The Guardian: Archaeologists reveal life stories of hundreds of people from medieval Cambridge. “Archaeologists at Cambridge University have reconstructed the ‘biographies’ of hundreds of the city’s ordinary medieval residents by examining their skeletons in detail, using a wealth of scientific data to fill out the life stories of poor or disadvantaged people whose names were never recorded.”
Northeastern University: London’s underground theater scene takes center stage in new Northeastern mapping project. “Funded by the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, [The Origins of West End Theatre] presents information about 45 different theaters that were active from 1660 to 1812. In doing so, it shines new light on a largely forgotten — but significant — part of London’s theater history.”
Eastern Daily Press: Ringsfield Primary students put time capsule in church roof. “School pupils have laid a time capsule in the roof of a village’s 15th-century historic church which is being rethatched. Ringsfield church, near Beccles, welcomed the Year 3 and 4 children from Ringsfield Church of England Primary School to bury a time capsule in the new thatch on the roof being restored.”
University of Cambridge: Medieval Murder Maps. “A new website, launched by Cambridge’s Violence Research Centre, allows users to compare the causes and patterns of urban violence in medieval England across three cities for the first time. The site features a new map of York’s homicides during its 14th century ‘golden age’ when – driven by trade and textiles – the city flourished as Black Death subsided.”
University of York: Researcher creates city map from diary of 18th Century York woman . “A researcher has created a map for a walking tour of York based on the diaries of a woman who lived in the city during the Napoleonic Wars.”
Rail Advent: Stockton and Darlington Railway archive available to the public online. “The National Railway Museum has acquired and digitised a newly-discovered archive from Leonard Raisbeck, a largely forgotten early railway pioneer. Raisbeck was an influential figure in the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world’s first public railway. He suggested that the new venture should be a railway, a new technology at the time, rather than a canal. Born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1773, solicitor Leonard Raisbeck played an important role in planning and organising the new railway.”
Nottinghamshire City Council: New website heralded ‘An Aladdin’s cave for archaeologists, researchers and students’, launched in Notts. ” The new website… provides access to an expansive database of heritage sites, earthworks, historic buildings, and archaeological finds that that make up the rich and varied historic environment of the county. Features from the 25,000 data entries range from single chance finds, such as Roman coins, to large sites such as WWII airfields.”
Burnley Express: Historic Clitheroe Advertiser archive from 1888 to 2015 now online thanks to civic society efforts. “Digitised versions of the Clitheroe Advertiser and Times have been been made free and available to all online thanks to the work of Clitheroe Civic Society and partners.” Clitheroe is a town in England about 35 miles from Manchester.
Reuters: King Charles backs research into monarchy’s slave links. “King Charles has given his support to research that will examine the British monarchy’s links to slavery, Buckingham Palace said on Thursday, after a newspaper report said a document showed a historical connection with a transatlantic slave trader.”
BBC: England’s archaeological history gathers dust as museums fill up. “Troves of ancient artefacts unearthed during building and infrastructure works are gathering dust in warehouses as England’s museums run out of space, the BBC has learned.”
CNN: Codebreakers find and decode lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots. “A trio of codebreakers has found and deciphered a treasure trove of lost letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots. The 57 secret letters, from Mary Stuart to the French ambassador to England between 1578 and 1584, were written in an elaborate code. The findings come 436 years after Mary’s death by execution on February 8, 1587.”
University of Stirling: Burns’ influence on working class English writers revealed after the discovery of ‘lost’ works. “The influence of Robert Burns saw poets in the north of England writing verse in Scots, say researchers who have uncovered a host of ‘lost’ literary works penned by industrial workers in the 19th Century. The team, led by Professor Kirstie Blair of the University of Stirling, has discovered a deluge of poems, songs and short stories penned by navvies, shipbuilders, railwaymen, factory workers and miners, from Scotland and the north of England, which give unique, first-hand accounts of their lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s.”
The Conversation: How British theatre censorship laws have inadvertently created a rich archive of Black history. “Between 1737 and 1968 British theatre censorship laws required theatre managers to submit new plays intended for the professional stage to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for examination and licensing…. In essence, this meant that the government collected, monitored and frequently censored new dramas. In this way, the licensing of plays has inadvertently produced an extensive historical archive of surveillance and censorship. This includes records of early Black theatre-making, at a time when the British state did not routinely collect and preserve the work of Black playwrights.”
BBC: Coventry photographer’s archive saved from a skip catalogued by volunteers. “Thousands of photographs taken by Coventry photographer Arthur Cooper from the 1940s up to the 1960s have been digitized and released online by Coventry University. The archive, in the form of thousands of glass negatives, was found dumped on a Coventry street and returned to publishing company Mirrorpix.”
British Library Maps Blog: Norden and Van den Keere: Two seventeenth century atlases digitised and online. “Two bound sets of maps from the British Library’s core collection of early modern English cartography have recently been digitised and placed online. Harley MS 3749 is a series of 18 hand-drawn maps of parts of the Royal estate at Windsor, produced in 1607 by the English surveyor, mapmaker and author John Norden (c. 1547-1625).”
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