Hampshire and the Wider World
Date: Saturday, 21st April 2018, 9.20 am - 3.45 pm
Progamme
2018's Local History Section Spring Symposium comprised the following talks:
- Norman monks and Hampshire churches: alien priories between 1066 and the loss of Normandy - Dr Brian Golding
- 'A Funny Thing Happened on the way to China': Southampton Merchants and the New World - Dr Cheryl Butlerd, Hon. Fellow, University of Winchester
- Eighteenth Century Revolutions: Hampshire's Response to America and France - David Roberts, PhD Student, University of Winchester
- The transportation of convicts from Hampshire to Australia during the 19th century - Celia Lassen, Local Historian and Researcher
- Missions, Mothers, Church and Empire: Connections between Rural Hampshire and the Wider World c.1850-1980 -Alistair Beecher, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
The Symposium was held in the Cinema at the Hampshire Record Office, Sussex Street, Winchester.
A pdf of the programme is also available for download. (0.7 mb)
The Speakers & their topics:
Dr Brian Golding
Brian Golding taught medieval history at Southampton university till his retirement. He has written extensively on ecclesiastical and monastic history, especially the Gilbertine order (e.g. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, Oxford University Press, 1995), Gerald of Wales, as well as on many aspects of the Norman Conquest. He is the author of Conquest and Coloniza on: the Normans in Britain, 1066 - 1100 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and wrote the introduction to the Hampshire volume of the Alecto edition of Domesday Book. He is currently working on monastic foundation histories.
1066 represents one of the great tectonic shifts in English history whose aftershocks were still felt centuries later, perhaps even until today. A new French, overwhelmingly but not exclusively Norman, aristocracy occupied the commanding heights of both lay and ecclesiastical government, society, and economy. These settlers gradually constructed a new identity, but like all colonialists their relationship with the homeland was often fraught, particularly since the colony was wealthier and more
effectively governed and administered than their French principalities: these tensions were ultimately irreconcilable. Today's paper examines this relationship through the prism of monastic patronage, especially the creation of 'alien priories' that established colonial enclaves that were administered and staffed from Normandy, and which were themselves threatened as relations between the kingdom and duchy fractured.
Dr Cheryl Butlerd, Hon. Fellow, University of Winchester
Dr Cheryl Butler studied history and drama at Winchester & Southampton Universities, with a special focus on Southampton in the late medieval and early modern period. She is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Winchester, on the editorial board of the Southampton Records Series and the Hampshire Papers and is a trustee of the Hampshire Archives Trust. Awarded the Brtish Association of Local History personal achievement award in 2014, she has written extensively on the history of Southampton including three volumes for the SRS on the Southampton Book of Fines, and books covering the oral history of Itchen Ferry Village (We Only Wore Shoes on a Sunday, Tudor Southampton Rioters, Revellers & Reformers and Jane Austen Jane Austen & Southampton Spa). In 2017 she published her first novel set in Elizabethan Southampton The Theatre of the World.
In 2020 it will be the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower from Southampton, bound for the New World, but Southampton’s contact with the New Found Land stretches back to the 1490s. It is a story of trade, exploration, privateering, colonisation and fish. This presentation will explore how the merchants of Southampton
looked to find new trade routes and trading partners to replace the traditional European markets which had begun to collapse in the sixteenth century. A story that led to war and the threat of invasion and ended with the birth of an empire.
David Roberts, PhD Student, University of Winchester
David Roberts originally read History at The Queen’s College, Oxford. After retiring from a career in management, he returned to academic study through an MA at the University of Winchester, where his dissertation covered the politics of Winchester’s corportion in the 17th century. He is now working on a PhD which is concerned with the Political Culture of Georgian Hampshire.
The events of the American Revolution created an issue which divided Hampshire’s poltical elite. They also acted as a catalyst for new organisations and ways of doing politics in the county. This culminated in a critical by-election of 1779 where the previously loyal Hampshire electorate returned a candidate opposed to Lord North’s government.
A decade later events across the Channel provoked a very different response. Despite the real social and economic problems which existed in Hampshire and elsewhere, there was no British Revolution to match the one in France. Instead a loyalist upsurge enabled the government to ensure that it was never in danger of succumbing to
the radical political movements of the time.
Celia Lassen, Local Historian and Researcher
Celia Lassen gained a Masters in Social History at the University of Winchester in 2011. Her dissertation was on the Transportation of convicts from Hampshire to Australia. She has a long-standing interest in the transportation of convicts to Australia, originting from a greatgreat-grandfather who was transported for stealing a handkerchief. She is now retired but helps with research for St Barbe Museum, Lymington. She previously worked at the University of Hertfordshire, in employment in Peterborough and prior to that with the Foreign Office.
The period of transportation to Australia lasted from 1787 to 1868, during which time 162 thousand people were transported. 2,102 convicts were transported from Hampshire, of which 341 were transported between 1815 and 1825. The majority of these later convicts were convicted of theft and the majority of them came from Hampshire and were labourers of some sort. They were convicted in the United Kingdom and imprisoned or confined to hulks before their departure. They then sailed in cramped conditions for weeks on end. After their arrival they were dispersed to work. The conditions they endured and the hardships they overcame are unimaginable by today’s standards. They formed part of the backbone of what is now a successful country.
Alistair Beecher, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford
Alistair Beecher is a part- time tutor in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. After a 30-year career as a chartered accountant, mostly spent in London, he returned to academia in 2010 completing a postgraduate certificate, a masters and a DPhil in History at Oxford. His doctoral thesis explored secularisation in rural Hampshire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Bri sh Empire was arguably at the height of its power and influence in the early twentieth century, controlling around a quarter of the world’s land mass and population. The people of rural Hampshire, whose daily lives were heavily influenced by the Anglican Church, bore witness to their collective identity through enthusiastic support for missionary pageants, Empire days, jubilees and other communal celebrations. Having explored the Imperial context, this paper goes on to consider one of the most significant and enduring connections between Hampshire and the wider world; the formation and evolution of the Mothers’ Union which, under Mary Sumner’s initial guidance, grew from its humble roots in Old Alresford to become a truly global organisation with four million members in over 80 countries.
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