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Making History
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Tuesday 3.00-3.30 p.m
Vanessa Collingridge and the team answer listener’s historical queries and celebrate the way in which we all ‘make’ history.
Programme 2
7 October 2008
Vanessa Collingridge and the team explore themes from Britain’s past thanks to queries raised by listener’s own historical research.

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St Augustine at Long Compton in Warwickshire

Mark Morris is a member of the Long Compton History Society and he approached Making History to clarify a local rumour. Did Saint Augustine of Canterbury visit the village in the sixth century and if so why?

Making History consulted the Reverend Professor Matthew Steenberg from .

Augustine was sent to Britain by Pope Gregory who himself yearned to come to Britain but, once he’d become Pope, his papal duties prevented it. Britain was important because it was unaffiliated. Augustine arrived in 597 at Ebbsfleet. Letters sent to Rome show he was nervous about the reception he would get (the Roman stereotype of the British as poorly dressed, long-haired thugs survived). But, incredibly, King Ethelbert of Kent – a pagan – met him personally and asked him to address his court. He even gave his blessing for Augustine’s work.

Augustine makes himself a base in Canterbury and we have evidence that he travelled. In particular in 602/603 he went to meet with the Bishops of the British Church near Wales. Perhaps at Aust near one of today’s Severn Crossings. Long Compton is but a few miles north of the route he may have travelled and so Matthew Steenberg is quite prepared to believe that he may well have visited the village but warns that we have no hard evidence for this. Why did he visit? Well, according to Matthew Steenberg, the Neolithic rollright stones in the village would not have attracted him. Britain was full of pagan sites and symbols and Pope Gregory had made it clear that he wanted Augustine to ignore them. Professor Steenberg suggests that there is evidence for a long standing British church in the village which could possibly have been in place for 150 years prior to Augustine’s arrival in Kent. It would be more likely that he would visit a Christian site than a pagan one.

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The Plague Pits of London

Making History listener Sally Browne recalls stories from her youth about shrubs marking the spot where plague victims were buried in the City of London. Is this true and what was the extent of the burial sites she asks?

Making History consultedÌę Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

June 7th 1665: This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and to chaw which took away the apprehension.

From the diaries of Samuel Pepys

It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 Londoners died from the plague in 1665. People had little understanding of how the disease spread. Those who were ill and their families were locked up and their houses marked with a cross, others took refuge on boats on the Thames. The great and the good – including Parliament - left town. It was a long hot summer and soon London’s burial grounds couldn’t cope. The church authorities tried to give the dead a proper funeral but more often than not the deceased were taken to mass graveyards on the outskirts of the city. Although it was written in 1722, Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” remains a convincing account of the events of 1665.

Professor Champion has heard many rumours of plague pits all over London. However, he reminds us that London was geographically much smaller in the seventeenth century and many of today’s rumours surround places that would have been in open countryside in 1665 and would not have experienced the severe pressure on burial grounds that the City did.

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TheÌę houses many records and papers from 1665 including the Bills of Mortality
Skull and Cross Bones

Cliff Horton contacted Making History following a family holiday in Cornwall. He was struck by the number of gravestones in the churchyard at St Just which had skull and crossbones motifs on them. Is this linked to Cornwall’s maritime heritage asks Cliff?

Making History consulted archaeologist Dr Sarah Tarlow at theÌę.

Vanessa Collingridge met up with her at Anstey churchyard north of Leicester where some graves also have skull and crossbones on them.

Sarah Tarlow

Dr Sarah Tarlow

Dr Tarlow explained that skull and crossbones have nothing to do with pirates, plague victims, poisoning or Catholics, they simply come from an age (most usually the seventeenth and eighteenth century) when attitudes to death and the deceased was very different to the nineteenth century and later. Quite simply, these motifs were a reminder to the living of what happened to the body at death. Judgement was made on lives lead not vain hope of forgiveness later.
    Contact ÌęMaking History
    Use this link to email Vanessa Collingridge and the team: email Making History

    Write to: Making History
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    Telephone: 08700 100 400

    Making History is produced by Nick Patrick and is a Pier Production.
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    Vanessa Collingridge
    Vanessa CollingridgeVanessa has presentedÌęscience and current affairs programmes for ±«Óătv, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for ±«Óătv Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.Ìę

    Contact Making History
    Send your comments and questions for future programmes to:
    Making History
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    BN1 1PL

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    Making HistoryÌęis a Pier Production for ±«Óătv Radio 4 and is produced by Nick Patrick.

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