Tag: #itemofthemonth

Item of the month: A Peek into the Mysterious World of 16th Century Witchcraft

A post by Archives & Special Collections Apprentice, Charlie Lough

Amongst the vast Durham Probate Records (DPR) collection is a modest document wrapper from the 16th century. However, upon closer inspection, this unassuming item hints at a world where witchcraft and sorcery were very real fears.

Let’s travel back to 1592, to the village of Chatton in Northumberland, where a man named Steven Revlye died. After his death, an inventory of his belongings was created. But what is really fascinating is not what Steven owned, but what was used to wrap up this inventory; a piece of paper that had served as a public notice. The document in question had the remains of a public announcement about “sorc[ery]” and “incha[ntment],” words that would send shivers down the spines of any 16th century villager. During this time, the word “witchcraft” was used to describe a wide range of practices, some of which were purely imaginary. But whether real or not, those accused of such practices often faced severe consequences.

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Item of the month: Satires, censors, and pseudonyms

Les galanteries et les debauches de l’empereur Neron…Par Petrone (Bamburgh I.5.32)

A post by Collections Assistant Caroline Ball, in Cologne

On the title-page of this book, the imprint tells us that it was published in 1694, in Cologne, in the workshop of the printer Pierre Marteau. Sounds plausible? Certainly, until we discover that Pierre Marteau – “Peter the Hammer” – never actually existed.

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Item of the month: Peter Apian’s Cosmographia

A post by Collections Coordinator Hannah Cartwright

Our item of this monthis Peter Apian’s Cosmographia. Initially published in 1524, later editions of Cosmographia expanded and edited by Gemma Frisius became hugely successful. Our 1584 edition is one of these later editions. Over 40 editions of Cosmographia were published in under a century, and it was translated from Latin into 4 different languages.

So, what made Cosmographia a 16th century bestseller?

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Item of the month: Letter from Sarah Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey, to Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey – 8th January 1827

A post by Collections Assistant Jennifer Leach

This letter is one of 152 letters held in our collections written from the Countess of Jersey to Earl Grey. In 1827 Earl Grey was a prominent member of the Whig party but had just resigned his leadership to Lord Lansdowne, partly due to how at odds he was with the Prince Regent. However, in just three years he would become Prime Minister. The Countess was an influential member of the London social elite as she was not only a member of the aristocracy and extremely wealthy independently of her husband but also a patron of Almack’s, the most exclusive social club in London.

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Item of the Month: Photograph Album from the White Russian Camp in Kellerberg

The Kellerberg (also spelled Kellerburg) and Feffernitz Camps in Austria housed 10,000 displaced persons between them in the late 1940s. The Camp was located near the town of Kellerberg in the Drava River valley, northwest of Villach, Austria. Largely new barracks, the camp consisted of, at minimum, beds and basic structures, although it was built up to include a Church, Cemetery, Theatre Hall, and barracks for living quarters as more persons arrived. The camp was multinational, Slovenes were the largest group followed by persons from the Baltic countries and other Eastern and Southeastern countries of Europe. While families had their own barracks for privacy, single men and women had separate barracks, one for women and one for men.

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Item of the month: An Account of the loss of HMS Athenienne in October 1806

Athenienne, a 64 gun third-rate ship of the line saw service during the War of the Second Coalition in the French Revolutionary Wars. She also supplied the British fleet following the Battle of Trafalgar. She sank in 1806 with the loss of over 300 lives. GRE A2229 details an account of the loss of the ship on 20 October when it ran aground on a submerged reef in the channel between Sardinia, Sicily and Africa.

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Library by the sea: the first printed catalogue of the Bamburgh Castle Library

Way before the existence of the large online library catalogues we are now familiar with, libraries users would have had to visit a library to find if it held the material they were interested in, or they might be able to consult a printed catalogue. Today, these printed catalogues are valuable to researchers and librarians interested in what libraries used to have on their shelves and how the library’s contents changed over time. They tell us about former library management practices and collection development. They offer an insight into what was considered appropriate reading material. Where libraries no longer exist, historic catalogues are important witnesses to how knowledge and information circulated among communities. They are occasionally also a source of information about who could use the library and on what terms.

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Item of the month: From tea rooms to decontamination centres – developments at South Shields sea front in the 1920s 

plan showing concrete platform with swimming bath and tennis courts, identifying parts of beach and land north of Lawe Road from different deeds, and marking row of buildings with red and blue hatching.

A post by archivist Andrew Gray

August means summer holidays.  And for many of us, summer holidays means days at the beach.  So this month, we celebrate the beaches at South Shields, and in particular the development of the foreshore north of the pier (Littlehaven beach) in the 1920s. 

Our item of the month comes in the middle of this development, so first some context.  The end of the 19th century saw the transformation of local government, culminating locally in the formation of South Shields County Borough in 1889. In 1896, the Corporation had got Parliament to pass the South Shields Corporation Act, “… to make better provision for the health and good government of the Borough and for other purposes.”  This gave the local authority extensive powers (among others) to acquire new lands, to regulate the use of the seafront and public bathing, and to lay out and manage public parks. During the first decades of the 20th century, they took advantage of their new powers, and development of the foreshores at South Shields was typical of this new ambition. 

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Item of the month: First world war novel or anonymised memoir: ‘The Crown Prince’s Jewels’

The Sudan Archive recently accessioned the papers of Philip Ingleson (1892-1985) and his wife Gwen (née Fulton, 1896-1986). Philip Ingleson was Governor of Darfur from 1935 until his retirement in 1944, his period in office probably extended due to the war. Unusually, Ingleson also served as governor in Halfa (1931-1932), Berber (1932-1934) and Bahr el Ghazal provinces as well. He thus must be one of the few people to have governed in north, south and west Sudan; he began his career in the Sudan Political Service in 1919 as an Inspector in Um Kedada, Darfur.

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