchildren were encouraged to contribute to the war effort. Schoolgirls converted thousands of pairs of disused woollen stockings into mittens; boys’ woodwork classes in both England and Australia became mini factories for manufacturing splints and crutches for the Red Cross .. on one occasion, the crutch made by a boy was, to their mutual surprise, given to a relative.

Before the outbreak of war School Boards had permitted children over 11 who had achieved the Fourth of Six Standards to work fulltime on the land for part of the year. By 1917, H.A.L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, estimated that “600,000 children had been put prematurely to work”.

Two recently founded youth organisations prized public service and duty: the Boy Scouts (1909) and Girl Guides (1910). On 29 October 1914, Boy Scouts were engaged to work for MI5. By 4 September 1915, the experiment was considered a failure. Boy Scouts were perhaps better suited to outdoor tasks, such as watching the coast and strategic bridges. So MI5 recruited 90 Girl Guides instead, mainly as messengers at their Waterloo House HQ. Guiding’s greatest accolade came in 1919: seen as utterly reliable, a contingent accompanied the British delegation to France. They ran errands for the Paris Peace Conference delegates at the Palace of Versailles and a group of Senior Guides (aged over 16) were invited to witness the signing of the Peace Treaty.

Toy manufacturers, British and German, swiftly developed products inspired by the War. Not all were in the best taste. 1915’s most gruesome offering was ‘The Exploding Trench’. A 30cm-long wood and cardboard, muddy green-coloured ‘trench’ contained half a dozen miniature soldiers. When the Union flag was struck, the [German] soldiers were catapulted into the air ‘in all directions’, as if by an explosion. Unsurprisingly, this toy seems to have been discontinued.

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All of the quotes in italics are from Viv’s fascinating 2019 Pen and Sword book ‘Children at War 1914-18’. She may well be able to bring some copies with her to the lecture. There are details of her other books here. This talk is free to members of The S&DHS and seats should be available to non-members from 2.20p.m. on payment of £3 at the door.