Bloody Flux and the King’s Evil
December 21, 2023
This is a guest post by Jayne Muir, who volunteered at Manuscripts and Special Collections between April and September 2023, cataloguing medicinal herbs and their uses in remedies from material held in our collections. The byways, meadows and cottage gardens of Britain were once a vast larder of ingredients from which oils, ointments, tinctures, pills, …
Beyond the Mayflower: Separatists and Puritans
October 6, 2021
Our new exhibition ‘Beyond the Mayflower’ is now open at the Weston Gallery, Lakeside Arts. Among the passengers on the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 were a group of religious separatists who wished to worship in a different way to that allowed by the Church of England. In the early 17th century the Church …
In Sickness and Incest
April 2, 2019
On the 9th June 1732, Edward Robinson and Martha Robinson of Heanor were married in St Alkmund’s, the 12th century parish church of Duffield in south Derbyshire. At the time, the happy couple were living 18 miles away in Beeston, a few miles from Nottingham city. Perhaps they married there because Martha was originally a …
The Curious Case of Benjamin Cockayne
January 22, 2018
By October 1719, Churchwardens Stephen Turpin and John Pimm had had enough of Benjamin Cockayne, the bad boy of Bramcote. For seven years, they had watched with increasing concern his immoral lifestyle, his drunkenness, and his routine abuse of his neighbours. They brought a case against Cockayne to the ecclesiastical authorities and there was no shortage …
Anne Vaux: recusant!
November 1, 2017
If you’ve been watching the BBC drama Gunpowder, you will be aware of the historical character Anne Vaux, played by Liv Tyler. Anne was unmarried and wealthy, and fiercely devoted to Roman Catholicism, at a time when Catholics were being persecuted for their faith. According to her biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography …
Robert Boyle, the Biggleswade Bigamist
February 14, 2017
With dark eyes, broad shoulders and a black suit with a gold-embroidered waistcoat, former soldier Robert Boyle cut a dashing figure. He used his confidence and charm to win the hearts of young ladies wherever he went – and then ruined them. Bigamist Five days into her marriage, Susannah Boyle was confronted with the reality …
A new view: changes to our Manuscripts Online Catalogue
February 17, 2016
After ten years of faithful service, our Manuscripts Online Catalogue has had a facelift. Our new CalmView website, like our old catalogue, allows users to search over 250,000 records describing our rich manuscript and archive collections. However, beyond a cosmetic refresh, the launch of CalmView has allowed us to bring thousands of records relating to …
One Born Every Minute
May 2, 2015
As William and Kate welcome their baby daughter into the world at the state-of-the-art private maternity ward The Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, we had a look back through our collections to see what childbirth was like in the 17th and 18th centuries. Traditionally, pregnancy and birth were social and domestic occurrences, which predominantly …
What’s in a name?
July 11, 2014
It was Zsa Zsa Gabor who said “I call everyone ‘darling’ because I can’t remember their names”. Perhaps she had never been introduced to people blessed (or cursed?) with creative, unique or downright strange names. Here, in chronological order, are fifteen genuine examples of people’s names taken from the manuscripts that we have come across: Original Steele, of …
Finding your Family
June 2, 2014
Within the 4 million documents held in Manuscripts and Special Collections are the names of hundreds of thousands of people from Nottinghamshire and the broader East Midlands. Catalogues can never list every person named in documents, so one of the major challenges of family history research is finding which records may refer to your ancestors. …
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