Blog

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.

Most humble men - by Tom Davis

by Ahutton April 13, 2016 Comments

Tom Davis is an undergraduate historian at the University of Exeter, Penryn Campus who is currently working on our Pageants project. Here, he compares two Pageants, the Historic Pageant of Northampton Nonconformity (1910), written by William Pierce and Co-operative Century. A Pageant of the People (1944), written by the prolific Pageant Master Lawrence du Garde Peach for the centenary of the Co-operative movement in Britain. Tom argues that there are significant overlaps between how the ...
Still Going -Pageantry in Arbroath!

by Lfleming April 7, 2016 Comments

The days when Arbroath staged innovative spectacles with stunning lighting and pioneering sound effects enacting the coming into being of the Declaration of Scottish Independence, may be over, but a small band of pageant players still like to recall this part of Arbroath's heritage. Since the last full performance of the Arbroath pageant in 2005, every year on the 6th of April (the date when the famed declaration was originally despatched in 1320) members ...
The View from St. Paul's

by Ahutton March 18, 2016 Comments

One of the questions our Pageants team repeatedly ask and are asked is just how much did spectators really get from Pageants? Did people in the cheapest seats at the pageant, who most likely did not buy a programme or book of words (whose grip on history might have been tenuous at best) really know what was going on? Could they really tell the eleventh Earl of Arundel from the twelfth? During the 1938 Pageant ...
Pageants and pickpockets

by Ahutton March 14, 2016 Comments

by Paul Readman
I’ve just remembered a curious discovery Tom Hulme and I made last summer, when we visited Sherborne. Before giving a talk to a meeting of the Somerset and Dorset History Society, we had time for a quick look in the Sherborne School archives.

Above: Paul in the archives
One of the highlights of the archive – apart from the life-size cut-out of Old Shirburnian Benedict Cumberbatch – is a large-format commemorative album of ...
The Pageant of Ambridge

by Ahutton March 7, 2016 Comments

A regular listener of the long-running compendium of rural sound effects The Archers has brought it to my attention that a current story line in the show involves the staging of a pageant at the Ambridge Village Hall. The Pageant being put on by Lynda Snell is a revival of E.M. Forster’s England’s Pleasant Land first staged at Milton Court, Surrey in July 1938.

England’s Green and Pleasant Land was Forster ...
‘The World’s Most Famous Strip-Girl’: Lady Godiva and the Coventry Pageants

by Ahutton Feb. 24, 2016 Comments

It is perhaps surprising that the celebration of the opening a new cathedral should be marked by public nudity, however, the 1962 Coventry Cathedral Festival which marked the opening of the Cathedral almost twenty-two years after the old building had been destroyed in a bombing raid was accompanied by a search for someone to play what the Daily Mail declared as ‘the world’s most famous strip-girl’[1]

Above: Programmes of various Lady Godiva Pageants ...
A Pageant that Wasn't

by Ahutton Feb. 19, 2016 Comments

by Mark Freeman

I have been sent a picture of a flyer advertising a pageant in St Albans to be held in July 1908. As the city had staged a historical pageant in 1907, and few if any places had more than one in this period, the document took me by surprise. The date of the flyer seems to be sometime in late 1907.

Above: Flyer for the St Albans pageant of 1908. Many thanks ...
Victorian courtroom dramas in 2016

by Ahutton Feb. 11, 2016 Comments

By Mark Freeman

On 28 January, as part of ‘Residents: Enjoy St Albans’ weekend, the St Albans Tour Guides put on a performance of some Victorian courtroom scenes in the courtroom in the old town hall. Built in the 1830s, this was a magistrates’ court, and also hosted grand jury proceedings, where the large jury considered bills of indictment.
The proceedings that were re-enacted in 2016 came from various real trials and committals from the ...
The Mendicant Merry Monarch

by Ahutton Feb. 1, 2016 Comments

We have a pool on about which historical figure crops up the most in Pageants. The obvious money is on Queen Elizabeth, largely because of the phenomenal numbers of visits she paid to towns and stately homes up and down the land. These visits, which could last weeks, could bankrupt local nobles through the expense of putting up her entire retinue of, servants, attendants and various flunkeys, nobles and ministers (and their attendants, servants and ...
Lumière London, January 2016

by Ahutton Jan. 25, 2016 Comments

by Mark Freeman
I spent a large part of Saturday night strolling around central London looking at the various light displays that had been mounted – for this weekend only – for the Lumière festival. Streets were closed, and thousands came onto the streets of the capital to look at a whole range of installations, ranging from the modest to the huge.

Above: Fish floating above Piccadilly
Highlights included lit-up fish floating above Piccadilly, a circus projected ...

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