Talk on the Armstrong Murder Case

 Tony Pryce started his interest in the Armstrong murder case back when he was an officer with West Mercian Police, and he had to visit a local solicitor's office in Hereford.  The firm was TA Matthews, and in a glass case there was a pipe and a letter.  The pipe had belonged to Major Armstrong, and the letter was to thank the original TA Matthews for all his help during the Major's trial and appeal process.

Since then, he's gone into incredible detail on every aspect of the case, including every person involved and their family backgrounds, and how they related to each other.  He believes the evidence is overwhelming that Major Armstrong was guilty.

One interesting detail is that some evidence from the case ended up in the Metropolitan Police Museum.  Back in 1921, when a murder investigation needed to be done, small police forces often didn't have the expertise to carry them out, so they applied to the Metropolitan Police to send experienced officers.  Modern day investigations typically involve 26 police officers and 4 support staff - back then the Met sent a Detective Chief Inspector (this was his last case before retirement) and a Detective Sergeant, and they started their investigations in secret, while staying at the Green Dragon Hotel in Hereford.

So there is a packet in the Black Museum labelled as arsenic from the chemist at Hay - but it has never been analysed.  Tony Pryce tried to persuade them to find out what the white powder was, but when they realised that the objective was to prove Major Armstrong's guilt rather than overturn the guilty verdict, they decided it wasn't worth spending the money to do it.  Tony Pryce believes that the packet was planted in the Major's bureau (which was produced as a surprise exhibit during the court case) by a member of the defence team, because he owed Major Armstrong a favour.  It's a fascinating theory, and very convincing.

There were so many fascinating details like this that the talk ran for an hour and a half instead of an hour, and he could have continued.  However, he got as far as the execution at Gloucester Prison (an ex-prison governor now gives guided tours of the building!) and stopped there.

Cusop Village Hall was so full they ran out of chairs and had people standing at the back and into the entrance hall!  And there wasn't time to show the video advert for the Cusop Castle dig, which will be happening from 5th to 14th June this year.  Also, I'll be giving a talk on Saturday 9th May at Cusop Castle at 4pm on medieval weapons and arrows, hopefully with audience participation! 

Cusop History Group Talk

 The next talk from Cusop History Group is on Thursday 16th April at Cusop Village Hall at 7pm.  The topic is The Murder of Katherine Armstrong and the Trial of Herbert Rouse Armstrong, and the speaker is Tony Pryce, with an introduction by Peter Ford.

Strange to think that this happened just over a hundred years ago.

Entry is £2, with donations for refreshments.

I'll be at the hall a bit earlier than that, because the Cusop Dig committee will be having a quick meeting - everything seems to be going well so far! 

The Herefordshire Hoard

 Tim Hoverd came to Cusop Village Hall on Thursday evening to talk about the Herefordshire Hoard (or 'how can two metal detectorists be so spectacularly stupid?').  It's a talk he says he's given "too many times", but it's part of his job to publicise things like this, to show what happens when people don't follow the law in metal detecting.

Put briefly, two metal detectorists from South Wales walked some fields near Leominster without the land owner's permission (they asked the tenant farmer, who did not have the authority to allow it), and they found a hoard of silver coins from the Viking era.  They did not declare the find, as they were supposed to do, but eventually produced a few pieces to satisfy the Finds Liason Officer - an arm ring, a ring, a crystal orb bound with gold, and a badly damaged coin.

They intended to sell the rest of the coins - it was later estimated that there were around 300 of them. But the police quickly became involved.  The detectorists had taken photos of their finds, which is how the archaeologists could estimate how many coins were in the hoard.  Some were found when their homes were searched.  Others had been already sold, but once the story became public, it became almost impossible to sell any more of the coins on the open market, because they are very distinctive.

If archaeologists had been able to study the hoard, as a whole, they would have been able to tell a lot more about the dating, and the conditions at the time the hoard was buried, and who was most likely to have buried it.  From the few pieces that were recovered - about eighty coins were found - they can tell that the hoard was likely buried at the time that the Great Viking Army was sweeping across Saxon England.  The coins were mostly from Wessex and Mercia - and the designs on the coins showed an alliance between King Alfred the Great and his Mercian counterpart Ceolwulf II.  Some are struck with only one king's head, but there are others with both, known as "The Two Emperors" coins.

If the detectorists had declared the hoard, they would have got a huge payout.  As it was, they got six and ten years in prison, and one of the coin dealers they tried to sell the coins through was also prosecuted.  They were involved with the criminal underworld in South Wales, and owed someone nasty a lot of money - and Tim Hoverd suspects that the bulk of the coins went to some crime boss, and may never be seen again. 

Earlier in the evening, before the talk, Tim sat down with the committee of the Cusop Castle dig to flesh out a few details.  The dig will take place from Friday 5th June to Sunday 14th June, and they are looking for volunteers.  It won't all be heavy digging - there are plenty of jobs around site for people of all sorts of varying ability, and full training is given.  I'm going to be there as much as I can - bearing in mind that I was last a professional archaeologist over thirty years ago, and a full day's digging now would probably kill me!

If anyone is interested in volunteering, they should contact Cusop History Group - there's a link on their front page.  Under sixteen year olds must be accompanied by an adult who is taking a full part in the dig, and Tim has a strict No Dogs policy. 

Also at the talk, to sell copies of his new book, was Joseph Emmett.  It's called New Roots, Ancient Lands: Walking Through Herefordshire's History, and it looks very interesting - I bought a copy, but it might be some time before I get round to reading it.  In it, he visits local sites like Arthur's Stone and Mouse Castle, Snodhill Castle and the Gloucester to Hereford Canal, as well as other sites right across the county. 

The next Cusop History Group talk will be "The Murder of Katherine Armstrong and the Trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong" with Tony Pryce, introduced by Peter Ford.  It will be at Cusop Village Hall on Thursday 16th April at 7pm.  Entry is £2, with donations for refreshments. 

Cusop History Society - The Baskerville Family

 I got it slightly wrong yesterday - the Cusop History Society meeting actually started at 4.30pm, so I was rather early.  The hall was full, though, and the £3 entry fee included a glass of wine.

Paul Remfry was talking about the Baskerville family and their lordship of Cusop.   He was also talking about the difficulties in interpreting medieval documents - were Ralph, Roger and Robert brothers, for instance?  We know the mother of one of them was called Juliana, but was she the mother of the other two - or were they some sort of cousin or nephew?  Some of the documents were written long after the events they recorded - the Diocese of Llandaff, which had land holdings locally, claimed to have records dating back to 500AD - but did they really?  Or were they writing documents that just claimed that they had always held that land?

Another famous chronicler of medieval Wales was Gerald of Wales - who was notoriously selective in his recording of facts, especially concerning families who he considered to have blocked his ambitions to be Archbishop of Wales (there was no Archbishop of Wales until 1924, when the Welsh Church finally became independent from the Church of England). So it was Gerald who attributed a quotation to Henry II about how terrible the Baskerville family were, presumably because he had fallen out with the Baskervilles himself.

What we do know is that Ralph who died in 1086 held most of the Baskerville lands, including Cusop, and across to near Aberystwyth and in the other direction across the Midlands, and there is a paper trail through the records that survive showing that Cusop was passed down the family until it came to a family called the Clanvowes, which may be a corruption of theWelsh Llanfair - and one of the Clanvowes may have married a Baskerville daughter.  Possibly.

But what about the time before the Baskervilles arrived?  They were Normans, so before 1066, Cusop was Welsh, and there are various Welsh princes who were probably lords of Cusop.  It all got quite complicated, and also included stories about the Earl of Hereford known as Ralph the Timid!

At any rate, it was the Normans who built several of the local castles - Hay, Clyro, and Cusop all have a very similar plan, though Cusop doesn't seem to have a motte like the others, and Hay became far more elaborate over the centuries.

It was a fascinating talk, about a complex and confusing period of history (though doubtless the original Baskervilles would have been quite clear about who was related to who, and which brother owned which lands).

I'm looking forward to the next meeting - possibly in March?  Details to be arranged.

Big Cheesy Night Out with Hay Theatre

 It's on Saturday 24th June, at Cusop Village Hall, at 7pm, with songs, poems, magic and a mini quiz.  

There are also cheesy prizes, cheese platters and cheesecake.  And a raffle.

The evening is free, apart from wine and drinks, and donations are welcomed.

It's all to raise money for the Junior and Senior Youth Christmas Show.

Cusop Snail

 

                                                                    Sounds intriguing!

Cusop History Group on Film!

 John Price has kindly sent me the link to the February meeting of Cusop History Group at Cusop Village Hall.

There's a talk about Cusop Castle by Tim Hoverd, the archaeologist from Herefordshire Council, and updates on the research that's been going on about Cusop Church.

Cusop Castle is on private land, and is also a Scheduled Ancient Monument, so no holes can be dug, or geophys a la Time Team done without applying for a license.  In the case of Cusop Church, a faculty would have to be applied for from the diocese for any archaeological work, but it would be fascinating to find out more about both sites.  Cusop Castle is a very unusual shape for a Border castle - there's no motte, and Cusop Church may once have had a round churchyard, which is a very early, Celtic, feature.

The meeting rounds off with a short AGM.

The new date for the Roman Roads to Railways talk is Thursday March 23rd, at 7pm, at Cusop Village Hall.  Cost is £3 for members, £5 for non-members, and includes wine.

Unfortunately, the film has copyright material in it, so can no longer be viewed publicly, so I have deleted the link.

(all the more reason to turn up to the next meeting in person!)

Fairtrade and History on Thursday

 It's Fairtrade Fortnight at the moment, and I was chatting with Chris on the Fairtrade stall on the market last Thursday.

This coming Thursday, there will be a coffee morning at Eighteen Rabbit from 10am to 1pm.  Their special guest is Jenipher, from Uganda, who has been organising farmers in Uganda (mostly women) to produce coffee which they now market under their own brand.  It's available at Eighteen Rabbit, and she will be talking about how they make it and offering samples.  The event is free, but donations of £1 minimum are requested.

Then in the evening, Cusop History Group is meeting at Cusop Village Hall.  Tony Usher is giving a talk on Roman Roads to Railways - how the transport networks shaped the fortunes of Herefordshire.  It starts at 7pm, and costs £3 for members, £5 for non-members, and includes wine.

[Edited to add: the Cusop History talk has been postponed due to snow]

Cusop History Group

 While I was at the Castle for the Volunteer Fair, Cusop History Group were re-launching themselves in Cusop Village Hall.  The evening included an AGM, a talk on Cusop Castle and the meeting was also attended by Herefordshire Archaeologist Tim Hoverd.

They also have a Box of Books of local interest for members to borrow.

Warm Welcome in Hay

 Today there was snow, so it seemed like a good idea to mention the useful leaflet that has been printed by Hay Festival, giving details of all sorts of help available in Hay this winter.

First of all, for people who need help but don't know how to get it, Helen Quinlan is the PAVO Community Connector, and she visits Hay Library on the first and third Thursday of each month between 10.30 and 11.30, as well as being available by phone on 07599 110 315 or 01597 828 649.  

For the Herefordshire side of the border, there's the Herefordshire Talk Community Helpline on 01432 260 027.

Dial-a-Ride provides local transport all year round - it costs £10 to become a member, with trips starting at £2 - and they'll even deliver prescriptions.

Hay Youth Club provides free activities and free hot dinners for school years 7 to 13 (ages 11 to 18), every Tuesday in term time from 6.30 - 8.30pm at the Pavilion on Brecon Road.

Hay Library is a warm space (with lots of books, and free Wifi).

The Hay Repair Cafe will fix things for free - small electrical items, textiles and clothing, and they'll even sharpen knives.  They're open from 11am to 2pm on the last Saturday of every month at the Pavilion on Brecon Road - contact hayrepaircafe@gmail.com

Bethesda Evangelical Church has free activities for all ages, including a Baby and Toddler group, Tea and Chat, and Crafts.  They also provide a free Community Meal, to eat there or take home, every Thursday at 6pm.  Contact Jane Dodds on 07758 318 772 for more details.

Zero Waste Hay has a table at the Cheese Market on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10am with free food for whoever comes along - this is usually stuff the Co-op can no longer sell, which would normally go to landfill, but someone brought walnuts from their tree last Friday, and someone else brought apples, so there's always something different.

Advicelink gives help applying for welfare benefits and other Government support.  For Wales the number is 0808 250 5700 and for England the number is 0800 144 8848.

Age UK gives free home energy checks for the over 65s, and can help with fitting draft excluders and so on.  For Powys contact 01686 623 707 and for Herefordshire the number is 0800 008 6077

Susie Wood is the Energy Advocate for Powys, who can help with managing energy debt, find the best tariffs, and help with energy efficiency.  Her email is advocate@severnwye.org.uk

There are food banks in Brecon and Hereford, but people need to be referred to them.  In Hay this can be done through Haygarth Surgery, Hay Primary School, Dial-a-Ride, any of the churches, and a variety of other organisations.

And if you need to talk, there's always the Samaritans on 116 123.

Powys also has a website to provide help at powys.gov.uk/costofliving

and Herefordshire has something similar at talkcommunity.org

Also mentioned on the weekly rundown, on the back page of the leaflet, is the Mothers Union, which meets on the second Tuesday of each month at Cusop Village Hall from 2 - 4pm, for tea, chat and guest speakers.

The British Legion also has Tea and Chat from 11am - 2pm on the third Thursday of each month

and St Mary's Church in Cusop has a Tea and Chat at Cusop Village Hall on the fourth Sunday of each month from 3 - 4.30pm.

Cusop Churchyard

The talk last night at the Cusop History Society was about Cusop Churchyard.
There was a serious technical problem at the beginning of the talk where the memory stick wouldn't talk to the laptop that controlled the projector, but a Heroic Tech Guy took the laptop outside, and when he came back, it was fixed, and Jane could quickly go through the pictures that accompanied her talk up to the point she had reached.

Jane Weaver, who also belongs to the Camera Club, was asked to take photographs of the graves in Cusop Churchyard. An old list had been found (from around 1990) with a map of the graves and their inscriptions. Since then, of course, more graves have been added to the churchyard, and the churchwardens wanted to have an up to date record.
Then, when Jane had started the project, someone else found a different list of graves, so there were two documents to work from, one with 43 pages and the other with 13 pages.
It wasn't as easy as it sounded, to just record them all. Jane decided to work from the "John Wilkes list" (he compiled it), as it was more comprehensive, and started in the corner of the churchyard near the lych gate, where the graves are mostly in neat rows. The Booth family are buried there, the most recent being Richard Booth the King of Hay.
One of the problems Jane found was that the churchyard has not always been as it appears today. Her map showed rows of flat graves up in the top corner (if you take the lych gate as the bottom corner), which have been overgrown to the extent that many are no longer visible. Other grave stones have broken, and there is a pile of them against the wall of the church. In the 1970s, a group of men "who were good with crowbars" tidied up the churchyard by moving a lot of gravestones, and laying them flat under one of the yew trees like a pavement. They had a serving police officer as part of the group, to add a veneer of legality to the proceedings, but they didn't seem to make any record of what they were doing. Apparently, at the time, the churchyard was in a bit of a state, with a pony tethered near the lych gate and sheep grazing, and brambles overgrowing areas.
Another problem Jane found was that memorials which had been legible in 1990 had deteriorated, and were no longer legible, so that in some cases she couldn't find graves that had been recorded.
The oldest grave she found was by the church door, of Thomas Watkins who died in 1792, I think - he'd been a local JP.
One of the other early graves was of William Seward - it's now illegible, but they know where it is, because William Seward was a nonconformist preacher who was injured while preaching to an unruly crowd, and later died of his injuries. Jane wasn't sure why he had been buried in Cusop, but someone in the audience thought that he had been taken to a farm nearby, where he had died. There is a memorial to William Seward inside the church. Celia, one of the present churchwardens, said that their next project would be to restore the box tomb where William Seward is buried.
Jane also photographed the memorials inside the church - William Seward's, and also the First World War memorial, which starts with a member of the Royal Flying Corps. There is no memorial for the Second World War. One memorial mentioned in an old historical article is no longer there, and the two bells mentioned in the article were removed in the 1960s.
Another member of the Royal Flying Corps buried at Cusop went on to train as a doctor after the First World War, and ended up as quite a high ranking surgeon in the Royal Navy.
Another interesting grave is of "Johnny the Pilot". He was a Polish airman during the Second World War, and one of the Cusop History Group is doing a little project to find out more about him. He was shot down twice, and came to live in Cusop after the War. There are quite a few other graves of military men in the churchyard, too, including one young soldier who died in India, and another who died in the Transvaal.
One picture Jane showed was of a typical family plot, with eight members of the family buried there. "It's the Adams Family," she said, looking round the room. "Not a titter!" she complained.
She had also looked at the grave of a Victorian curate who worked at Cusop - I missed the name. The rector of Cusop had been absent at the time, so he employed the curate to do the parish work. He is buried with his wife Isabella, and the grave monument is interesting. It consists of three steps, meant to symbolise God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, with a cross on top. The memorial to Isabella is on the East side, where Jane expected to find the curate's details - but he is memorialised on the West side of the monument. Various beliefs about the Last Judgement were mentioned here - like the idea that Jesus would come from the East to raise all the dead from their graves - so the details were recorded on the west side of the grave where Jesus would see them!
After the talk, I mentioned the previously unknown chapel I had helped to dig in Norwich, back when I was an archaeologist. We found the grave of a man we assumed to be the priest, partly because he had been buried with a small chalice and paten, and partly because he had been buried in the opposite direction to everyone else in the graveyard - so that on the Day of Last Judgement, he would rise from the dead to face his parishioners.
It was a fascinating talk, and brought out quite a few memories from the audience who had known some of the people mentioned, or their families. Jane was thanked at the end, for the quality of the research she has done.

The next talk will be by John Price, on 13th March, who will be showing local photographs from the Mary Ridger Collection, including some stereographic 3D photos of Cusop.
On Friday 17th April, Tony Usher will be giving a talk "From Roman Roads to Railways: Connecting People in Herefordshire"
In June there may be a trip out, to be confirmed, and on July 10th Heather Hurley will be talking about the Green Lanes of Herefordshire.

Extinction Rebellion Meeting - Hay Town Council and COP26

There was quite a good turnout, with several people who hadn't been before, considering that it was the first night of Storm Dennis.
The meeting started (after tea and cake and introductions) with a cut down film of a talk by Professor Rupert Reed, who was talking about regeneration, rewilding and repair - positive actions highlighting topics such as food security by planting a pop-up allotment outside the County Council offices or preparing a feast with food that has been thrown away by supermarkets (there are groups that do this - one of them came to Hay for the Festival a few years ago).
Now the XR movement has been noticed, by doing big actions like the ones in London last year, it's time for tactics to change, so the emphasis should be on local actions, but co-ordinated nationally. This means that people are not having to travel long distances to do the actions, and they can be relevant to local conditions. The aim is to be disruptive of the people in power, rather than ordinary people.

One of the people at the meeting was also a Co-ordinator for the Midlands, so he could listen to the ideas in the local group and pass that up to regional level.
One problem the group identified was that - last year there was a clear focus, on going to London and doing various things as part of the big actions there. This year, we've got to find our own focus.
Two aims that the meeting wanted to keep in mind were to campaign for Net Zero Carbon emissions by 2025, and to organise Citizens' Assemblies to decide priorities.
One person in the circle (all the chairs were arranged in a circle around the room so that everyone had an equal chance to see and be seen and speak if they wanted to) suggested that the movement needed to do something like the Flood Warning system - starting with a Flood Alert, and moving on to Flood Warning, with clear advice about what to do in each situation.

There was praise for Hay Town Council and their Low Carbon Group. They want to make Hay carbon-neutral by 2030, and have invited XR members to come along to advise on the town's carbon footprint. There will also be a Green Festival at Hay School on 18th April, where XR will have a stall.
Powys County Council, on the other hand, have not yet declared a Climate Emergency, and they are launching their new local development plan soon - it would be good if they paid attention to the Climate Emergency in that plan.

One of the reasons for the meeting was to get people who were interested to join the sub-groups of the movement. There are the Affinity Groups, who are trained in how to act during big protests, but not everyone is willing or able to do that. So there are other groups, such as the one for Regenerative Culture - this is fundamental to the way XR works, and involves self-care, and practicing the change they want to see. So the Regenerative Culture group members would be the ones making sure that other groups had hot soup or cold drinks or time out when they needed it. It also covers singing, counselling and meditation. There is training available.
A Climate Choir is going to start meeting at St. John's soon, on Monday evenings. There's another group for Art, making banners and costumes, and in an area like Mid-Wales, where groups tend to be small and spread out, this can be a good way of collaborating between groups - so Hay could do something with the Golden Valley group, for instance.
There's also a group meeting at the Globe on Thursday mornings from 11.30am, not just to talk about climate change, but to chat about general topics and be supportive.

Having said that there wasn't really a focus for action this year, in November COP26 will be happening in Glasgow. This is the 26th year that the nations of the world have met to discuss climate change, and there hasn't been a lot of action so far. So expectations are low that it will be any different this time - but it is something to focus on to encourage world leaders to concentrate their minds on the problems that the world faces. On this topic, there was a book recommendation - There is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee. A table at the side of the room had been set up as a library table, with various books and magazines for people in the group to borrow.
Suggestions of what to do before and during the COP26 meetings included a "Jarrow March" up the country, linking up with XR groups along the way, to deliver the message that this time real action was needed internationally, and ending the meeting with a vague statement of intent was not enough.
Slogans were considered (it's always useful to have a memorable slogan), such as "Good COP/Bad COP" or "Fair COP".
Another suggestion was that XR should organise its own COP meetings - though it's probably not possible to hire a hall in Glasgow at the same time as the official COP meeting. So maybe this could be organised regionally, and it would also be a good idea to get the School Climate Strikers involved - there wasn't anybody young at the meeting. Or an XR COP could take place after the official COP meetings, like the Paralympics after the main Olympic Games. This would have the advantage of the XR meeting knowing what had been decided by the world leaders, so they could respond to it. This is where the regional organisation of XR comes in, as the Midlands group can contact the Scotland group to see what they have in mind.
Someone asked what the carbon footprint of the COP meeting was, and would it be possible to find out, and make a visible representation of that?
Nobody at the meeting had any great hopes of the present UK government being remotely environmentally friendly, especially after seeing Boris Johnson sharing a platform with Sir David Attenborough at the Science Museum (and saying all the right things) and promptly going off and approving HS2.

Herefordshire Life Through a Lens

Cusop History Group are having their first meeting of the year tomorrow evening (Friday) at 7pm, at Cusop Village Hall. They'll be showing the film Carousel, from Herefordshire Life Through a Lens. Cost is £3 for members, £5 for non-members. It's based on the Derek Evans photographic archive from the 1950s to 1970s - he took photos of all sorts of local events around Herefordshire.

Dial-a-Ride Coffee Morning

I went up to Cusop Village Hall for the Dial-a-Ride Coffee Morning and jumble sale on Saturday morning - and came away with a few good bargains - and a nice cup of tea included in the entrance price.

I also picked up a leaflet about the new "Bank Bus" which Dial-a-Ride will be running for members. This has been funded up until March next year by the Rotary Club, for all the people who need to use a bank when there is no longer one left in Hay.
It will go once a month (I believe the first one was already fully booked), and the next one is on Friday 28th September, followed by Friday 26th October, 7th December, 25th January, 22nd February and 29th March. Bookings are only being taken one month in advance.

Hay History Group - Cistercians and Graveyards

So it was up to Cusop Village Hall for the Hay History Group meeting and talk last week - held in Cusop because they couldn't find anywhere in Hay after the Three Tuns closed! It was a small meeting, and the audience was entirely female!
The first part of the evening was taken up with the group meeting - reporting back on things that have happened recently, and events that are coming up.
Alan Nicholls talked about Hay Graveyard, which has got sadly overgrown. He's been helping a lady track down the graves of her ancestors, one of whom ran the chemists' shop at the time of the Armstrong murders! He'd also had a chat with a lady who was recording gravestones for the Powys Family History Society. There is a book, by Bryn Like, but it appears to be incomplete. Alan has had a word with the churchwardens, and he's started clearing the brambles, and unearthing some flat grave slabs which were completely invisible under moss and earth. He reckons the job will take him all winter, doing it a bit at a time. Of course, he'd welcome assistance, if anyone is interested.
Coming up soon is a trip out - on 29th November - to the Thomas Shop and Abbeycwmhir Hall, which will be all decked out for Christmas then. The Hall has 52 rooms, and each one is decorated in a different style. Abbeycwmhir Hall was partly built with the stone from Abbey Cwm-hir, a Cistercian monastery nearby. It's a Victorian house, and one of the pictures on the website, of their collection of vintage children's books with pictorial binding, made my mouth water in anticipation of seeing the real thing. Their website is at https://abbeycwmhir.com
The Thomas Shop is a museum, with tea shop, of a traditional village shop, at Penybont. I've wanted to go there for a while because of the Wool Emporium which is also attached to the museum. Their website is www.thomas-shop.com

And so on to the talk, about the spread of the Cistercian Order across Europe in the Middle Ages, with particular reference to St Bernard of Clairvaux, who was related to some of the most important families in France, and preached in favour of the Crusades. The Order was at the forefront of agricultural innovation, which they could spread quickly across Europe through the meetings of the abbots of the different Houses that were held regularly. The lady giving the talk, Gil McHattie, had gone on holiday to some of the sites in France, and had excellent pictures of abbey buildings and the granges, or farms that supported the abbeys, to show.
The Cistercians were an important order in Wales - Abbey Cwm-Hir, Strata Florida, and others were under the patronage of Welsh princes. The farm just beside Clyro petrol station was originally a grange, and the barn there (now holiday accommodation) is medieval.

HARC - Archives are Fascinating

I went up to Cusop Village Hall on Friday evening for the talk on the Herefordshire Archives and Records Centre, and it was entirely fascinating.
Before we started, I was told that membership of the Group was free (having paid my £3 to get in). I wasn't going to bother - I was quite happy to pay for the talk, but then I discovered that there is a members' trip in the New Year to the Ashmolean Museum, with a talk and a look behind the scenes. This was too good a chance to miss - I've wanted to go to the Ashmolean for years - so I joined up on the spot and paid my deposit for the trip!

The Archives service used to be housed in an old barracks building in Hereford - it was old, it was big, and it was empty, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it was also damp - just about the worst thing it could be for old records. Some of the mould was, apparently, rare Herefordshire apple mould, and a form of penicillin, but even so....
So, just before recession and cuts hit local authority services, HARC moved to a brand new, purpose built facility in Rotherwas, which may be unique in the world. It's built on the passivhouse principle, with so much insulation it's a constant temperature like a cave inside, which saves them something like £100,000 on heating and air conditioning bills a year.
Rhys Griffiths, the speaker, said that he was very pleased to be in Cusop, because it demonstrated the importance of boundaries. In Hay, there is also a history group, which is very Welsh based, whereas Cusop is firmly based within Herefordshire, even though they are very close together. As well as the county records, HARC also keeps the diocesan records, which extend into South Shropshire.
There are maps, of course - one interesting thing they're doing is to take the 6inch maps of the area and match them up with aerial photographs - some of the field boundaries have stayed the same for centuries. He showed one early map of Cusop Dingle with pictures of four little water mills spaced out along the stream.
He also showed examples of form filling from 1720, with a local vicar ticking boxes (as it were) to say, yes, the church did have a fair chalice for services, and the chancel was in good repair, and there were no dissenters in the parish. An even earlier Visitation for Cusop had the vicar of the 1390s describing the adulterous relationships between members of his parish, in some detail! (So-and-so has thrown his wife out of the house and installed his mistress!).
The records are also good for people who are interested in the history of the railways, with many records and maps. A lot of these come from the Quarter Sessions, which were a sort of proto-County Council, responsible for the upkeep of roads and so on as well as local crime. The Quarter Sessions accounts also cast a light on poorer people in the area who were involved in crime - the horse dealer convicted of stealing a chestnut mare, and sentenced to transportation, for instance, and on the same page, the sad story of a girl who had tried to commit suicide, who was sentenced to a short period of imprisonment for it.
There are also wills, showing what the average household contained over the centuries, as there are often inventories of contents.
Rhys Griffiths said that, in the past, archivists had been a bit sniffy about family history researchers, preferring academics with leather elbow patches in their tweed jackets, but now they welcome people who are researching their own families - one of whom was in the audience, and chipped in to provide extra detail a couple of times.
For instance, there was a map showing the sale of part of the Moccas estate - we had been following the fortunes of Llydyadyway Farm, under its many different spellings - and the chap from the audience pointed out the small plots along the main road, where big houses like York House were built, and the field behind, where Victoria Terrace was built the following year, as a speculation - the houses were then bought by landlords who let them out to poorer families.
He talked a bit about palaeography - the study of old handwriting - and how the Mormons have helped by transcribing records for their own purposes. A lot of information is now online, but it is still possible to visit the Centre in Rotherwas for research, and there are some records that can only be consulted in their original form.
And then there's the census, started in around 1810 mainly to count how many able bodied men there were in the country who could be called up for military service in the Napoleonic Wars - and as time went on the civil servants realised they could collect all sorts of other useful information at the same time, including how people moved from place to place - the rural population was not as static as people tend to think, especially after the coming of the railways.
So, with a bit of work, and help from the archivists and their team of volunteers, all sorts of information can be extracted from the most boring-sounding documentary evidence.

Dark Age Herefordshire

I went up to Cusop Village Hall on Saturday - Cusop History Group had a visiting speaker who was talking about Dark Age Herefordshire, starting just before the Romans legions left, and going up to the death of King Offa.
It's useful to look at history sometimes on a local level. Herefordshire is tucked away from the coasts, so the early incursions of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes on the eastern side of the country, and the Irish from the west, didn't make much impression on the area which would eventually become the county at first. The Roman roads were not maintained, and the iron smelting in the south of the county with ore from the Forest of Dean stopped being economically viable. Meanwhile, Celtic Christianity produced St Dubricius in the south of the county - who may possibly have crowned King Arthur at Caerleon before he went off to become Bishop of Llandaff. And St David may have been born at Much Dewchurch. There's even a church which claims to have a chair made for St Augustine when he came to visit the Welsh bishops, in an important meeting between Roman and Celtic Christians (the Welsh bishops weren't too impressed by Augustine).
The River Wye split the area in two, with one side eventually being taken over by the Mercians, and the other becoming the Welsh commote of Archenfield.
One thing which was really useful was seeing the map of the area, with the names at different periods, and the locations of the towns. Hereford itself wasn't built until quite late in the period, but when it was it seemed to become the pattern for boroughs elsewhere in Mercia, with a grid iron layout of streets surrounded by a stout wall. Some of the streets in Hereford still follow the original Saxon lines.
The hall was full, and I think we all found the talk very interesting - and there was time to chat over tea and biscuits afterwards. I found myself discussing the course of the Wye, and whether the Roman road went to the north or south of the river near Hay - and was it really the Silures who attacked the Roman fort at Boatside? Nobody was sure. And I learned that a Roman coin was found, years ago, in the garden of Rest for the Tired on Broad Street in Hay, the only trace of Roman occupation in Hay itself.
Cusop History Group and Hay History Group are quite different in the focus of their activities, even though there's some overlap of membership. The border really does divide things up so that Cusop looks to the east and Hay looks to the west and Welsh history much more.
Cusop History Group costs £5 for a year's membership, and £5 to attend a talk for non-members "so you may as well join!" they said. Members pay £3 for a talk, which includes the tea and biscuits.
The next Cusop History Talk will be at Cusop Church next month, talking about the history of the church.

Fairtrade Talk at Cusop Hall

The full write up is on the Hay Fairtrade blog (link on the side bar). The talk was given by Taysir Arabasi and Cathi Pawson from Zaytoun, which sells olive oil and other products from Palestine. The talk was called Palestine: Fairtrade as Resistance, and there was olive oil to taste and a variety of products to buy from the stall run by Ange Grunsell. She's the volunteer distributor for Zaytoun products in the Hay area, and can be reached at ARGrunsell@aol.com

It's really very good olive oil, and the farmers are well worth supporting. I even got some olive oil soap there.

Celebrating New Year in Cusop

Cusop Village Hall sounds like the place to be to see the New Year in - in a rather unusual way. Revellers will be gathering for a New Year lunch, from 11.30am on New Year's Eve, so they can celebrate New Year arriving on the other side of the world!
The lunch will consist of Maori and Asian dishes.

For Sale

This used to be Cusop Village Hall. There's now a new Village Hall, nearby, and this building was sold for conversion to a private house.
After doing a lot of work on it - or at least, paying Ron Smart the builder to do a lot of work on it - the owner has now put the building up for sale.
I love the way estate agents use language! When I saw the sign up in their window, the building was described as a "breath-taking conversion".
"Breath-taking" is one word for it. From the picture, I'm not sure you can get the full glory of the Grecian urns etched on the glass....