York Museums Trust Blog

We’ve been busy creating a medieval world inside and outside York Castle Museum over the last few weeks, ready for a month of summer holiday fun.

 Outside, the old Prisoners’ Exercise Yard is now a medieval jousting arena, decked out with brightly-coloured shields and banners.

Here Geoff Hutchinson and Andy Wilson are pictured putting some of them in place:

Children will be able to play as knights practising their jousting on our wooden horse, which has been carefully constructed and painted by Andy.  See if you can aim your lance into the wooden hoop target!

Andy at work making the wooden horse

The completed horse ready for action

There will be also be a professional armourer showing off his skills every Friday and Saturday during the school holidays.

Every day there will also other games and stalls to explore – weather permitting…

Inside you will be able to try on helmets and handle swords in our Military Studio.

Little ones will be able to play in our new Castle Playroom, at the end of the Toy Stories gallery.

This has also been decorated in grand, medieval style. Children will be able to play giant medieval board games or play with our castle-themed toys and dressing-up clothes!

Lynda Withers puts together a toy castle in the Castle Playroom

Lynda and Lucy Knock show off some of our fancy dress clothes in the Castle Playroom

For more details of dates and times visit our website or download our Summer Fun Leaflet 2011 about all of York Museums Trust’s summer holiday activities for families.

York Castle Museum’s Raindale Mill has finally seen some dramatic changes, writes Geoff, one of our regular museum volunteers

Over the last year it has been opened by volunteers.  They have been opening it up to the public after the mill grounds had been closed for over 5 years.

Since then, funding has been sourced and work finally started on making it all work again.

Last month saw the old axle been removed and a new one put in – with the net axle the mill can be operational. It currently does not grind grain but this will be coming up in later stages of the mill development.

The next stage will come after the summer holidays. This will involve the changing of the area around the mill. The current plans for the mill area are situated inside the mill and open for discussion.

You can find out more by downloading our information leaflet, which tells you how you can have your say on the plans.

Raindale Mill wheel can currently be seen turning most Saturdays and Sundays between 11am and 1pm – but please phone and check before visiting as work on the mill is still in progress and it may not always be possible for it to be seen in action, especially in poor weather conditions.

Our Victorian street piano has been renovated recently and is a regular feature of Kirkgate, entertaining visitors at York Castle Museum, writes Gwendolen Whitaker, curator of history. 

Museum guides Carl Newbould and Alan Milner with the refurbished street piano in our Victorian street, Kirkgate

It now plays ten tunes, the clearest being  There they are and Funiculi funicula.

Street pianos, or barrel organs, were in most towns in England by the 1880s with their heyday around 1900. They began to decline steadily during the Edwardian period and rapidly during the First World War. By the 1930s they were a rare sight.

They were generally made by Italian immigrants in London. The first ones were also played by Italian immigrants but by 1900 over half were played by Englishmen.

Records show that a lot of money could be made on a good day, organ-grinders who knew their patch knew which tunes were popular, and when their customers had just been paid so Saturdays was always the best day of the week.

However, in some streets, residents would pay organ-grinders to move away from their houses further down the street so they didn’t have to listen to the music!

This street piano was built around 1895-1900 by Capra, Rissone & Company of 30, Warner Street, Clerkenwell, London.

It was bought by Canon Algernon O. Wintle of Lawshall Rectory, Bury St Edmunds in 1947.

Canon Wintle was a clergyman but his life-long hobby was mechanical musical instruments. He re-furbished many street pianos, primarily to give work to ex-servicemen after the First World War, and learnt how to set the tunes, he traded as The East Anglian Automatic Piano Company. Between 1948 and 1950 Canon Wintle rebuilt this street piano and set the tunes and he donated it to the museum in 1950.

Street pianos were made of wood so they were light enough to push. They have a wooden frame with tuned strings hit by felt-faced hammers. These hammers are caused to move by a large wooden pinned barrel turned by a handle on the side of the box.

There is another handle for changing the tune, and when turned it raises the keys clear of the pins, moves the barrel along to another set of pins, drops the keys again, and indicates the number of the new tune.

Watch this interesting old Pathe News film  from 1960 to see Antonion Tomasso, preparing a barrel, marking it, and later seen playing it.  Mr Tomasso was this country’s best barrel piano arranger and came from a family extensively connected with the street piano business.   

There’s all sorts of miniature wildlife out there in the Museum Gardens and now young visitors can find it for themselves thanks to students from the University of York.

We’ve got a new display in our Extinct Gallery called Insects in the Gardens, together with trails which visitors can take away to make their own exploration of the ten-acre botanical gardens.

Gaby Lees, learning manager, said: “We’ve been delighted with the group of students who worked on this project - another group from the University have created some stories about Roman children for us which we also hope to include in the galleries soon.”

Find out more about the students’ projects at the University of York website.

Or download the trail and see if you can find ants, bees, butterflies, moths, slugs and snails!

Cornelia Parker’s Thirty Pieces of Silver, currently on display in York St Mary’s, is a haven away from the hustle and bustle of the city, writes Jenny Alexander, assistant curator of fine art.

For those who want to know more about it and the artist behind it, we have invited Cornelia up to York this week.

She is giving a lecture about her work on Thursday 30 June, at 1pm at Kings Manor.

This will be followed by questions and a conversation with Cornelia and writer and researcher, Dr Claire MacDonald. The event is free and no need to book.

We will be streaming the event live on our website for those that cannot attend – just visit www.yorkstmarys.org.uk  (this is a first for York Museums Trust and we hope it proves popular!)

We will also be live tweeting under the hashtag #30pieces or follow @YorkArtGallery

Hope you can join us – in person or online!

Our latest exhibition of Roman artefacts has just gone on show in our newest gallery – outside in the Museum Gardens!

Ben Turner, collections technician for York Museums Trust, explains more here:

If you’re a regular visitor to the gardens, you may have already noticed two lines of sarcophagi (or large stone coffins) appearing close to the medieval ruins of St Mary’s Abbey.

We’re just putting the final touches to some signs and labels explaining more about them after completing our research into their history.

It’s been some months since we first found three of them when we were clearing out one of the old museum stores.

Myself and Adam Parker were taken on back in December to undertake this work. Both of us have an archaeological background so it was fascinating to be able to look more closely at the Roman inscriptions on these huge stone objects.

Of the three we found there, two were originally found during excavations at the Castle Yard, in front of York Castle Museum, the other we’re not sure about.

We then moved several other sarcophagi to join them, which had previously been sited in the St Leonard’s Hospital ruins,  between the Museum Street gates and York Explore (the Central Library).

The word sarcophagus comes from the Greek , meaning "flesh-eating"

We have arranged them in two rows to represent the way the Romans arranged their sarcophagi, usually with a path running down the centre. Typically the Romans preferred to cremate their dead, but during the third century, burying the dead in sarcophagi like these became more fashionable.

They were usually made of stone, wood or even tile. Bodies were washed, anointed in oils and dressed formally for the funeral. Offerings of food and wine were often left beside the grave.

We hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we have enjoyed researching them. It’s certainly been interesting for me to see the museum-side of archaeology compared with the field archaeology I’d been involved with before.

This sarcophagus is highly carved and its inscription tells us it originally belonged to Julia Victorina and her four-year-old son, Constantius, and was commissioned by her husband, a veteran centurion called Septimius Lupianus.

This inscription on this sarcophagus tells us it was made for a woman called Aelia Severa, but when it was found in 1859 in York the remains of a man were found inside. The lid that was used was the tombstone of Flavia Augustina, which can now be seen on display inside the Yorkshire Museum.

This small one belonged to a child. Even though it is quite plain, the burial of a child in a stone sarcophagus signified he or she came from a wealthy family.

Ben Turner looks at one of the sarcophagi in the Museum Gardens

It’s all change again at York Art Gallery as one exhibition ends and another starts to appear on the walls.

David Hockney’s Bigger Trees near Warter has now closed and is being taken down, canvas by canvas, from the wall in the Main Gallery.

It’s been extremely popular and gallery guide Julie Redpath, for one, is sad to see it go.

“I’ve got used to seeing it every day and am feeling quite sad now it’s going!” she says.

Curators Laura Turner and Jenny Alexander have been busy checking over the canvases before the giant picture moves on to its next host gallery, the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull.

Meanwhile paintings for our new exhibition, William Etty: Art and Controversy, which opens on 25 June, are already going up on the wall in the next-door South Gallery.

This huge exhibition will be the first for years to take up both ground-floor galleries – it really does aim to show as many works as possible so people can make their own minds up about Etty and the controversy his nude paintings caused at the time.

Julie’s colleague Tony Dunnington already likes the look of it – and prefers it to the departing Hockney: “Look at that wall of Old Masters – it’s great!” .

He is pointing at one end of the South Gallery which is covered in paintings by different artists, displayed in the style of 19th century exhibitions.

Laura Turner explains: “This Old Master hang gives a flavour of how paintings were displayed in Etty’s day and they are similar in style to some of the Old Masters which Etty looked to for inspiration. The rest of this section will be filled with Etty’s paintings “after” the Old Masters, or inspired by them, including Etty’s prized copy of Titian’s Venus of Urbino which the artist considered to be the best copy he had ever produced.”

The rest of the South Gallery will include at a selection of Etty’s paintings and sketches from the Life Class, and a display of his portraits. 

The partially-completed wall of Old Masters

This painting of a male nude holding a staff is a study from around 1816 from the life studio, and is mounted alongside a sketch of a male nude, to show how Etty experimented with different poses

This painting showing a male nude with his arms up stretched is typical of Etty's work in the life studio

Guide Tony Dunnington looks at some of Etty's portraits which have started to go up on the walls

This large portrait of two sisters is called Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball and dates from 1835

Once the Hockney painting has gone, the Main Gallery will be repainted before being filled with a spectacular array of Etty’s major historical works, loaned from galleries across the UK including the Tate and the Royal Academy.

Watch curator Sarah Burnage explain more about the Etty exhibition in a special film on our website.

Archaeologists have been on site at York Castle Museum as part of our plans to recreate a former prisoners’ yard, writes museum manager Ian Carlisle.

As you may or may not know, the space “between the wings” of the former Debtors’ Prison building (or the South Building) was a prison exercise yard in  the eighteenth century.

It had a low wall across the front, topped with railings to stop the prisoners escaping, and a gate in the centre for access. The citizens of York used to come and gawp at the prisoners exercising in the yard.

Eighteenth century view of the Debtors' Prison. The low wall and railings can be seen running across the space between the wings

Cropped print of another eighteenth-century image, showing a close-up of the low wall, railings and gate

We are hoping to reinstate the wall, railings and gate and resurface the yard so that visitors can go into it as part of the York Castle Prison exhibition.

Before we can do this, English Heritage have insisted that we carry out a small scale archaeological excavation to define the position of the wall, to make sure we rebuild it in the correct position. They also wanted us to try to find out what the original yard surface consisted of.

We contracted On Site Archaeology to do the work and they spent three days excavating three trenches:

General view of the site. One trench can be seen across the yard in the foreground, where the remains of a wall running diagonally across it were found. This may be remains of one of the medieval castle buildings. There is a second trench at the corner of the building, middle left, to locate the low wall, the third between the two diggers, also to locate the wall.

Trench to locate the position of the low wall. The diggers think they have found the end of the wall next to the wrought iron access gate here.

Excavating the trench at the corner of the right-hand wing. This trench was to find the position of the wall where it meets the building, but it also shows the foundations of the building.

Close-up of the above trench. The arrow points to the foundations for the building, which are very shallow for such a large structure.

One interesting find was that of the base of a Romano-British pot. It was possibly a beaker, something like the Nene Valley Ware example below, but it is impossible to tell its exact form from such a small sherd. At the end of the life of the pot, such bases were commonly used as gaming counters. It was found in disturbed soil so does not necessarily indicate Roman activity on the site

Nene Valley beaker

Unfortunately, there was no indication of the original surface of the yard. The excavation team initially thought a layer of cinders could have been it, but a later drainage trench did not cut through it, so this theory was abandoned.

The next step is for the archaeologists to report back to us and to our architect before we decide how to proceed.

Collections Snapshot: Armadillo Work-Bag

We have some fantastically unusual objects in our Collections. Here is one of them:

Armadillo Work-Bag

Armadillo Work-Bag
(1920-1940)

In the York Castle Museum Costume & Textiles Collection - In Store

The Armadillo is a timid mammal found only in the Americas. They are not an endangered species, and souvenirs are still made from their shells.
This Armadillo work-bag would have been seen as a novelty when it was brought back to this country in the early twentieth century, however today we would be unlikely to welcome it as a gift!

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially after the expansion of the British Empire and improvements in transport, many unusual items from other countries found their way to Britain. Animals were very much to the fore, either as hunting trophies or as novelties like this bag.
The work-bag is a good example of the types of objects that sometimes used to find their way into museum collections, often because no-one knew what else to do with them!

It was great to meet a direct descendant of York Castle Museum’s founder Dr John Kirk when he visited last week.

Jeremy Hands, from Australia, is the great-great-grandson of Dr Kirk, who set up the museum in 1938. Dr Kirk donated many of his own collections of objects to the museum and our Victorian street Kirkgate is named after him (find out more about Dr Kirk’s life on our website).

Jeremy was in England to meet family and friends and to research his family tree and was keen to find out more about the life of his great-great-grandfather.

He came along to see the museum and was shown round by Denise Hamilton, our deputy senior guide,  then returned for a longer chat with assistant curator Michelle Petyt who was able to tell him lots about the Kirk family and the history of the museum.

He was really interested in what we had to tell him and even agreed to have his picture taken for the York Press! See the article here: