St. Albans Pageant, 1907: Queen Elizabeth at Gorhambury.
Courtesy of St. Albans Museums.
The project team produced regular blog posts over the course of the period 2013-2017 (covering the years funded by the first AHRC) grant. These blog posts can be found below.
I’ve spent most of this week in the picturesque town of Bury St Edmund’s, Suffolk, carrying out archival research and meeting up with Alan Baxter, who represents Magna Carta 800 – one of our official project partners. I have, of course, also found plenty of time to wander around the extensive and beautifully conserved ruins of the medieval Abbey, and even to savour a pint in (officially!) the smallest bar in the UK – the ...
*Guest post by Philip Sheail *
In 1914, during the week of 29 June-4 July, an historic pageant took place in the county town of Hertford, as part of the celebrations to mark the millenary of the town’s foundation by the Saxon King Edward the Elder. The centenary of the pageant has in turn been marked by the publication of a book called Hertford’s Grand Pageant 1914, written by Philip Sheail in conjunction with ...
Well it had to happen... Having spent the past six months looking at the documentary record of historical pageants in Scotland, within the context of a project that takes in shows that took place across most of the British Isles, I now have to come up with some ideas on what pageants north of the border had to say on the issue of Scottish identity. This question is not simply about the narrative content of ...
It was a short journey from London on 1 June 2014 to the small county town of Hertford, to see the launch of a book by Philip Sheail entitled Hertford’s Grand Pageant 1914. In common with many other towns and cities in the Edwardian era, Hertford had a historical pageant, and there is something especially poignant about this one, which took place only a few days before the declaration of war. In the midst ...
In my last blog I mentioned the pageant-related manuscript sources, such as the scripts and scores relating to the Communist Party Centenary Pageant, which are held in the British Library. But of course the library also holds a wealth of other material too. Indeed it is the range and variety of the items held at the BL that truly impresses. As might be expected, there are many published books of words and souvenir volumes, one ...
I’ve had an interesting afternoon in the British Library reading books of words from peace pageants from the early post-First World War years. This has been a welcome distraction from other academic activities!
In July, on behalf of the ‘Redress of the Past’ team, I’ll be presenting a paper at ISCHE: the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, for which I’m also on the organising committee, as it’s being ...
Many archives and libraries hold material relating to pageants. One prominent example is provided by the British Library. Of course we were expecting to discover a great deal of material in the Reading Rooms at St. Pancras, but thanks in part to the BL’s (relatively) new archive catalogue we have made some unusual finds. One example is a set of manuscripts and musical scores associated with the Communist Manifesto Centenary Pageant of 1948, which ...
I spent Sunday afternoon at Bernard’s Heath in St Albans, with about 2,000 other people. It was a re-eanctment of the second battle of St Albans in 1461, one of the most important of the Wars of the Roses. The event was part of Sandridge 900+, commemorating the anniversary of St Leonard’s Church, Sandridge, a village to the north of St Albans.
The re-enactment was carried out by the Medieval Siege Society ...
Last night, as part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival, I gave a free talk at King's College London to a small-but-enthusiastic audience made up of members of the public. The Fringe first took place in 2012, and is aimed at anyone who is interested in gardens and gardening. Most events are free, participation is encouraged, and it runs alongside the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Anyone can enter an event, as long as its legal ...
Last weekend I went to Birmingham at the invitation of the course team teaching the MA in History at the Open University. This was the second of six day schools that students on this programme attend, and took place at University College Birmingham.
I had been asked to talk about the project in general, but also the ways in which I went about writing my recent article on twentieth-century historical pageants, published in Social History ...