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Publications

Newsletter Archive

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We're in the process of adding our newsletters to the new website. Please contact the society via Bevcivicsoc@gmail.com or by using the website's contact form to gain access to the newsletters.

Foods, Feasts and Festivals: Beverley and the East Riding

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The three sections of its title describe how the great family of the Percy earls of Northumberland, and their household of 160 men, ate at Wressle Castle and Leconfield  Manor in the early years of the Tudor kings, where the food and drink came from and even how much it cost. Every day’s menu was recorded, what was eaten when, from the earl in his castle to the children in the nursery and the stablemen in the yards. Over the Twelve Days of Christmas, the food was even grander, as feast followed feast with elaborate ceremonies, music and plays. Beverley was a source of food and wine for the Percies and other great families, and the Northumberlands visited to watch with the merchant guildsmen from their ‘ castles' the medieval mystery plays (38 different plays in all, played on wagons rumbling through the town from dawn till dusk) and the great religious processions of St John’s shrine.

Twelve Extraordinary Beverley Women

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Twelve Extraordinary Beverley Women, edited by Barbara English, was published in January 2019.  It contains twelve essays by different people, based on talks given in Beverley in September 2018 within the Civic Society’s Heritage Open Days programme. The theme of Extraordinary Women was chosen by the national Heritage Open Days organisers (a branch of the National Trust) to commemorate 1918, when women were first permitted to vote in UK elections. The talks were so over-subscribed that the Civic Society decided to publish them as a book.

 

The Society found it easy to identify the town’s Extraordinary Women, and the twelve begin with St Hilda, an East Riding princess whose pupil founded Beverley, and ended with the designer Pat Albeck, who began to learn her great patterning skills at Beverley High School.  The full list of twelve women and the speakers who described them are listed below.

 

St Hilda of Whitby  Barbara English, Emeritus Professor of History

Johanna Crossley  Barbara English, Emeritus Professor of History

Mary Wollstonecraft  Janine Hatter, University of Hull

Elizabeth Lambert  Sally Hayes, Beverley Curator (Treasure House)

Mary Braddon   Janine Hatter, University of Hull

Mary Elwell   Sally Hayes, Beverley Curator (Treasure House)

Eva Collet Reckitt  Bernard Porter, Emeritus Professor of History

Nellie Collinson  Pamela Eldred, great niece of Nellie Collinson

Hilda Lyon     Nina Baker, historian of women in engineering

Winifred Holtby  Janine Hater, University of Hull

Margaret Powell  Barbara Powell, daughter of Margaret Powell

Pat Albeck   Hannah Hoad, artist and teacher

 

Chairwoman for the talks Margaret Pinder

Designer of the book  Kloskk Tyrer

 

The Extraordinary Women of Beverley include brief biographies from many centuries, with accounts of their talents and different experiences. Beverley Civic Society believes that readers will find much of interest in the different sections.

 

73 pages, fully illustrated in colour.

Purchase the book by clicking on the link below:

 

Click here

Beverley Pastures

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BEVERLEY PASTURES by Barbara English was published by the Beverley Civic Society in 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Society. The common pastures that lie east and west of Beverley, an ancient market town in East Yorkshire, have a long and interesting history. Westwood, Hurn, Figham, and Swine Moor, they came into the possession of the town in the early middle ages, and are today governed by a group of Pasture Masters, chosen by Pasture Freemen and Freewomen in an archaic election held in the town’s medieval Guildhall.

 

The pastures are a much loved part of Beverley, and provide green spaces for people to walk, run, fly kites, sledge, play golf and go racing’ and also to find a wide variety of birds, mammals and reptiles, and wild flowers. The survival of the pastures (among the greatest of all urban commons in England) is remarkable, for there are endless pressures to ‘modernise’ them or even to build roads, car parks or cycle tracks on them.

 

The Beverley Civic Society offers this book in the hope that it may make the pastures even better known, and so help the Pasture Masters to continue to resist change that would harm these distinctive and much loved spaces. 88 pages, fully illustrated in colour.

You can also purchase the book by clicking on the link below:

Click here

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