By Madi East In the 16th century, England faced growing threats, particularly from France and Spain. In recognition of this, King Henry the 8th ordered the construction of new coastal defences, including Southsea Castle. The location of Southsea Castle was strategically chosen to overlook the main navigable channel into Portsmouth harbour, through the Solent. It was accompanied by a range of defences such as artillery, chain booms, and the use of natural features (like the sandbanks of the Solent) to their advantage. Any ship that attempted to reach the harbour would be forced into the range of the castle’s guns, making it an ideal artillery platform. [1] It is suggested […]
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Research in Focus
A heritage-lottery funded project to explore Black lives in Portsmouth
The Portsmouth Black History Group has been awarded a grant by The National Lottery Heritage Fund to fill a gap in the Portsmouth archives by documenting the experiences of the pioneering African and Caribbeans who made the city their home after the Second World War. Our own Dr Jodi Burkett, Senior Lecturer in History, who is the University’s current representative on the Portsmouth Black History Group, comments: “This project will add to a growing national picture of the role, experiences and importance of African and Caribbean people to the development of British society in the late twentieth century. It will enrich our understanding of the vast range of people who […]
Do not seek pleasure – guidelines for 17th-century widows
Last year our own Dr Maria Cannon won a fellowship to study at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. While there she came across a manuscript book, Of the Commendable Estate of Widowehoode, a translation of a 16th century Italian work which advises widows on suitable behaviour, and afterwards wrote this blog piece for the Folger Library blog. Let’s just say that having any kind of fun is out. While its lessons can appear restrictive and depressing to modern tastes, this lengthy guide reveals that women were responsible for negotiating their own behaviour, spirituality and relationship to God. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/how-to-be-a-true-widow/
The conflicted loyalties of gunmakers during the English Civil Wars and after
English Civil War royalism has often been depicted as the preserve of the elite, but this was not necessarily the case, as MRes student Natalie Lejeune found in her research into the activities of gunmakers during and after the civil wars. Prior royal service often inclined these specialist craftsmen towards the Royalists initially. After the Royalist defeat, they transferred their work to a new Republican Government prepared to tolerate their dubious loyalties in exchange for their much-needed skills. Yet their loyalties remained conflicted, with some, including female-gunmakers as well as men, secretly supplying arms to Royalist conspiracists on the side, a pattern of mixed loyalties which mirrors those in France […]
Was mid-17th century Britain a dystopian society?
Dr Fiona Mccall was interviewed in December for the 1984 Today! podcast on all things dystopian, being intrigued by the concept of thinking about the 1640s and 1650s, in this way. How did the strictures of the real puritan regime of mid-17th century Britain compare with fictional dystopias like those of Orwell, Huxley, John Wyndham, Margaret Atwood and John Christopher? There were certainly incidents that strike us today as dystopian: the execution of women (but not men) for adultery; the rise in witch hunting for example. But the theme encouraged reflection on whether we would understand these times as dystopian in the same way as those who lived through them […]
Who do I trust? Analysing local grievances at the start of the French Revolution
Our own Professor Dave Andress has a new journal article published in the latest issue of Historical Journal, “The Language of confiance and the French cahiers de doléances of 1789”, which you can read in full on open access here. With increasing historiographical attention to the emotional content of French revolutionary politics, the unprecedented nationwide consultation that produced the cahiers de doléances of 1789, ‘registers of grievances’, drawn up by localities to the Estates-General convocation, now available as a searchable digitised corpus of four million words, offers a way to explore the hopes, fears, and concerns of thousands of French people who participated in the cahiers’ composition. The article […]