- 8th March 2019
Dig a hole in any medieval town or village in England, and you’ll find pottery. On most medieval excavations, potsherds are likely to be the most abundant type of artefact. Popular ideas about medieval crafts such as pot-making are dominated by images of bearded men in dirty aprons, such as this extract from this article...
- 1st March 2019
An article has just been published which sheds light on the regions from which cattle were brought to Worcester in Roman times. The results, using evidence from bones excavated on the site of The Hive, are in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science and show how with scientific advances new discoveries can...
- 15th February 2019
We recently accepted a deposit of a Court Book covering the Evesham Abbey lands in South, Middle and North Littleton. The item had been for sale at auction and following private purchase and assistance from the Friends of Worcestershire Archives, the book is now here in the archives. As it was sold under the Manorial...
- 5th February 2019
It’s fairly common to find animal bones on archaeological sites. Most often there’s a range of different bones from an assortment of animals, left over from cooking or butchery. So when the finds trays start filling up with just one or two different bones, it’s a cue that something particular was going on. This...
- 2nd February 2019
Did you know that the Worcestershire regiment had a battalion at Gallipoli in the First World War? That Worcestershire Yeomanry fought in Egypt and Palestine? Or that Worcestershire soldiers fought at Basra in modern day Iraq? A new leaflet has been produced by the Worcestershire World War One Hundred team all about Worcestershire’s links to...
- 30th January 2019
One of the documents which we have in our display cabinets in our strongrooms is a relatively recent addition to our collection. A couple of years ago we acquired a Commission of Array for the City of Worcester dated 14 September 1642, which was just as the first military actions of the Civil War were...
- 29th January 2019
Driving over the bridge into Evesham you pass asparagus fields – a small remnant of the market gardening industry that thrived in the Vale of Evesham until the mid-20th century. A new project exploring and celebrating the market gardening heritage in the Vale is now underway and looking for volunteers. The key focus of...
- 28th January 2019
Our Explore the Past guide frequently attracts positive feedback from users, including Roger Leake, Chairman of the Friends of Worcestershire Archives. Read about Roger’s experience of using it in this post. We published our Explore the Past guide a while ago to give people far and wide a helping hand with getting started with researching...
- 10th January 2019
In the eighteenth century Worcester had a wide variety of shops and evidence has been found to show that this included fashionable toy shops. Here we explore a little bit more about where these shops were located in the city. What we think of as toy shops now are very different to what they were...
- 8th January 2019
Happy New Year! We know this is a time when many people are looking at doing something new or picking up something they started but had to put on hold. Family and house history are amongst these things and each January we have people coming to The Hive asking us how to begin their search,...