The Nightingale, Chough and Phoenix are back!

As the beginning of a new venture but building on what has happened over the last decade, for the first KCHH blog I thought it would be good to open with details of the forthcoming Nightingale Lecture.

This year the Michael Nightingale Memorial Lecture will be held in the Templeman Library Lecture Theatre on Tuesday 23 September at 7pm with a wine reception from 6.30pm. As a change from previous years, this is organised by MEMS Kent with CAMEMS and, as always, Brook Rural Museum, Michael Nightingale having been instrumental in the establishing of the Museum at Brook in the fabulous late-fourteenth-century barn and early-nineteenth-century oast house. We are very fortunate that our speaker this year is Victoria Stevens, a conservator and lecturer at West Dean College in Sussex. Her talk is entitled ‘Conserving intangibility: the significance of change in heritage collections’. As Victoria says, “Conservation, by its very nature, is firmly rooted in the preservation of stability in tangible objects. Conservators work to maintain structure, form, aesthetics and frequently function. But what about the conservation of an object’s story of use? Or the meaning that damage, or material change, can add to that story?

This presentation will seek to identify where significance in heritage lies and demonstrate the opportunities for this to be explored and maintained through conservation and preservation interventions. Using a series of case studies, based specifically on the speaker’s specialist area of written heritage, this presentation will demonstrate that meaning can lie beyond the overt or apparent object and be held in evidence of human interaction, including what we have previously seen as damage. It will investigate the way that the changes an object has undergone in production, use or subsequent storage can impact the way heritage objects are interpreted and understood, and the added value and holistic view this can provide. Finally, it will seek to highlight some of the analytical techniques that are available to conservators to gain this information without invasive treatment.”

For some background on our speaker, Victoria has recently completed a Masters by Research at CCCU. Moreover, she has worked in heritage collections for over 25 years, mainly as a written heritage conservator and collections care adviser but latterly as a learning and engagement lead, a perfect complement to her overall collections work. As well as being the current Subject Lead for Books and Library Materials at West Dean College of Arts, Design, Crafts and Conservation, she is a sessional tutor on the Archives and Records Management course at University College London. She believes developing the potential of students and providing them with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in their chosen direction is a huge privilege.

Consequently, she is very proud to be a strong advocate for the heritage profession: as a result, she currently serves not only as a Trustee of the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust but also as an Arts Council Museum accreditation mentor and an Institute of Conservation accreditation assessor. Additionally, she is a committee member and assessor for the Archive and Records Association’s Archives Training Scheme and sits on the Fabric Advisory Committee of Hereford Cathedral as their conservation adviser.

This is a free, public lecture which means we shall be delighted to see you on Tuesday 23^rd September, please also note that car parking is free after working hours at the University of Kent. I am hoping that Karen Brayshaw in Special Collections will be providing a small display in the library. So do join us!

Moving to October, this should also see the publication of the book from the Kent Maritime Communities project which was done in conjunction with Drs Craig Lambert and Robert Blackmore from the University of Southampton. All being well, we’ll be able to have a book launch at Dover and if you are interested, please see details of the publication on the Boydell website: Kent and Europe, 1450-1640 – Boydell and Brewer .

Staying with October, and I will mention these again near the time, there are two exciting events taking place. In Kent on Saturday 18 October it is the first day of a 2-day celebration at the Royal Engineers Museum at Gillingham, the Medway History Showcase that is going from strength to strength with its hallmark stalls provided by a broad range of history and heritage organisations in Medway, and more broadly from across Kent, as well as a series of great talks. For the first time this year there will be a group from CAMEMS which is excellent news. See the Museum’s website with more details shortly: What’s On – Royal Engineers Museum

Sadly this clashes with the MHS, but on Saturday, 18 October the Southern History Society is holding a day conference at Winchester on the theme of ‘Poverty in the Parish in Southern England, Medieval to Modern’. As readers of the old blog will know, this is something I am interested in and I have offered a paper on continuity and charge concerning funeral doles in Tudor Kent, which will give me the chance to draw on evidence from the excellent will collections for Kent from this period.

In addition to food and drink, such doles might include the provision of clothing, thereby following Christ’s directive to ‘clothe the naked’. Interestingly, some testators seemingly had a strong personal link to their chosen recipient while at the other end of the spectrum the choice of receipts was left entirely in the hands of the testator’s executors. Just to give an example of each of these, when John Pynnok of Sholden (near Sandwich) made his will in 1519, he bequeathed to William ‘my bedesman at Sandwich’ a leather coat. It seems likely this garment was the last in a succession of gifts William had received from his benefactor, William having undertaken his part of this reciprocal arrangement through his earlier prayers for John’s well-being, his acts of intercession for John’s soul to continue thereafter. This suggests John’s leather coat was a visible reminder of the charitable bond between the two men, William seen by his neighbours as a living memorial of his patron’s generosity, while his own worthiness as a suitable recipient would be assessed through his devotion to his calling as a humble intercessor on John’s behalf.

Someone who might be said to have been at the other end of this spectrum was William Thompson of Canterbury. In his will dated 1516 he intended that all his old coats, jackets, doublets, hose, caps and hats, but not his doublet and jacket of worsted silk, should be given to poor people. He left no further instructions in his will, expecting that his executors would use their local knowledge to find suitable recipients. Whether this distribution was to occur at William’s funeral services is not clear, and his primary concern seems to have been the appropriateness of the gift for the poor.

Although these two examples come from the early part of the 16^th century and therefore reflect ideas in pre-Reformation Kent, hopefully they do demonstrate the potential of such evidence. And who knows, I may return to these sources for the next blog in a fortnight’s time because they are important, too, for doctoral research students working on a range of topics.