Herefordshire Past

The Newsletter of The Trust for theVictoria County History of Herefordshire

Registered charity no. 1070427

Series 2, No. 6 Autumn 2008

Chairman’s Letter

In this issue ...Herefordshire ProgressNews from the CentreVolunteers at WorkTranscribing the Ledbury RentalFurther Census WorkArchaeological Dig in LedburySouthend Wheelwrights

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The Herefordshire England’s Past for Everyone project has now entered its final year, and the Trust is looking to the future. The current economic downturn is likely to make fund-raising more difficult, and as everyone knows a great deal of Lottery money has been committed to the 2012 Olympics. Nevertheless, we are starting the process of making an application for a small Heritage Lottery Fund grant. This would be for a joint project with the Museums Service to improve displays in Ledbury and to ena-ble the team leader to continue work on the town for at least part of 2010. We are also planning an appeal to individuals and to that end the Trustees, with a great deal of help from the central EPE staff in London, have designed a publicity/fund-raising leaflet. A copy is enclosed with this Newsletter, and more can be obtained from Sylvia Pinches or from me; we should be very grateful for help in distributing them as widely as possible. Our main fund-raising effort, planned to coincide with the launch of the first of the Ledbury volumes, has had to be postponed. The final editing process in London is taking far longer than expected, and publication is not now planned until the spring of 2009. The delay is regrettable, but I am sure the

final result will be well worth waiting for. Meanwhile steady progress is being made with the second volume, on the history of Ledbury up to the mid 16th century, supported by the five volunteer projects reported on further pages.My appeal in the last Newsletter for someone to organise Gift Aid for the Trust was spectacularly successful, and the Trustees and committee are delighted to welcome Alan Starkey as our Gift Aid officer. His work, which has already started, should considerably increase the Trust’s income.The success of that appeal emboldens me to appeal again, this time for help with the secretarial work of the Trust. Our present Hon. Secretary, David Whitehead, has held the post for more than 10 years and feels it is time for him to move on. I am most grateful to David for all that he has done, and continues to do, and am delighted that he will continue as a Trustee, so we shall not lose the benefit of his knowledge and experience. His impending retirement means that we urgently need a new Hon Secretary. The Hon Secretary’s main task is to do the secretarial work associated with the regular Trust committee meetings (usually three a year, held in Hereford or occasionally Ledbury), including sending out the agenda and taking the minutes. Between meetings there are occasional letters to write or forms to fill in. Help with the Newsletter and its circulation would also be appreciated. In this increasingly computerised world, it is essential that the secretary should have some computer skills and should be on email. The Hon Secretary is, of course, a member of the Trust committee, and we would particularly welcome someone with energy and new ideas, although that is not essential. If you think you could fill the office, please contact me (janetcooper272@btinternet.com). As usual, I conclude my letter by thanking those who have helped us during the last six months or so. The Archaeological Research Section of the Woolhope Club have continued to make their laptop and digital projector available for use by our volunteers working on wills and medieval documents. The importance of that equipment was demonstrated when it broke down a few weeks ago and groups were forced to huddle round the PC in the Heritage Centre! I would also like to thank John Teale Photography of Southend, Ledbury, for generously allowing us to use the photograph of Peter Faulkner and his coracle, which appears in our new publicity leaflet.

Janet Cooper

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Herefordshire Progress Sylvia’s Say

The volunteers and I have been busy with the research for the second volume, on the history of Ledbury to the mid-16th century. This is going very well. I have been enjoying peaceful days in libraries and record offices and have already written a couple of draft chapters, on life in the town and on the later medieval church. This volume will benefit from chapters contributed by Janet Cooper (on the early church), by Keith Ray, the county archaeologist (the prehistory of Ledbury and district) and Nigel Baker, urban archaeologist (the medieval town plan). The volunteers have done sterling work on medieval documents, wills and archaeology, all of which is reported in more detail elsewhere. I continue to be most grateful to them for their enthusiasm and dedication, and to Janet Cooper for organising the groups so ably.

A number of the volunteers have been helping with preparing material for the website. Some have undertaken individual research projects, finding out about particular trades, buildings or people. Others have been helping with putting the material up onto the site (a somewhat slow process). I am pleased with the items which we have already got on our pages and look forward to putting much more up before too long. Central office tell me that we get many ‘hits’, being the 3rd most visited of the county pages, not just from people in this country but from much further afield, too. We have had correspondence from Australia about the Feathers inn in Ledbury, for example. When the England's Past for Everyone project is over, the website will continue to be maintained by the University of London, so it will not disappear into a black hole.

In early May I spent a day on the VCH/England's Past for Everyone stand at the ‘Who Do you Think You Are?’ exhibition at Olympia. A wide range of people came to talk to us and took an interest in our work. It was heartening to realise once again how many family historians are interested in the history of the localities where their ancestors lived and the conditions of their lives. Some were already aware of the VCH ‘Big Red Volumes’ as a useful resource but we were able to spread the word to a wider audience. I have also given talks about the EPE to the Malvern Family History Society, Ledbury & District Civic Society and Ledbury Rotary Club. When I give these talks I like to enliven the explanation of what we are doing with snippets from our research. One such snippet I recently uncovered at the National archive in

Kew comes from a series of depositions about the state of St. Katherine’s Hospital in the 1530s and 1540s. The management of the Hospital was obviously at a low ebb at the time. Two witnesses referred to a fencing school being held there and also to bears being tied up inside the Hospital building before being baited. Their description paints a lively picture, if not a favourable one, of how different life was in Ledbury in those days.

News from the Centre:Aretha George, Education and Skills Manager, who attended several meetings in Ledbury and who provided training for our Oral History volunteers, left the central EPE office last summer for a post with the

HLF. Her successor is Skye Dillon who has joined EPE from University College London where she worked at the UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage, co-ordinating and managing short courses for heritage professionals, in partnership with English Heritage. She is also a hands-on interpreter volunteer at the British Museum, so she has seen volunteering from both sides! Skye has already paid one visit to Ledbury, and we look forward to working with her in the final stages of the EPE volunteer projects.

Centre for English Local History at the IHR

On 1 August 2008 a new Centre for Local History was born at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. Both the Victoria County History and England’s Past for Everyone come under its umbrella. The academic work of the Central Office of VCH includes the organisation of the Locality and Region seminar programme, supervision of the MA research degree and individual research by academic members of staff. A major part of the remit of the new Centre for Local History is to facilitate research. The work of the VCH in editing and publishing the county volumes in the VCH series sits very well with this. Efforts are being made to raise money to fund the appointment of a Chair of Local History.

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Volunteers at WorkAbout 30 volunteers have been working on projects to support Sylvia’s work on medieval Ledbury, most of which have required them to learn new skills, and training days have been held for individual projects. The only general meeting has been the summer party, held in the Heritage Centre in July, when Sylvia entertained us by talking about her work in her previous job at at 78 Derngate, the house of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Northampton.

The group working on Medieval Documents have completed transcription of c. 1288 rental of the Bishop of Hereford’s estate in Ledbury. The part of this rental which covers the town has already been well studied, but there is no readily available transcript. The group were fascinated by the slight differences in rents for apparently similar properties: a fruitful field for future research. We were also interested to find a little clerical neighbourhood in the Middle Town (High Street), where Roger the vicar, Richard the deacon and Roger son of the chaplain lived next door to one another. Walerand the chaplain, however, lived in the Homend; he or another man of the same name also held a house in Bishop (Bye) Street. Richard son of the chaplain held a butcher’s stall, as did men surnamed Hooper, Skinner and Baker; either they followed two occupations (perfectly possible) or their surnames were hereditary ones.

The rental also covers the large rural area of Ledbury, and this has been much less studied. It lists freeholders at Hazel, Ockeridge, Massington, Wellington and Donnington, all of which were probably small hamlets. Some of them had earlier paid rents in honey and fish, suggesting they were occupied in bee-keeping and fishing, presumably in the Leadon. The unfree tenants had to work on the bishop’s land for 2 days a week between the end of September and the beginning of August; in harvest (August and September) they owed a total of 16 works, almost 4 days a week. They were also required to plough and sow 23 acres with their own wheat, and to plough 22½ acres for oats in the spring, but not to sow it. In addition, Gilbert of Donbridge was obliged to carry goods by pack animal to and from the bishop’s manor of Ledbury. Adam of the Frith had to guard thieves imprisoned in the Ledbury manor house, and if they escaped he was to answer for it. And he had to carry the lord bishop’s letters within the bishopric at the order of the lord bishop or his bailiff.

Wills Between 10 and 12 volunteers are within sight of completing the transcription of the pre-1700 wills and related documents for Ledbury in the Herefordshire Record Office. We continue to find marvellous details which

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About 30 volunteers have been working on projects to support Sylvia’s work on medieval Ledbury, most of which have required them to learn new skills, and training days have been held for individual projects. The only general meeting has been the summer party, held in the Heritage Centre in July, when Sylvia entertained us by talking about her work in her previous job at at 78 Derngate, the house of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Northampton.

The group working on Medieval Documents have completed transcription of c. 1288 rental of the Bishop of Hereford’s estate in Ledbury. The part of this rental which covers the town has already been well studied, but there is no readily available transcript. The group were fascinated by the slight differences in rents for apparently similar properties: a fruitful field for future research. We were also interested to find a little clerical neighbourhood in the Middle Town (High Street), where Roger the vicar, Richard the deacon and Roger son of the chaplain lived next door to one another. Walerand the chaplain, however, lived in the Homend; he or another man of the same name also held a house in Bishop (Bye) Street. Richard son of the chaplain held a butcher’s stall, as did men surnamed Hooper, Skinner and Baker; either they followed two occupations (perfectly possible) or their surnames were hereditary ones.

The rental also covers the large rural area of Ledbury, and this has been much less studied. It lists freeholders at Hazel, Ockeridge, Massington, Wellington and Donnington, all of which were probably small hamlets. Some of them had earlier paid rents in honey and fish, suggesting they were occupied in bee-keeping and fishing, presumably in the Leadon. The unfree tenants had to work on the bishop’s land for 2 days a week between the end of September and the beginning of August; in harvest (August and September) they owed a total of 16 works, almost 4 days a week. They were also required to plough and sow 23 acres with their own wheat, and to plough 22½ acres for oats in

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Sunday. Preliminary results do not suggest that any trace of a standard width for town centre plots survives, but this does not mean that there was not one before the plots were split up and amalgamated over the centuries.

Hedge Dating On 10 June two members of the VCH Trust, Ruth Richardson and Sue Hubbard, took a party of about 10 volunteers out to try dating hedges by counting the number of species they contain. The aerial photographs group had helped with preliminary work for this day, identifying hedges on old maps. Unfortunately we were at the last moment unable to get permission to examine what might have been potentially the most interesting hedge, but we spent several hours on one of the few warm sunny days of the summer examining the hedges, and the general landscape, near the possible Iron-Age hill fort at Kilbury Camp.

We examined two hedges in the fields between the camp and the main road, identifying 13 species in all: briar rose, hawthorn, elder, field maple, holly, ash, oak, sloe or blackthorn, dogwood, cherry, hazel, sycamore and crab apple. Outside the hedges were privet and spindle. Some of us learned a lot of botany as well as landscape history!

Archaeology For much of October a number of volunteers were hard at work digging metre-square pits in back gardens in High Street, Homend, Southend, and Bridge Street. This project, led by Herefordshire’s Community Archaeologist, Chris Atkinson, was planned to search for evidence of medieval settlement. In the event most of the pits revealed more 19th century china and clay pipes than medieval pots, but the experience was fun, even though it resulted in some sore backs and wrists. The finds have been carefully washed at the Heritage Centre, and we now await the archaeologists’ final report on them. We want to thank Chris very much for his enthusiastic work on this project and his inspiration to the volunteers who worked with him.

Janet Cooper

Transcribing the Ledbury Rentalin the Bishop of Hereford’s Red Book

The Medieval Documents Group began work towards the end of September 2007 learning how to use medieval documents. Dr Janet Cooper led a dozen intrepid individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds, who were all eager to wrestle with medieval handwriting, the study of which is called palaeography. Those volunteers who have been transcribing wills have also needed to learn about this part of the historian's craft.Janet found some local charters including one by which Thomas Chaundos granted land near Holme Lacy to the dean and chapter of St. Ethelbert's church in Hereford (i.e. the cathedral). Another granted arable land and woodland in the same parish to an abbey of the Premonstratensian order to establish a cell or outpost of the abbey there. We also translated and transcribed a charter relating to a burgage plot in the Homend in Ledbury and 10 acres of arable land near the town.We then studied the different types of government records, most of which were copied onto rolls. Successive documents were stitched together with the top of the new one to the tail of the previous one and then rolled up for storage, so they had no worries about keeping records in date order. These documents included the financial records known as the pipe rolls (the earliest public documents after Domesday Book), the administrative documents copied onto the patent rolls (whose originals were sealed open so that they could be read and reread) and the close rolls (whose originals were sealed closed so that opening them broke the seal). We heard about manorial court rolls and the rolls of the king’s court, and how the law worked in dealing with disputes, crimes and other matters; about free and unfree tenants, account rolls recording rents and the arrears to be paid. We also learnt about inquisitions post-mortem, Yes, they even had death duties in medieval times! Having been given an insight into the workings of the medieval world and how it was administered, all carefully explained by Janet, we were finally ready to start work on the bishop's rental.The bishop's rental was written in about 1288. In those far off days Ledbury belonged to the bishop of Hereford. He wished to have a definitive list of all his land holdings, not just Ledbury, and the rents due from them. The resultant rental names all the bishop’s tenants, with details of the land they held as well as the rent due from it. The compilers went round the town, street by street, before moving on to the fields surrounding it, then called

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Ledbury Foreign. The Ledbury rental was checked in 1228 by the bishop’s bailiff, Robert Furches, who recovered several previously ‘hidden’ rents.The bishop's rental for Ledbury is contained in a manuscript known as the Red Book. This document is far too precious to work with directly, so the pages relating to Ledbury were digitally photographed and transferred to a CD. We could then view the pages by computer or project them onto a large screen for the whole group to see and any difficult bits could be enlarged to facilitate deciphering.

The bailiff started his work at the edge of town in the Southend with its 20 tenants and then proceeded into New Street, which had 35 tenants. Next came Middletown, as the High Street was called until 1461, which had only 26 tenants, because St. Katherine's Hospital took up a lot of the space. Then up the Homend (up as far as Shanti Shanti) and down again, with 78 tenants in all, and into Bishop (now Bye) Street with 56 tenants. Both Middletown and Bishop Street had shop rows (called ‘selds’ in the rental) and there were 5 ‘shambles’ (butchers’ stalls where meat was butchered as well as sold), probably located near the lower cross in Middletown where water conveniently flowed by to carry away the unsavoury waste. Unassigned tenants may have lived in Church Lane and Church Street or in the shop rows. Ledbury had both a watermill and a windmill; even a ditch is listed, rented by John le Webb for one penny per annum.There were a number of people who held land by knight service of the manor of Ledbury; these were freeholders. Then followed a list of free tenants, who were also freeholders but had to pay a fixed rent, and a list of tenants who held farmland around Ledbury with a list of the total acreages. The population at the end of the 13 th century was only about one tenth of that today. The bishop of Hereford owned and was paid rent for arable, pasture, meadow and even vineyards Some tenants had to work on the bishop’s land for one or two days per week throughout the year, with extra work at harvest time, as part of their rent. Indeed some even had extra duties as well as this field work,

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guarding the crops or acting as postman for the bishop's letters. The value of the borough (town) itself was £27 10s 7½d, and that of the rural manor of Ledbury was £66s 5s 8d.It has been great fun, as well as really interesting, learning about the medieval world and helping to translate and transcribe the bishop's rental. We are very grateful to Dr Janet Cooper for all her hard work organising and running the medieval documents group. We would not have got very far without her extensive knowledge and expertise, particularly with the Latin!

Celia Kellett

The census group continues to meet informally and is working on an article we hope to offer to the Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, the county journal for local history among other subjects. The article will be based on the information for Ledbury Town, which we have transcribed from the enumerators’ books for the seven censuses from 1841 to 1901. Our initial task was to define the boundaries of the ‘town’, and after some discussion the area to be covered was declared to be that within the tollgates. Sticking to this area for every census year will enable us to make meaningful comparisons between the decades.

The topics being covered include population analysis, which covers the numbers of males and females in the town, their places of birth and age structures (e.g. how many children and how many elderly there were in 1851 compared with 1901). Another topic is occupations. Which were the main occupations in the town? Which 19th century ones had disappeared by 1901, and which had sprung up anew? How did the number of servants fluctuate from decade to decade? We will also comment on the workhouse and St. Katherine’s Hospital, along with their inmates.

The task of getting numerous tables of information off the computer has been done by Pat Strauss, who is also working on the history of pubs, inns and hotels in the town. Jane Adams is co-ordinating the overall article and writing a section on schools and education. Ann Jones and Gill Arquati are looking at the nature of the occupations of people living in different streets, and thus their social structure, and how certain families moved around the town during the second half of the 19th century. Mike Clarke is in charge of the maps that will illustrate the changes in the streets from 1851 to 1901.

Peter Bishop

Further Census Work

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“Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go” I sang in my head as I marched through Ledbury, armed with a bucket and shovel, following a group of people clad in their gardening clothes. An American tourist stopped short and exclaimed “Aw! Gee! You look as though you’re on a dig”. “We are!” was the reply – and that’s the first time I’ve ever seen an American lost for words.

That was not my only ‘First’. All my life I’ve wanted to go on a dig, and then the call came for volunteers to do just that. At first I hesitated, thinking I wasn’t young enough, but was assured that “There’ll always be something you can do” – and there was. From the first morning, when Chris Atkinson, Herefordshire’s Community Archaeologist gave a very useful introductory session, I was hooked.

We had to learn the correct way to excavate a cubic metre, a number of which had been previously earmarked in various back gardens around town. Firstly remove the turf neatly and stack it so that it could be replaced later, and then pile the excavated soil onto a tarpaulin, so that that could also be replaced. We then started to examine the top 10cm layer (or ‘spit’), loosening the soil and scraping with a trowel, extracting anything that looked interesting and placing it in the ‘Finds Tray’. To start with everything looked interesting so our Finds Tray filled rapidly, until Chris patiently explained the difference between a chunk of stone and a bone – not easy for novices when the item is covered with soil anyway. Slowly we began to get the feel of it, or at least to recognise stones! Having got to the bottom of the first spit, we had to record the finds in that layer. This was done on a form where we had to fill in the various descriptive fields: Site Address, Soil Colour, Compaction, Depth, Inclusions and Finds. Then the Finds – the interesting bits – needed to be bagged and labelled, to identify exactly where they came from. Once this had been done, we approached the next 10cm spit in the same manner, and so forth. Discovering how all this recording is done was probably for me the best part of the whole experience – something which one doesn’t see on ‘Time Team’!

Time Team Extra-Special

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The first dig was near the churchyard, where we came across quite a few bones, some human and some animal. Deep down in one trench, part of a skull was found with other bones scattered near it; as this could possibly have been a burial, it was carefully recorded and then covered up again. The next sites were in High Street and were quite different. Quite a lot of broken oyster shell here and I learnt that, apart from oysters being eaten by anyone who could afford them, the shells were also used in mortar. We also found a late nineteenth century coin there. Other interesting finds during the “Dig” were probably mostly Victorian and included bits of glassware and glazed pottery, nails and scraps of metal and quite a lot of clay pipe stems and bowls. In the early days we got all excited every time we got a Find, but after a while we became a bit more blasé about it all, even throwing some things casually away onto the tarpaulin. In one of the Southend sites we came across a rubbish dump with a difference, being full of charcoal and clinker. There was also a tooth and, as luck would have it, next door is the surgery of a dentist, who was able to tell us that it had probably fallen out (i.e. had not been extracted) from a large elderly male, who used a tooth pick!! The neighbour on the other side then told us that, yes, one of the buildings at the top of the garden had indeed been a forge. This of course led me to look in the Census returns from 1851-1901 and some of the trade directories of that period, from which I came to the conclusion that Charles Kings, who was christened in 1822 and had lived most of his life in Southend, started life as a blacksmith but turned to wheelwrighting. (Perhaps he was a large man, who had lost a tooth!!). If only we knew exactly which building he operated from.

The final two sites were located further from the centre of town and for various reasons were perhaps less interesting. However, each in its own way contributed towards what for me was a worthwhile experience. Even though we found nothing startling, I found that looking at these ordinary everyday items, dug up from maybe half a metre down, and wondering who used them, how, and why they had been discarded, was fascinating. I came to the decision that Walt Disney knew what he was talking about when he wrote “You’re never too old to be young”.

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Southend WheelwrightsAll this digging of ‘old rubbish’ has made me think about the people who might have thrown it away. Drawing upon various sources and volunteers’ projects, I have therefore tried to find out about who was living in the Southend in Victorian times and in particular anyone involved with a forge.It transpires that from at least 1820 to the early 1840s there was a William Russell, age 50 in 1841, and variously described as a smith, a whitesmith or a blacksmith operating there. Then in the 1850s we have Henry Russell, a blacksmith and jobbing smith. Registers of baptisms also list a Henry Russell, one of nine children born to William (listed as a smith/blacksmith in the Homend) and Hannah between 1819 and 1835, and christened on 14 January 1821, making him about 30 years old in 1851. Indeed a Henry Russell, a blacksmith of that age, appears in the 1851 Census. However after that date the only Russell mentioned is Hannah, a widow living in New Street in 1851 and in the Southend in 1861, by which time she had reached the grand age of 68 years.In the next property we find the Kings working at the same trade. John Kings was listed as both a wheelwright and a blacksmith in the Southend in a 1835 directory; he was still recorded there in 1851 at 61 years of age. John Kings had been married in Ledbury in 1822 to Charlotte Bosley, who had been born in Preston, Glos., daughter of John and Mary Bosley. John Bosley was another blacksmith working in the Southend at about that time, but by 1835 it seems as if he may have handed over the smithy to his son-in-law. It may have been the same John Bosley who by that point had taken over the New Inn from Ann Bosley, possibly his mother, who had died four years earlier aged 81. But certainly by the 1841 census, the elderly John and Mary Bosley had retired to St Katherine’s almshouses, where John still resided in 1851, by then aged 90.Between 1822 and 1831 at least six children were born to John Kings and his wife Charlotte, the first one coming 9 days before they were married. Two of their sons were Charles and John, neither of whom married. Charles followed in his father’s footsteps and seems to have remained a wheelwright in Southend all the 70 plus years of his life. John junior, on the other hand, though living with the family in and after 1871, was variously described as attorney’s clerk, accountant, secretary to the Ancient Order of Foresters, solicitor’s clerk and finally, in 1901, aged 74, a ‘gardener for own account’, still living in Southend, now with a widowed sister, Ann.John Kings senior died before 1861 leaving his widow Charlotte, aged 69, as wheelwright, though their son Charles, 38, with the same occupation was there

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to help, with his sister Harriet, aged 31 and also unmarried. Ten years later this grand old lady of 79, who had kept her family and the business going, was still alive, though blind by this time. She probably died, nearing age 90, sometime before the 1881 census. The children carried on, and Charles even added carpentry and joinery to his skills; by 1891, when almost 70, he was still a wheelwright employing other men. Going back to the Russells, we mustn’t overlook all of William’s other children. One son, also named William, went to London becoming a draper. He certainly made good in some business in Old Bond Street, and later in life he built the Woodlands at Parkway. Shortly before he died in 1889 he gave £50 towards a clock for the town, which eventually became the seed-corn money for the building of the Barrett Browning Institute, with £1500 given by his widow in the following year. And a daughter Elizabeth ran a school, later endowing the ‘Russell Middle Class School’.So there we have these apparently close knit, fairly healthy and long lived families of wheelwrights living in the Southend between 1820 and 1901. Having seen, during “The Dig”, a rubbish dump including lots of charcoal and clinker, with metal, a very large human tooth and the bones of what was probably a cat behind no 20 Southend, and having been told by a neighbour that no 19 is on the site of a forge, I am tempted to say that Charles Kings, a well-built cat lover, lived and worked here. However I can’t prove it, so perhaps in my next life I shall resort to writing Historical Fiction!

Janet Funke

My sledge and hammer lie reclined,My bellows too have lost their wind.My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed

And in the dust my vice is laid.My coal is spent, my iron gone,

My nails are drove, my work is done. My fire-dried corpse now lies at rest.

My soul, smoke-like, is soaring to be blest.

The Blacksmith’s Epitaph(inscribed on the gravestone in Ledbury churchyard of

Thomas Russell, father of William Russell above)

This Newsletter is published in May and November. Copy should be submitted by early April and October respectively,

preferably electronically or as typed entries, to the Editor, Pat Strauss.By email to: pat_and_mike@compuserve.com

or by hand/post to the Heritage Centre, Church Lane, Ledbury HR8 1DN

The CommitteeThe chairman is Dr Janet Cooper, formerly Editor of the Essex VCH and a member of the central VCH committee, now Volunteer Group Leader for Ledbury EPE. The other trustees are Professor Chris Dyer (Birmingham and Leicester University, formerly chairman of the VCH central committee) and the Herefordshire historians Ron Shoesmith, Brian Smith, Jim Tonkin and David Whitehead (our secretary).

They are joined by committee members James Anthony (Herefordshire Libraries), Tom Davies (our treasurer), Joe Hillaby (Herefordshire and Ledbury medieval historian), Sue Hubbard (lately Herefordshire county archivist), Gill Murray (lately 6th Form College, Hereford), Ruth Richardson (lately 6th Form College, Hereford) and Dr Charles Watkins (Nottingham University).

Our Herefordshire patrons are Sir Thomas Dunne, lately Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire, the Bishop of Hereford, Sir Roy Strong and Lawrence Banks CBE.

For all the latest results of the EPE Ledbury researchas well as back numbers of this Newsletter, visit

www.exploreenglandspast.org.uk/.

Contact details:EPE office: 01531 635221

Mobile: 07971 430960 e-mail: spinches@glos.ac.uk

Chairman – Janet Cooper Team leader – Sylvia Pinches Volunteers – Janet Cooper