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.
Having worked my way through the tale of Arbroath's past pageant glory, I'm now familiar with the work of the pageant master who was in charge for at least twelve out of the town's eighteen pageants - Frank Thornton. As readers of our web page will know, the Arbroath pageant chiefly celebrated the signing of the Scottish Declaration of Independence in 1320.
I was never in any doubt that Mr Thornton was a ...
Walking through the City of London the other night I came across a welcome sight, that of a street sign bearing the name Pageantmaster Court near St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill. On doing some brief internet digging, the sign goes back to 1993 and commemorates J.R. Snowdon, Pageant Master of twenty of the Lord Mayor’s Shows.
Though not strictly a historical pageant the Lord Mayor’s show, which dates from 1189 ...
Mark Freeman
On Monday the ‘Redress of the Past’ team met with the project advisory board for the second time. Along with many other projects, we made provision in our application to the AHRC for an advisory board, on which a range of academic perspectives are represented, as well as stakeholders in the project from the heritage and information sector. One member, David Glassberg, came all the way from Massachussetts to attend the meeting. His ...
Like every other four year old, I was obsessed tractors. As a twenty-seven years old, I still am (privately). The best tractor, as I’m sure you will know, is the red Massey-Ferguson.
Sadly (or, from another perspective, fortunately) hay fever prevented this relationship from every truly blossoming although my cousin’s farm has a thoroughly respectable collection. One event I’m sure I would have loved to go to as a small child was ...
When planning pageants, writers had to be careful in how they portrayed historical characters: as heroes, as villains, and noble knights or comic fools. Misjudging a town’s local hero could be very harmful. Thus King John appears as the bad King John forced by the barons to sign Magna Carta or, at Bury St Edmunds, taking the Abbey’s treasures. However, as at the Stafford or Bridport Pageants, he appears as the King who ...
By Mark Freeman
A visit to Scarborough
Mark Freeman
This morning our new project researcher Alex Hutton and I visited Scarborough to meet our project partners from the Scarborough Museums Trust. We are staging an exhibition on the Scarborough pageant of 1912, which will be opening on 12 September 2016 in the Scarborough Art Gallery on The Crescent. The exhibition closes on 10 October 2016, but will move to the town’s library for a ...
By Mark Freeman
Last week a colleague and I
visited the Whitechapel Gallery to see an exhibition
about the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, an esoteric organisation founded in
1920 by John Hargrave.
Hargrave had been involved
with the early Scouting movement, but broke away due to its militaristic
tendencies – he had Quaker connections and was a pacifist. The Kibbo Kift
involved men and women of all ages, and had a complex set of rituals ...
One of the most impressive aspect of Pageantry was the costumes. Often, when seen up close, rather than from at a distance, chainmail was stiflingly-warm knitted wool and pearls were mere painted chestnuts. Nonetheless, the spectacle of one Pageant in 1934 led a leader writer for the Times to contrast the colourful display of Pageantry costumes with more austere contemporary fashions:
‘The Pageants, which from Ludlow and Thanet to the Albert Hall now give innumerable ...
To finish off our Pageants and People Exhibition, held at the King’s College London Arts and Humanities Festival on Monday 19 October, we heard three talks by people on the project. Paul Readman spoke first, giving a general overview of Historical Pageantry. He discussed Pageantry's Edwardian origins at Sherborne under the strict rules set down by Louis Napoleon Parker, through its height in the 1920s, the use of Pageantry by many radical organisations ...
Pageants and people: an exhibition at King’s College London
Mark Freeman (19 October 2015)
Today we staged a one-day exhibition in the River Room, overlooking the Thames, at King’s College London. This was part of the KCL Arts & Humanities Festival, which this year has the theme ‘Fabrication’. The idea of the festival is to showcase the range of research that goes on at the college, and it was an excellent opportunity to ...