Newsletter

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The Winter Lecture Season

By Dorothy Newbury.

Lecture time will soon be with us again, and for those who can’t find their programme cards, we repeat the details.
Oct. 4 1977 – Archaeology and History of Iona – Dr. Richard Reece, BSc, PhD, FSA
Nov. 1 1977 – Silchester – the Investigation of a Roman Town – Dr. Michael Fulford, BA, PhD
WED Dec. 7 1977 – Elizabethan Banquet, Old Palace, Hatfield — see page 2
Jan. 3 1978 – Archaeology of Peru (or Mexico) – P. Barnes, MA
Feb. 7 1978 – A Possession for ever – the Parthenon at Athens – B. F. Cook, MA, FSA
Mar. 7 1978 – Meaning and Purpose of English Wall Paintings – E. Clive Rouse, MBE, FSA
Apr. 4 1978 – Excavations in South West London – Scott McCracken

With our increased membership it is difficult to provide a programme that caters for all tastes – not to mention every period – but we have tried to make the scope of our lectures as wide and as varied as possible.

Lectures will as usual take place on the first Tuesday of each month at Central Library, The Burroughs, NW4 (near the Town Hall). Buses 83 and 143 pass the door; Nos. 240, 125, 183 and 113 are within ten minutes walk, as is Hendon Central Underground station. There are two free car parks nearly opposite the library.

The lecture room upstairs opens at 8.00 pm, when coffee and biscuits will be available at 10p, and there will be an opportunity to meet each other and chat, and particularly to greet new members (old members please note!) Our Hon. Librarian, George Ingram, will be there to arrange loans from the Book box, and our publications will be on sale. Lectures start about 8.30 and, if time permits, are followed by questions. The Library building closes at 10 pm sharp.

Members are welcome to bring a guest, but guests who wish to attend more than one lecture should be asked to join the Society.
The First Lecture

Dr. Reece, who will be giving our opening talk, is on the staff of the Institute of Archaeology. His lecture promises to be a lively one, as anyone who has read g=his article “Ideas in Archaeology,” in the current issue of London Archaeologist” will agree.

His subject is Iona, an island in the Inner Hebrides granted to St. Columba in 563 for the foundation of a monastery. It was the base from which the Celtic Church converted Northern Britain to Christianity.
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More HADAS dates for your Diary

Oct. 15. SYMPOSIUM for HADAS members on the West Heath dig, with various speakers, at Bigwood House, Bigwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb (behind the Institute). 2-6 pm. Tickets buy post from Dorothy Newbury, or available at the first lecture. No entrance fee, but a first-class tea(with HADAS made cakes) will be provided at 30p per head.

Oct. 22. BOOKSALE at the Teahouse, Northway, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 10-12 noon. Entrance, including coffee and biscuits, 15p. Donations of books, including paperbacks, will be very welcome. Please stockpile them now, and await further details about their disposal in the October Newsletter.

Nov. 12/13, 19/20. PROCESSING AND RESEARCH SESSIONS, two weekends, at the Teahouse, 10 am – 5 pm daily. Further details next month.
Dec 7. CHRISTMAS EVENT: DINNER AT HATFIELD

The Society’s 1977 Christmas celebration will befit this Jubilee year: it will be an Elizabethan banquet (with Elizabethan entertainment) at the Old Palace, Hatfield House, where the first Queen Elizabeth waited quietly in the wings for her return to ascend the throne of England.

Hatfield was an ecclesiastical manor belonging to the Bishop of Ely from Medieval times. The Old Palace was built in 1497 for Cardinal Morton (of “Morton’s Fork” fame), then Bishop of Ely and later Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1538 the manor passed from Ely to the Crown. The Bishop’s Palace became a Royal Palace and the nursery of Henry VIII’s children. Mary, Elizabeth and Edward, all of whom were to rule England, all spent part of their childhood there.

We shall dine in the authentic Tudor Great Hall, already a century old when nearby Hatfield House was built by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury and Prime Minister in turn to Elizabeth I and James I. An application form for the dinner is enclosed. Please return it to Dorothy Newbury as soon as possible.
JUBILATION

.. is the title of a Jubilee exhibition of Royal commemorative pottery at the Bethnall Green Museum of Childhood – but only till Sept 4.

On show are 260 pieces, starting with Delft ware of the reign of Charles II and ending with pieces produced for George V’s Jubilee. These are from the extensive collection of James Blewitt, who in the last 15 years has amassed over 5000 pieces. There is an interesting catalogue and visitors get an added bonus by seeing the displays of toys, Punch and Judy and toy theatres, whilst upstairs are costumes, furniture and Japanese armour. The Museum is only three minutes walk from Bethnal Green tube station.

Have you bought your copy of the Society’s latest booklet, Victorian Jubilee? It deals with the events that took place during the two Victorian celebrations in the then rural areas of today’s Borough of Barnet. Price 65p post free from Jeremy Clynes.
Tracing your Ancestors

How many of us have fleetingly thought that it would be interesting to follow up our ancestral tree – with the vague notion that we would have to consult the parish records of the place where our parents were born, but knowing little more? David Ireland’s “Your Family Tree,” one of the Shire Publications “Discovering” booklets, tells you how to set about the job methodically, where to look, how to use tracings already made and how to record your findings so that they are readily available when needed. It lists numerous sources of information – secular as well as church records, apprenticeship indentures, tithe and enclosure records and many others.
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This booklet (available form Jeremy Clynes, 60p post free) is an excellent first step on the ancestral trail. You may (perish the thought!) find you have singularly uninteresting ancestors – but you will still manage to catch a fascinating glimpse of social history. Once started, indeed, you may find yourself hooked! It would be interesting to hear from HADAS members who have already traced their family tree. What did they find on the way?

Parish Registers

Recently the Parish Registers of Hendon St, Mary’s, formerly kept in the Parish Chest, have been lodged by the Vicar in the Record Office of the Greater London Council (Middlesex Section, Queen Anne’s Gate Buildings, Dartmouth Street, SW1), where they have been copied onto microfilm. They consist of:

Baptisms – Oct.1653-Aug. 1946

Marriages – Mar. 1654-Sept. 1949

Burials – Oct. 1653 – June 1953.

The Libraries department of the London Borough of Barnet has applied to the GLC for microfilm copies, fro the Borough’s Local History Collection.

It may be of some help to HADAS researchers to know the whereabouts of other local parish registers: (* dates give the total span within which the three registers fall.)

AT QUEEN ANNE’S GATE BUILDINGS:

St. Mary-at Finchley (registers from 1558-1958*)

St. Margarets, Edgware (1717-1867)

St. James the Great, Friern Barnet (1674-1968)

South Mimms (1558-1906)

Monken Hadley (1619-1956)

AT COUNTY RECORD OFFICE, HERTFORD:

St. John the Baptist, Chipping Barnet (1560-1692)

St. Andrews, Totteridge (1546-1947).

A helpful research tool, “Original Parish Registers” published 1974 by Local Population Studies, provides much of the above information. It lists original registers to be found in Record Offices and small libraries in England and Wales, and costs £2.25 from Tawney House, Matlock, Derbyshire. If the registers of a parish are not mentioned in this booklet they probably either (a) remain with the incumbent (as do, for instance, the registers of St. Mary the Virgin, East Barnet, where the Rector is the Rev. H. Steed); (b) they may have suffered some accident – destruction by fire, water or rats being the most likely; or (c) occasional volumes may drift into the possession of great libraries such as the Bodleian or the British Museum.

The August Outing: A Trip Full of Superlatives

Report by Lucile Armstrong.

The sky was persistently grey as our HADAS coach nosed its way through the lovely town of Marlborough, with its enchanting old houses, and on past Wiltshire landscape and rolling hills. We caught a glimpse of “The Sanctuary” (from which a stone avenue leads to Avebury Ring) and parked the coach on the Roman road, almost at the foot of Silbury Hill. From here we trudged up to West Kennet long barrow – built c. 3650 BC – from which an extensive view of the surrounding “treasures of Neolithic Britain” could be admired: Windmill Hill, The Sanctuary, Silbury Hill and innumerable barrows dotted along the ridgeway against the sky. West Kennet barrow (said to have contained 45 skeletons) is the largest in England; from its summit our guide, Dr. Eric Grant, explained its history and that of the Avebury complex seen from the crest of the barrow. This part of Wiltshire is remarkable for its obvious importance to Neolithic man. The Icknield Way – the route for a prosperous flint trade – passes here. Some flints may have come from Grimes Graves.
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Silbury Hill is the largest man-made mound in Europe. It is estimated to have taken 700 men ten years to construct. Material was quarried from around it and this enabled the erection of what is virtually a step pyramid – not unlike that of Mycerinus in Egypt, also built in the 3rd millenium BC. In Silbury’s construction 12 and 1/2 million cubic feet of stone and soil were used. It is believed to have represented the Earth Mother (se Michael Dames’ book “The Treasure of Silbury Hill”, London, 1975).

There was no time to climb Silbury Hill, so we rushed on to Avebury, visited the museum – it contains many finds from the neighbourhood – and then the Great Ring, which afforded us time for lunch and a breather among the stupendous stones erected “in the time before metal was known.” The Great Ring is protected by a ditch 20 feet deep (how did they excavate it using red deer antlers alone?) then an outer rampart 50 feet high. Within the ring are two smaller ones – from an aerial photograph these look like two eyes. A few stones, which have withstood the erosion of time and the depredations of man, still indicate the Avenue to the Sanctuary.

Dazed at the cyclopean work accomplished by Neolithic man in dragging these enormous sarsens across from the neighbouring hills and erecting them, so that they still stand five thousand years later, we made for Swindon and the Great Western Railway museum, with its colossal steam engines. The railway employees’ village was also visited; it is undergoing a most imaginative face-lift, and looked very attractive.

After that an enormous and delicious tea awaited us at McIlroys before our journey home. Much thanks are due to Mrs Newbury for organising such a wonderful outing, and to our guide Dr. Grant. We all felt sad that (except, of course, for Bristol), this was the final outing of the season.
Legal Literary Luminary

By Daphne Lorimer.

Thomas Jarman lived in one part of our Borough – Hadley – and was buried in another – Totteridge – where he lies with his two sisters and a nephew in the Dissenters Graveyard. To the casual passer-by he is a forgotten name on a forgotten tombstone; but to the legal world he is no “village Hampden,” but “one of those pioneers of legal literature” whose works are still in use today. “Jarman on Wills” is as standard a work for the lawyer as Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” is for the classical historian.

Thomas Jarman was born in 1800, son of Francis Jarman, Gentleman, of Bath. He certainly had two sisters, Anne (b. 1795) and Rebecca (b. 1802) and one brother. He first became a clerk in the office of his uncle, a Bristol solicitor, but in 1821 he moved to London and entered the Middle Temple. He was called to the Bar in 1826 and became one of the Conveyancing Counsel to the Court of Chancery, an office he held until his death in 1860.
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His literary work began at once. He edited the third edition of J.J. Powell’s “An Essay on Devizes,” published in 2 volumes in 1827, writing the whole second volume himself. In the same year he continued the work of W.M. Blythwood, compiling volumes 4-10 of “A Selection of Precendents forming a System of Conveyancing.” In 1844 he published “A Treatise on Wills;” previously, in 1835, he and W. Hayes had together written “A concise form of Wills with Practical Notes” which reached 9 editions by 1883.

He died a relatively poor man, and his law practice was never large. He had not had the advantage of pupilage in the chambers of a fashionable conveyancer and, as far as his Bristol connections were concerned, he himself ruefully admitted that “a prophet is not without honour save in his own country.” His professional reputation grew from his legal writings and was, in consequence, slow in coming. His genius (and inclination) lay not in the practice of law, but in “collating, methodising and elucidating a scattered medley of cases.” His labours were directed, as he once said, to helping “other men into their carriages at the rate of the day-labourer’s wages.” While others grew rich on the results of his work, he would often reject a temptingly endorsed brief in favour of research, once remarking that “were I a solicitor, I would not lay papers before a man deeply engaged in bookmaking, for then his client has only half a counsel.” Possibly in an effort to increases income, Jarman speculated unwisely on the money market. This, plus his recurring ill-health, may be why he had so often to change his chambers.

Jarman’s writing and practice were interrupted by three major illnesses. He had, however, the tenacity of purpose; much of his editorial work was accomplished despite physical disabilities. He was first afflicted with a serious eye condition which lasted many months. During this time he and an ailing fellow conveyancer indulged in rural wanderings (their only library being the 4th canto of “Childe Harold” and Arthelet’s “Shepherd’s Touchstone”). His second major ailment left him lame; his third and most serious illness in 1855 left him further paralysed.

The nature of these later illnesses is not specified but may have involved high blood pressure since he possessed a fanatical desire for fresh air and low temperatures. He was seen in his chambers in the Temple on a bitterly cold day in March, upright before his standing desk in his shirt sleeves, with all the windows open. He had not fire, saying that he benefited from the stove of a less hardy worker below. Again, a neighbour at Hadley, where his devoted sisters kept house for him, records finding him, one Christmas, working at a crude desk under a tree in a bleak field, cattle all round and snowflakes falling steadily on his manuscripts.

Thomas Jarman gave generously, if indiscriminately, to many charities. He was entirely free from avarice or rapacity and cheerfully gave his services free to indigent clients. A prominent member of the Totteridge Lane Chapel, he was wont to describe himself as a “Dissenter and an old Whig.” He was a republican at heart and an admirer of all things American but although a great law codifier, he was no law reformer.His friends, who were many and from all walks of life, regarded him as a man of large, inquiring and candid mind.

He died on Feb. 26, 1860, at Hadley Green, from erysipelys of the face and head – an illness which today is not considered fatal – one of “those rare men of whom the truth, the whole truth might be safely as well as instructively told.”
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The HADAS Bookbox

Members who ordered them have now received copies of the first list of contents of the Bookbox. Since the Box is constantly growing, there are already additions. We shall in future print occasional supplementaries to keep the original list up to date. Here is the first: references on the left (e.g. Misc 139) are to categories and numbers in the original list:
Misc. 139 The Lake Villages of Somerset Arthur Bulleid
Arch. 144 Report on Excavations at Brockley Hill, Middx, 1951 Trans. LAMAS 1953
Rom. Brit. 145 A Kiln of the potter Doinus Arch. J. vol 129
Brit. Hist. 79 Reconstructed Map of London under Richard II Marjorie Honeybourne
Local Hist 164 Medieval Camden Deidre le Faye
165 Streets of West Hampstead ed. Christopher Wade
166 Camden History Review No. 2 Camden History Soc.
167 Camden History Review No. 3 Camden History Soc.
168 Camden History Review No. 3 Camden History Soc.
169 Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907-1977 Brigid Grafton Green
Forthcoming Events

York Archaeological Weekend, Nov. 25-27, on the Norman Conquest of Yorkshire, particularly the violent events of 1068-9. Conference fee £8.00 (non-residential). Applications to Director of Special Courses, Dept. Adult Education, Leeds University, who will also supply on request a list of possible accommodation in York.

British Mesolithic, with particular reference to the Midlans: residential school at Knuston Hall, Irchester, Wellingborough, Northamts, Jan. 14/15 1978. Fee £12 (full residential). Applications (sae) to the Principal. Tutors: Mrs W, Tutin (The Environment of Britain, 10000-4000 BC): Paul Mellars (Chronological and Cultural Structure and Economic and Social Aspects of the British Mesolithic); A. Saville (Mesolithic in Midlands and Mesolithic Implement Types); Clive Bonsall (A case-study: the Mesolithic in West Cumbria).
Bristol Weekend, Sept. 23-25.

The coach for Bristol is full, with a very small waiting list. If anyone is still keen to go, please ring Dorothy Newbury. She will be glad to add names to the waiting list in case of further late cancellations.

Here is a short reading list for the Bristol area, suggested by Mr. M.W. Ponsford, Field Archaeologist to Bristol University, who will conduct our Sunday walkabout in Bristol:

Steamship Great Britain, Garahm Farr, 20p

Prehistoric Bristol, Grinsell, 20p

Romans in the Bristol area, K. Branigan, 20p

Medieval Churches in Bristol, M.Q. Smith, 20p

Bristol Mint, K. Grinsell, 20p

Industrial Archaeology of Bristol, R.A. Buchanan, 15p

Bristol in the Early Middle Ages, David Walker, 25p.

In addition we suggest The Mendip Hills in Prehistoric and Roman times, by John Campbell, David Elkington, Peter Fowler, and Leslie Grinsell, 60p.

If you would like any of these pamphlets, please lead Dorothy Newbury know, and she will order them in bulk.