In some ways the summer academic conference season resembles the grouse season, even though the timings are not as precise, in part because the end of the summer term varies to a degree (excuse the pun!) university to university. However, from the end of June for about a month and then again in early September academics can be seen travelling across England and these days internationally to take part in such occasions. Some conferences are exceedingly broad thematically and even chronologically, a couple of years ago I attended one in Durham under the title ‘Coping with Crisis’ which was indeed very wide-ranging, albeit there was a very strong strand that explored banking and bankers. This was perhaps hardly surprising in terms of current issues, but for those interested in other topics was a bit limiting.

Hythe High Street – look for potential medieval buildings (steep roofs)

Image from: www.invectis.co.uk

This year I went north again, although only as far as Hull. Maybe not the first choice for my sole ‘beyond Canterbury’ conference for 2015, but I must admit the place has changed significantly since I was there over twenty years ago. Being the summer rather than early December helped too, and I was very pleasantly surprised as I wandered around the city centre and what remains of the docks on Sunday afternoon. The conference itself took place at Hull University, which again as you would expect has expanded vastly since the early 1990s, and was organised by three members of the history department under the heading ‘Women, Land and the Making of the British Landscape’. I met Amanda Capern, one of the organisers, a couple of years ago at Plymouth where we got talking about place and space, among other matters, relating these ideas to personal, family and communal identity, and it was great to see that she is now developing such notions with respect to female sensibility and the landscape in early modern England. As you might expect, several speakers explored the use of place and space, ranging from quasi-royal progresses made by Lady Anne Clifford, a great aristocrat of the North (Jessica Malay), to Essex women in summer gathering together in the fields to spin (Amanda Flather).

This latter communal activity is also in evidence in late-sixteenth-century Canterbury, according to a church court deposition, the deponent or witness stating that she and her neighbours had sat together outside their front doors in Ivy Lane to spin. Again it was summer, being about the middle of harvest time, and as industrious, hard-working women they had begun early in the morning. Of course one of the reasons for such details was to demonstrate to the authorities, as well as others involved in the case and more broadly in the community, that they were honest, reliable and upright members of the parish whose testimony could be trusted in what was a defamation issue. Consequently, provided such evidence is used carefully, from the historian’s viewpoint these cases not only offer ideas about working practices of those below the elite, but also how such practices were viewed and understood economically, socially and morally by contemporaries.

The conference programme worked chronologically and thus opened with the sole medieval session. Interestingly this also worked from south to north. Hence I kicked-off proceedings with an assessment of what I believe contemporaries saw as the strategic value of the location of three houses for religious women in medieval Canterbury. The positioning of these houses on boundaries was, I think, less a matter of separation, liminality and vulnerability, words often employed with regard to nunneries, but instead needs to be considered in terms of negotiation, exchange and reciprocity for any assessment of the role of such female communities in the medieval landscape. I have mentioned the case involving St Lawrence’s hospital and the ‘fight’ in 1436 in an earlier blog, so it is just worth noting that the hospital sisters at St James’ had suffered similarly in 1188. Indeed, at St James’ the attack involved the theft of an unknown number of cattle and sheep, presumably from the hospital’s home farm. This incident was part of the dispute between Archbishop Hubert Walter and the monastic community at Canterbury Cathedral over the archbishop’s desire to found a college at Hackington. Yet, as in so many disputes, other issues might become attached, and here territorial and jurisdictional matters in Wincheap were ripe for negotiation among the various parties: the prioress and her hospital sisters, the master at St James’, the archbishop, the prior at Christ Church and several prominent Canterbury citizens. If you would like to know more about this episode and other examples involving competing constituencies, see the collection of essays edited by two present members of the Centre, Paul and Louise: Paul Dalton, Charles Insley and Louise Wilkinson, Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011).

Having arrived back in Canterbury on Tuesday night, I was able to attend a lecture given by Andy Mills yesterday evening at Hythe. Having lived all his life in the town, he has a great affection for the place and this has translated into an engagement with Hythe’s built environment. Also being a civil engineer by training he has a professional interest and considerable knowledge about buildings and their construction generally. I met him several years ago because of our shared interest in medieval Hythe and his talk last night was on the port’s medieval buildings. He touched on the church briefly but his chief concern was the timber-framed structures on either side of the High Street. As he said, in most cases the ground floor spaces of these houses and shops have been altered so many times that there is almost nothing medieval left in terms of determining what they may have looked like. However by looking up – to first floor and the roof – it is possible, at least in some cases, to get an idea of their form, their size, their age, whether they were jettied and on which sides, which the low/high end, whether they were end-on to the street frontage, and the quality of the building work. Being well-known locally, Andy (often with Andy Linklater and Rupert Austin of Canterbury Archaeological Trust) has managed to explore inside almost all of the likely buildings in the High Street and surrounding streets, but as he said there may be others hidden behind later facades, or surviving only as a few fragments in a later structure.

His illustrated lecture was full of interesting structural details from the various buildings, including moulded beams, decorated crown posts of different sizes, and fire-blackened timbers from once open hearths. Yet perhaps one of the best discoveries he has made is the few panes of a leaded light containing probably sixteenth-century very thin glass that survives because by chance it has been protected by an adjoining outer wall. His audience was, therefore, treated to a fascinating lecture about an under-researched gem of a medieval town. To be able to bring together the buildings and people who lived there in the fifteenth century still remains my aim, and hopefully I’ll be able to get back to work on the Hythe documentary records later this summer. However in the mean time I shall get on editing the final volume of the Kent History Project: Early Medieval Kent, 800–1220, which needs my attention, not least for Ian Coulson’s sake as the long-suffering series editor.