I thought I would begin this week with a couple of notices that involve events linked to the Centre, although before that I’ll just mention that Matthew Crockatt has given the Medieval Canterbury Weekend an afterlife – so do please look at the winning postgraduate poster, the short report and the picture gallery. Now to return to the events, the first involves a talk about St Botolph that will be taking place at Folkestone on 19 April. This is a free lecture organised by the Folkestone People’s History Centre that will take place at the Old Town Hall, Folkestone at 6.00pm when Denis Pepper will discuss this local saint under the title ‘The Riddles of St Botolph – Monk of Romney Marsh and Folly Field’. Do go along if you think this may be of interest, and you will also be able to find out about other activities relating to the history of Folkestone and surrounding area from the organisers. These include Dr Lesley Hardy from Canterbury Christ Church, who is particularly involved in community-focused projects in the town, such as ‘Finding Eanswythe’. The second event I would like to mention also involves a Kent port, this time Richborough and concerns the one-day conference that Dr Martin Watts has organised for Saturday 25 June. As I have mentioned before, the speakers will cover aspects of the port’s history over a very long time span, beginning with Keith Parfitt’s  (Canterbury Archaeological Trust) assessment of Roman Richborough and concluding with Professor Clare Ungerson’s examination of the port as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939/40.

To book a place at the conference you can either visit www.canterbury.ac.uk/richborough or call the box office Monday to Thursday during office hours on 01227 782994.

In the meantime, and especially for those in Canterbury and east Kent more broadly, you might wish to visit the excellent Canterbury Archaeological Trust ‘40 Years’ exhibition in the Front Room of the Beaney in Canterbury High Street. This exhibition charts the development of the Trust and the diverse range of its activities that cover different aspects of archaeology, surveys of standing buildings, the publishing of books, reports and articles, and providing educational resources both in the classroom and on site. Trust staff have worked in many of Kent’s secondary and primary schools, taking CAT Kits and other objects to provide children of all ages with a hands-on experience. Nor has this been confined to these age groups because such activities have been used at Canterbury Christ Church University, both with undergraduates and those learning how to teach on the various education programmes.

What is so fascinating about archaeology, as it is with history, is that you never totally know what you are going to unearth, whether this is in a trench, in a building or in an archive. Someone I heard from on Wednesday who might be said to have gone on this voyage of discovery is Professor James Carley. Professor Carley studies medieval book collecting, as well as the early history of the printed book, and he is an expert on the royal book collections of the Tudor monarchs. Even though he has been working on the Rochester Priory books for some while, the presence of several volumes from Rochester Cathedral in the Special Collections at the Templeman Library, University of Kent, has given him and the cataloguing team greater opportunities to examine these books more closely. Once the refurbishment of Rochester Cathedral library is complete they will return ‘home’, but for now are being studied in Canterbury.

To return to James Carley’s lecture on Wednesday, he introduced his audience to the range of books that once resided at the medieval priory. Interestingly, the Rochester monks during the Norman and early Angevin periods seem to have especially concerned to list their books, but thereafter such lists are exceedingly sparse and it is not clear what was there in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries. Indeed, even John Leland in the 1530s who seems to have made it his mission to list such monastic collections does not appear to have done one for Rochester, even though the evidence points to his having been in the city. As I have already mentioned, a few books are still at Rochester but the bulk of the priory’s collection was shipped to London at the dissolution to become part of the royal library, particularly at Westminster. Since then some volumes have found their way to Trinity College, Cambridge, but the British Library remains a major repository. What I found particularly fascinating in Professor Carley’s talk was that books were apparently transported in barrels, which seems an odd receptacle – why not chests? Also during the Middle Ages books were seemingly valued as items that could be pawned when there was a short-term cash crisis, to be redeemed when the financial situation had improved.

Turning my attention away from medieval books: copies of Aristotle or Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’, yesterday I spent several hours in the Canterbury Cathedral archives. Initially I was looking for materials about the parish church at Acrise for a friend, but then in the afternoon I had an enjoyable time investigating the Canterbury chamberlains’ accounts for the early 1520s. I have looked at these before but this time I was hunting for something specific, although as always I got drawn to other items of expenditure too. So to finish I’ll just mention a couple of these from 1521/2. The first involved a considerable amount of work on the cross at the Bulstake, including repairing little crosses as part of the main cross and much painting and gilding. Ideas encompassing ceremony and hospitality were also in the minds of the civic authorities because as well as providing bread and ale when they met the king at Harbledown, they spent time and money on at least one canopy, paid for the making of the ‘hale’ at the Dongeon for the king’s commissioners, and perhaps most interesting of all, paid for a silk ribbon to wrap around the keys to Westgate when they delivered them to the Holy Roman Emperor at the time of his visit to the city. So ended a very fruitful day in the archives!