Vanessa Collingridge and the team answer listener’s historical queries and celebrate the way in which we all ‘make’ history.
Programme 11
9 December 2008
Vanessa Collingridge and the team explore themes from Britain’s past thanks to queries raised by listener’s own historical research.
Church Spires
A Making History listener has just returned from a trip to Turkey and was rather taken with the minarets, or tall spires, found on Mosques. Could it be, she wondered, that British crusaders saw these back in the 11th and 12th centuries and then introduced them here?
Making History consulted Dr Richard Plant at Christie’s Education in London who explained that the church spire was more of a technological innovation of the French gothic than a cultural or spiritual introduction.
It could be argued that the tower of Sompting church in West Sussex is our earliest example of a spire or ‘Rhenish helm’ as it is properly called. However, it is agreed that the 12th century spire on Chartres cathedral in France is the best example of the early gothic spire and shows that architects and church-builders had managed to safely unite two different shapes – one square and the other pyramidal. In Britain,
Salisbury Cathedral’s 123 metre spire built between 1320 and 1380 is the tallest of the period anywhere in the world. Richard Plant accepts that the development of spires may well have been encouraged by a kind of municipal display of importance and that churchgoers would have seen the spire reaching to the heavens, but the real influence was technological from just across the North Sea and English Channel in Germany and France – not Turkey and the Middle East.
Who drained the Fens?
A Making History listener has found evidence that two Irish ancestors settled in Crowland near Peterborough in the 1630’s at the time when the drainage of the Fens was just about to begin. There is a suggestion that they may have been gifted land in return for their work on the drainage programme. Is this evidence of our first Irish navvies and, if not, who did all the spadework?
Making History’s Richard Daniel met up with social historian Dr Heather Falvey on the Ouse Washes in west Norfolk where she explained the work that was carried out in the 1630’s. Then they moved to the Cambridgeshire Record Office in Cambridge to see if there were any record for the labourers.
Following a discussion in last week’s Making History ( 2/12/08) in which a contributor suggested that a lack of research in our universities held back the teaching of the eighteenth century in our schools, one or two institutions contacted the programme to tell us that they put great emphasis on this period.
A Making History listener has discovered that two of his ancestors were aboard a Hull whaler caught in the Arctic ice for 13 months in the 1860’s. Making History consulted the outgoing Keeper of Maritime History at Kingston upon Hull Museum, Arthur Credland.
Cathyrn Pearce pointed out that most of the stories of false lights do not appear in primary sources until the mid-nineteenth century. She thinks that it is the romantic novelists of the Victorian period and the Methodist revival at this time that stokes up inaccurate stories about Cornish wreckers. She points out that local people have always salvaged material from wrecks and this is what many Cornish people understood by the term ‘wrecking’, however, the Methodists in particular need a ‘bogeyman’ and so-called ‘wreckers’ become such people. Records show that the Methodists used examples of people who were new to their faith who had, allegedly, once been ‘wreckers’, then turning over a new leaf and shunning their sinful past. There are also stories where the facts have been substantially changed throughout history, Cathryn points to one from the Scillies – see National Maritime Museum Cornwall
Helen Doe also thinks that the actions of smugglers may well have been confused with those of ‘wreckers’. The former used lights on cliff-tops to signal to ships at sea and this is where the legend of ‘false-lights’ has come from.
Vanessa has presented science and current affairs programmes for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for BBC Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.
Contact Making History
Send your comments and questions for future programmes to: Making History BBC Radio 4 PO Box 3096 Brighton BN1 1PL
Vanessa has presented science and current affairs programmes for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for BBC Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald. 