York Museums Trust Blog

The current exhibition of Yorkshire Museum treasures at the British Museum got a mention in Parliament yesterday.

York’s MP Hugh Bayley encouraged others to get down to the exhibition in London - or even better to travel to York to see the collection of star objects when the Yorkshire Museum re-opens in August.

Here’s how the exchange was reported in Hansard - the daily record of everything said in the Houses of Parliament.

Hugh Bayley: My right hon. Friend was in York last month, and perhaps he knows that, at the British Museum at the moment, there is an exhibition of some of the greatest treasures from Yorkshire, including the Middleham Jewel, the Coppergate Helmet and the Ormside Bowl. Will the Minister encourage members of the public, particularly Londoners, to go to the British Museum to see what makes York so special, perhaps as a taster to encourage them to go north in the summer and visit the real thing in Yorkshire?

The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Margaret Hodge): I am delighted that the temporary closure of the Yorkshire Museum has made it possible for those jewels in our crown to be exhibited in a room in the British Museum. I encourage everybody to go and see them. The partnership between national and regional museums is hugely important in ensuring that all the country’s wealth of artefacts are enjoyed by many more people. It is this Government who, through a renaissance in the regions, have made that partnership possible. That is why it is enormously important that we continue to fund that programme.

Click here for more information about Treasures from Medieval York, the exhibition at the British Museum which runs until 27 June.

Our curators Isla Gladstone and Stuart Ogilvy have been hard at work piecing together the 100-or-so sections of a giant ichthyosaur fossil in preparation for the re-opening of the Yorkshire Museum.

The massive sea creature, more than 20 feet or six metres long, was a predator in the seas over North Yorkshire during the time of the dinosaurs.
Our ichthyosaur is one of the biggest in Britain and its remains were found in Jurassic rocks near Whitby on the Yorkshire Coast. It is very rare to find one as well-preserved and complete as this one.
Isla and Stuart had to work out exactly how much space the huge fossil would take up and how it should be mounted to display it to its best effect in our new gallery, Extinct – A Way of Life.
Each piece of the huge jigsaw fossil been numbered by curators before them and each will be put back into place yet again when it goes on show.
Before then, the pieces will be sent away to be cleaned up and restored so the impact of this huge beast on visitors is as dramatic as possible. This would have been a beast you would not wanted to have encountered if you were a little fish swimming through the waters of Jurassic Whitby…

Sherri Steel unearths some archive recipes for using up old bread, which are set to be recreated in York Castle Museum’s working kitchen.

Recipe book from about 1930

Crumbs! It’s amazing the amount of food that can be created from a few slices of stale old bread…

I’ve been researching old recipes for some historic cookery demonstrations at the Castle Museum in March (Click here for details).

Avoiding waste does seem to be a topical subject at the moment and many of the recipes I found date from the times of rationing.

Cooking with stale bread didn’t just happen in times of austerity though, and it has been used for many things – toast, puddings, food for invalids. Breadcrumbs were often used in Roman and medieval recipes – a sage stuffing appears in a Roman recipe for baked dormouse!

Here’s some of the recipes we’ll be recreating:

Tart for an Ember Day

There were many recipes for Ember Day tarts. An Ember Day was one of the many days in the year when the church forbade the eating of meat.

This is from The Forme of Cury, c1390, a cookbook compiled around 1390 by the master-cooks of King Richard II:

Tart in ymber day: take and parboile onynons; presse out the water & hewe hem smale; take brede & bray it in a mortar, and temper it up with ayren; do perto butter, ineon, spice and salt and corans & a ltel sugar with powdor douce, and bake it in a trap,& serve it forth.

Which when translated means: Take and parboil onions; press out the water and chop them small; take bread and grind it in a mortar, and mix it with eggs; add butter to this, and saffron, salt, currents and a little sugar with sweet powder; bake it in a pie shell (or oven dish) and serve it forth.

Bread Pudding

Puddings also use up stale bread e.g. summer pudding or the traditional bread pudding.

This recipe uses breadcrumbs and is from The House-keeper’s Pocket-book, and Compleat Family Cook, by Mrs Sarah Harrison, 6^th edition, 1755.

To a pint of Cream put in a Quarter of a Pound of Butter, set it on the Fire, and keep it stirring; the Butter being melted, put in as much grated Manchet as will make it pretty light, a Nutmeg, or something else, and as much Sugar as you please, three or four Eggs, and a little Salt; mix all well together, butter a dish, put it in, and bake it half an Hour.

Toast sandwiches

And finally, here is an example of toast being used to feed invalids, in the belief it was easier on the stomach than freshly-baked bread.

This recipe is from Housekeeping Book, Edited by Mary Jewry, c.1890.

Ingredients: Thin cold toast, thin slices of bread and butter, pepper and salt to taste. Mode: Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the Yorkshire Museum’s galleries before and after our building work began…

Work is well underway on transforming the  museum in time for our re-opening on 1 August, 2010, when we’ll have five fantastic new galleries.

For those familiar with the building, the difference is already striking. Not only have all the cases and displays gone, but internal walls have been torn down and covers taken off hidden windows, letting in daylight and giving the place a feeling of being much more spacious.

Behind-the-scenes shots of a press event at the British Museum.  It was the launch of the new exhibition ‘Treasures From Medieval York: England’s Other Capital’

All of the treasures are from our own Yorkshire Museum collection.  It’s the first time the BM has displayed another museum’s collection in this way.  Very exciting.

Victoria Adams, a newly-arrived archaeologist at the Yorkshire Museum, describes what it was like to be on the scene when a skeleton was found by builders…

It is claimed that you can’t dig a hole in York without disturbing archaeology, and that certainly seemed true recently when human remains were unearthed beneath the foundations of the Yorkshire Museum.

Contractors were excavating a drain as part of the museum redevelopments, when they uncovered part of a human jawbone and cranium.  A watching brief was in place, so archaeologists quickly came on the scene to record the exact location and relative position of the bones. The remains were then removed to a safe location, allowing the contractors to continue work.

I was asked along to ‘hold the end of the tape-measure’ and accurately plot the find-site, for what we thought was just a few pieces of bone. Excavating a bit lower, more of the skull was unearthed, then the ball of the hip bone amongst the skull fragments, so we concluded that the skeleton was disarticulated, or jumbled up.  Lower still though we found the arms, ribs, and spinal column all in situ, with a large Victorian pipe cutting across where the pelvis and legs should have been. It appears that the historical builders were somewhat unconscientious, and on discovering human bones just threw them out of the way!

The skeleton may be that of a medieval Christian, as it was deliberately laid out to face east in the eventuality of waking up on Judgement Day. If so, he or she is likely to be associated with St Mary’s Abbey, the ruins of which surround and continue under the museum.

However to add to the intrigue, large fragments of Roman ceramics were found immediately above and below the bones. These may have been disturbed when the grave was dug in medieval times. Or this may be Roman grave, Christian or otherwise!

An osteoarchaeologist is currently examining the bones to determine age, gender and any other information about the individual’s life and death.  If the pathology is interesting then they may be carbon14 tested, to accurately determine the age of the bones. Eventually the skeleton will be respectfully reburied.

Does the Yorkshire Museum have any other skeletons hidden in the water-closet?! Quite probably, as many people were buried in the church and grounds of the medieval abbey.  Excavation destroys archaeological contexts, and analytical processes are continually developing, so it is better to leave sites undisturbed if possible.

So yes, it is quite likely that more bodies will come to light in the future. That’s certainly something to think about as you eat your picnic in the Museum Gardens.

Andrew Morrison, our Curator of Archaeology, begins a series of blogs about the £2m transformation of the Yorkshire Museum.

What’s our greatest problem at The Yorkshire Museum? The answer is obvious, isn’t it: we’re just too great.

That may sound like a boast – in fact, let’s face it, it is a boast – but it is the simple truth. There’s just too much important stuff and just too many fantastic stories for a provincial museum of medium size to tell.

Our greatest strength is, of course, the same thing.

Allow me to take a minute to explain just what we’ve (that ‘we’ includes you, naturally) got in the Yorkshire Museum.

We’re a science and natural history museum with one of the most historically important collection of fossils in Europe, the custodians of evidence which helped lead to Darwin’s breakthrough on natural selection.

We’re a Roman history museum with key artefacts crucial to the understanding of the Romans in Britain. The great emperor Constantine was proclaimed right here in York. We have the proof. We have the last evidence of the legendary, supposedly vanishing Ninth legion, rare statues of the Gods and a whole lot more.

We’re a museum of medieval history beyond compare in the country outside of London. The remains of the abbey, destroyed by King Henry VIII’s men, actually make up part of our building and we have the most complete and important Saxon helmet in the Kingdom.

Add to that the fact that the building is Grade I and of vast historic importance (we’re one of the oldest purpose-built museums in the world). Oh and don’t forget we’re a seat of learning with visiting academics from around the world beating a path to our doors.

So a legacy and a collection that is the pride of Yorkshire. How can you fail to present all of that? Very easily.

It can’t be confused, it can’t be boring and we have to entertain and inform both 80-year-old granddad and that five-year-old on his or her first ever trip to a museum. We want this museum to confirm its rightful place as one of York’s premier attractions, right up there with the Minster. We want the wow factor and we want to brand the museum as the one venue with the whole story of York and Yorkshire.

All of which sounds a bit grand when you find yourself knocking out plasterboard, breathing dust and wondering about the cup-of-tea factor while negotiating with the skip company and lending your mind to where that moth-eaten but much loved old stuffed bear is going to go.

We’d love you to join us and follow our progress via these blogs.

NB: Our thanks to Peter Williamson who bought ‘Swampy’ (see previous blog) for £69 for his dinosaur daft and animal crazy nephew, Jack, aged 11.

I’ve known my mate Swampy for a long time now and I love him.

Of course loving him wasn’t going to stop me from smashing him up with a sledgehammer and chucking him in the skip.

In fact it was only the gentle persuasion of the York Museums Trust Media and Public Relations Department (ie Lee) that led to my sticking him on eBay (current bidding £56).

‘Swampy’ is a plaster and fibreglass model of a 5ft amphibian which roamed the tropical – yes tropical – swamps of Yorkshire 312million years ago.

He was a key feature in Yorkshire Museum for well over a decade and so was viewed by well over a million people. Nearly every child and a fair proportion of grown-ups felt the need to pat his head.
 
 The reason for Swampy’s existence was to help explain what ‘Yorkshire’ would have been like in the Upper Carboniferous period, a time when many of the coal seams in Britain were formed.

Emerging from a swamp, devouring a fish, this eye-catching amphibian performed his job in our old museum well – though I lost count years ago how many people wrongly thought he was a crocodile.
 
He just won’t fit into our planned new family friendly and fun Extinct gallery which will boast a real dinosaur trackway, tell the story of supposedly extinct creatures that returned ‘from the dead’ and modern interactive activities.

Swampy is just one of our characters and I’ll be telling you of others in the course of these blogs. Not that we’re going to be too sentimental. They have to do a job and fit into our new museum – or it’s the sledgehammer and the skip.

Can you save Swampy from this fate? He makes a good educational tool and he’s quirky and fun. Just don’t call him a crocodile.

This lovely armchair is made from oak and was made in one of a group of workshops operating in the Leeds area at this time. The decoration is Elizabethan in style and so perhaps a bit old fashioned for the time of its production. The chair was probably made for one of the new breed of Yorkshire gentlemen whose fortunes were based in the affluent towns of the West Riding, at the centre of the English clothing industry.

This group of furniture makers produced various forms at this period including chairs, chests and cupboards. Their work is characterised by its extremely good workmanship and decoration.

The distinctive design features of these workshops which can be seen in this chair include the double-scrolled pediment crest with earpieces, and the carved back panel with the diamond motif complete with pennant-like terminals.

Lady Cockburn and Her Three Eldest Sons

Yorkshire’s Tourism Event of the Year!

That was the accolade given to the Trust’s ‘Grand Tour in York‘ at Welcome to Yorkshire’s awards ceremony at the Royal Armouries last night.

It was a good night for York all round as the Theatre Royal and National Railway Museum also won awards. And to top it all, prizes were handed out by our very own Archbishop, Dr John Sentamu, who only seemed to lose concentration a little when Pub of the Year was announced (Ye Old Sun Inn at Colton, in case you’re interested).