{"id":7558,"date":"2019-11-22T17:48:03","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T17:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/?p=7558"},"modified":"2019-11-22T20:26:08","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T20:26:08","slug":"postgraduates-working-on-kent-history-exciting-developments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/kenthistory\/postgraduates-working-on-kent-history-exciting-developments\/","title":{"rendered":"Postgraduates working on Kent History – exciting developments"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week there is information about the Centre’s future events, a report on the Kent History Postgraduate Group’s monthly research seminar and a notice about Dr Jayne Wackett’s memorial tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Reverse of Canterbury’s medieval seal [photo: Dean & Chapter]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I thought this week I would leave aside Medieval Canterbury\nWeekend 2020 and instead mention two events that will be taking place in May\nand June 2020. Details, including booking, will be going up very shortly on the\nCentre\u2019s \u2018Future Events\u2019 page. On 18th<\/sup> May, and in conjunction with\nCanterbury Cathedral Archives & Library and part of the Becket 2020\ncalendar, there will be a 1-day conference at Old Sessions, CCCU, entitled\n\u2018Church, Saints and Seals, 1150-1300\u2019 that will combine presentations by\nexperts, such as Professor Markus Sp\u00e4th (University of\nCologne), on seals with a visit to the Cathedral Archives and\nConservation Studio. Speakers, including Professor Sandy Heslop (University of\nEast Anglia) and Dr Paul Dryburgh (The National Archives), will discuss the\niconography of seals, including representations of sacred buildings and\nBecket\u2019s murder, as well as the materiality of seals and sealing practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then on Friday 19th<\/sup> June there will be an open lecture by Dr Claire Bartram, an expert in early modern book culture, on Christopher Marlowe\u2019s Kent. This will be an opportunity to celebrate Claire\u2019s edited collection: Book Culture in Provincial Communities: Contexts for Reading and Writing 1450-1650 <\/em>that is due to be published earlier in 2020. The second event in this exploration of Marlowe and 16th<\/sup>-century botany will take place on Saturday 20th<\/sup> June as a half-day conference on \u2018Natural History of the 16th<\/sup> Century and the Works of Marlowe\u2019. The day will start with a guided visit to Canterbury Cathedral Archives & Library before participants move to Old Sessions House, CCCU, where they will hear talks by speakers including Professor Howard Thomas (University of Aberystwyth) and Rae Granville, on contemporary ideas about plants and their importance in 16th-century society. The event is another collaborative venture, this time between the Centre and the Marlowe Statue Project group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Great Hall at Scadbury<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These\nare for the future, but this week we had a fascinating couple of presentations\nas part of the monthly Kent History Postgraduate Group\u2019s series of research\nseminars. The group also welcomed back Lily Hawker-Yates who submitted her\nthesis a couple of months ago and is now waiting for her viva. In the meantime,\nshe is giving several conference papers and it was these \u2013 papers at London and\nExeter, which meant she was in Canterbury. Often these seminars feature the research\nfindings of the doctoral students but this week both Janet Clayton and Dean\nIrwin were focusing much more on process. In Janet\u2019s case this was an\nassessment of her interdisciplinary approach, while Dean considered the most\nproductive way to categorise the English sources on medieval Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Janet was our first speaker and her title was \u2018Ruxley Hundred, 1200\u20131350: using \u201cstuff\u201d as evidence for status and trade\u2019 because she wanted to show how she is seeking to use material culture, that is documentary sources about things alongside things themselves, as found during archaeological excavations or as standing buildings. For, as she said, the documentary sources, such as lay subsidy returns, inquisitions post mortem and extents of debt, while they can be useful need to be deployed carefully because each source has limitations. Of these three types, as regular readers of the blog will know, Janet has found the lay subsidies valuable, especially the exceptionally rich 1301 subsidy for this Hundred. Yet, as earlier researchers (Willard and Glasscock) have pointed out, as well as issues of coverage, standardisation and accuracy, it is important to think about values of goods in relative not absolute terms. Moreover, the assessors were not seeking to record all a householder\u2019s goods but those deemed as surplus, albeit we don\u2019t know where they placed their threshold. So with these caveats in mind, Janet then took her audience through the various archaeological excavations that have taken place in the last eighty years in Ruxley Hundred. To these she added Joydens Wood, which is just over the Hundred boundary, because according to Kent Archaeological Society reports from the 1950s there should be a considerable pottery collection somewhere, perhaps at Maidstone, albeit Janet has yet to locate it. Indeed, both published and unpublished KAS reports, and the finds themselves may prove to be very useful once located but at the moment in terms of the actual \u201cstuff\u201d, her own local archaeological group [ODAS] has been the most fruitful (the work on Scadbury Manor) for her research, supplemented by some finds from other sites in the local museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For those in north-west Kent, very well worth visiting<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To\ntry to bring some order to this mix of sites and finds, and to explore issues\nrespecting relative personal\/household wealth, social status, craft\nidentification, residence versus non-residence and the degree or otherwise of\nlinks to London and elsewhere, Janet has been examining objects under three\nheadings: metal, ceramics, and stone. Taking metal first, she has been using\nsix categories of which one is \u2018iron and steel\u2019 \u2013 nails, iron for tools, steel\nfor the edge of spades \u2013 and perhaps one of the most exciting finds she has for\nthis is the weeding hook from Scadbury. Moving on to ceramics, London-type ware\nhas been found at Scadbury and Joydens Wood (12th<\/sup> century and early\n13th<\/sup> century). Yet this may be less evidence of direct links to\nLondon and instead may represent this type of ware produced at Plumstead, which\nwas then sold through the more local market system. Stone, too, may be equally\ndeceptive, but also instructive, as evidence of commerce and the transport\ninfrastructure because whereas the River Cray is often said to have been\nnavigable at this time, Janet\u2019s evidence points to transport of such items as\nmillstones to Dartford by water and then by road to Bexley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you can imagine, Janet\u2019s detailed exploration of the value of material culture for her research provoked several questions, comments and suggestions before we moved on to Dean Irwin\u2019s presentation. Having just return from a research trip to the archives in Gloucester, which he had found interesting in terms of quality if not quantity of material, Dean has been considering how best to rationalise the English sources for the Jews, not least because most in this field seem to concentrate on one modern archive: Westminster Abbey or The National Archives, rather than thinking about the contemporary context of the production of the documents that relate to the medieval English Jewry. Consequently, his four categories are: royal, civic, \u2018private\u2019, and ecclesiastical.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dean drawing a medieval Jew at the Medieval Pageant 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m\ngoing to keep this brief because Dean has given presentations on the first two\ncategories in the past and summaries of these are in earlier blogs. Starting\nwith the royal records, Dean pointed out the rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews\nand the value of say the assize rolls because they record at the top those\npresent, while the receipt rolls show what the Jews had to pay to the Crown.\nSuch rolls were produced at Westminster or if the king was elsewhere, then they\nwere written up there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dean\u2019s civic category is similarly very large because this second level of administration, the archaea (chests) in the various towns across England held copies of financial transactions involving Jews, the chirographers often included clerks used by the town to draw up civic documents. These chirographs are especially valuable for not only do they give details about the parties involved in the debt case, but they include witness lists \u2013 leading men within both the Jewish and Christian local communities. Furthermore, there is a link between the civic and royal categories, the Crown sending orders to the chirographers of the archaea, requiring that the archaea be sent to London. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alec, Karen and Diane (see below) looking at Jayne’s cherry tree<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Moving to Dean\u2019s other two categories, his \u2018private\u2019 is small but as he said does contain a few very valuable sources, such as 12 documents at Hereford that involve the religious house\u2019s purchase of Jewish debts which it then sought to enforce. Similarly, his last category brings in the Church, but more specifically the church courts and episcopal decrees. Like Janet\u2019s presentation, Dean\u2019s drew questions from his fellow postgraduates and then we almost finished the mince pies and ginger (courtesy of Lily) after another excellent seminar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alec and Karen listening to first Emily Guerry and then Ryan Perry [MEMS Directors]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I want to mention an event that took place yesterday at the University of Kent in the garden just outside the front of Rutherford College. As readers of the blog may remember, Dr Jayne Wackett\u2019s funeral at Wye is recorded in a blog from earlier this year, as is her and her husband Dr Alec Forsyth\u2019s (CCCU) major contribution to the success of the Centre\u2019s \u2018Garden History Study Day: From Monastic to Tradescant Gardens\u2019 in October 2017. Furthermore Jayne, with Karen Brayshaw, then the Cathedral Librarian, were instrumental in setting up \u2018Picture this \u2026\u2019, which has involved CCCU Medieval and Early Modern Studies postgraduates for a couple of years under Dr Diane Heath\u2019s leadership. Thus, even though Jayne completed her MA and doctorate in MEMS at Kent, and continued to be active there as a Visiting Lecturer, it is wholly fitting that the raising a glass to Jayne around \u2018her\u2019 new cherry tree should equally be remembered at CCCU as an appropriate gesture to an excellent scholar, a lovely person and a great friend to medievalists at both universities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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