About Volume 1

Historical Review Article Abstracts. Volume 1

Volume 1 Editorial

English Heritage owns or manages some 420 properties dedicated to public presentation. Probably no other governmental body in the world has so many. And the range of English Heritage's properties is arguably the widest anywhere, from prehistoric sites to nuclear bunkers. It includes Stonehenge and much of Hadrian's Wall, ruins of the greatest medieval religious houses, seats of the greatest medieval and early modern magnates, Renaissance fortifications, landscapes from the age of sensibility, a deserted Bronze Age village and a deserted medieval village, the world's first iron bridge and the world's first iron-framed mill, the greatest of London's aristocratic houses, a coal mine, Queen Victoria's island retreat, the Boscobel oak, the Albert Memorial, the most famous of Rembrandt's self-portraits, Darwin's diary and the duke of Wellington's boots.

English Heritage Historical Review is dedicated to this. English Heritage is an executive agency, not an academic institution. It determines practical and topical issues which arise in the course of managing the material evidence of the nation's past. Yet it would not be fulfilling its managerial responsibility in the necessary depth if it did not think about the nature of the properties which it manages. Whether executive or contemplative, many of these issues require fundamental investigation. On occasion this investigation is scientific, technological, financial, commercial, legal, educational or aesthetic.

But, as English Heritage is the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, all its properties require at least periodic audits of the available historical information, and often a more penetrating scrutiny. English Heritage employs professional historians and also engages historians as consultants for specific tasks. Although we do other things as well, we undertake historical research as part of our job. We make historical discoveries like those which are presented on these pages. Some of these discoveries are made by archaeologists and by archaeological means, but their consequences are historical.

Not all of our discoveries are suitable for the publication series which English Heritage has always produced. English Heritage guidebooks may summarise them. English Heritage archaeological reports may present the material data which underpins them. They may well be peripheral to the scope of our published architectural investigations, or be relatively inconspicuous within them. English Heritage Historical Review has therefore been conceived to present new historical discoveries about our own properties, as discrete items. This volume is the first of what is intended to be an annual publication.

The articles in it and its successor volumes provide information which might be distracting or overwhelming in guidebooks, and which require more interpretation and contextualisation than even the more generous length of archaeological reports allows. They cover all periods from prehistory to the present; they cover all aspects of material culture – landscapes, structures and smaller artefacts; they do not just record, but contextualise and interpret. The information in them is previously unpublished; it may be generated by documentation, survey, excavation, scientific examination or by interpretation; it is supported by the apparatus scholasticus necessary for verification, endorsement and further investigation. In short, English Heritage Historical Review presents discoveries about the past in a manner recognised as historical.

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Historic Review Glossary

Sample Spreads from Volume 1