Bottle Magic at the Museum of London
Last week the Inner Lives team was invited to the Museum of London stores by Nigel Jeffries, post-Roman pottery specialist, and James Wright, built heritage specialist. Following conversations on Twitter […]
A Visit to the Horniman Museum Stores
A few weeks ago Ceri and I met up with Tom Crowley, curator at the Horniman Museum, and other guests he had assembled to examine the collection of charms in […]
Lovers’ Gifts in the Middle Ages
As a Valentine themed post, I’d like to present a selection of late medieval tokens with inscriptions referring to love and desire. Part of the 1300–1500 strand of the Inner […]
Fear and Magic: Fighting Fire with Fire
When I began work on the Inner Lives project, I was more or less content with books and manuscripts as my historical sources. But over the past few months, thanks […]
The Mystery of the Mains Hall ‘Witch-Post’
In 2005-6 Adele Yeomans was renovating her home, the fifteenth– to sixteenth–century Mains Hall Manor, Lancashire. A self-proclaimed ‘tapper’, she’d been tapping the walls of an upstairs room and discovered […]
A Concealed Shoe Revealed
This week I had coffee with Laura Potts, Media Relations Manager at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where I teach history. Laura lives in an old house with her husband and […]
Concealed in France: The Asse-le-Boisne Cache
In February 2010 Owen Davies was contacted by Danny Rippon about some very interesting concealed objects he’d uncovered. Danny was living in France at the time, in a sixteenth-century farmhouse […]
The Pregnant Poppet of Burwash
In October I was contacted by Roy Carter who’d found a small wooden figure, about an inch and a half long, when he’d renovated a Tudor Cottage in Burwash, East […]
Timber Marks in the Tower of London
Yesterday (20th January 2016) the Inner Lives team was fortunate enough to be given access to a section of the Tower of London few visitors get to see. Accompanied by […]
