11/08/2015

Available for over a year

Professor Pamela King and Dr Richard Blakemore join Helen Castor to discuss some our earliest theatre scripts and what a wreck in the Thames Estuary tells us about Cromwell's navy. Tom Holland travels to St Just in Cornwall to meet theatre producer Will Coleman who has researched the outdoor locations of medieval plays and how they were staged. Using manuscripts from the Bodleian Library in Oxford he suggests that Country theatre in the 14th century was an immersive experience, more like going to Glastonbury than The Globe. Helen Castor talks to Professor Pamela King who believes that what was happening in Cornwall is happening all over Britain at this time On Wednesday divers and archaeologists from Historic England will try and lift a gun carriage from a 350 year old wreck which lies on the bottom of the Thames estuary having blown up in 1665. The wreck is that of The London, an important ship in Cromwell's Navy. We hear from a diver working on the wreck and Dr James Davey from the National Maritime Museum and Dr Richard Blakemore from Merton College Oxford who explain the importance of this revolutionary navy in the development of the British Navy.