Publications
Foods, Feasts and Festivals: Beverley and the East Riding published in 2021. The three sections of its title describe how the great family of the Percy earls of Northumberland, and their household of 160 men, ate at Wressle Castle and Leconfield Manor in the early years of the Tudor kings, where the food and drink came from and even how much it cost. Every day’s menu was recorded, what was eaten when, from the earl in his castle to the children in the nursery and the stablemen in the yards. Over the Twelve Days of Christmas, the food was even grander, as feast followed feast with elaborate ceremonies, music and plays. Beverley was a source of food and wine for the Percies and other great families, and the Northumberlands visited to watch with the merchant guildsmen from their ‘ castles' the medieval mystery plays (38 different plays in all, played on wagons rumbling through the town from dawn till dusk) and the great religious processions of St John’s shrine.
Twelve Extraordinary Beverley Women, edited by Barbara English, was published in January 2019. It contains twelve essays by different people, based on talks given in Beverley in September 2018 within the Civic Society’s Heritage Open Days programme. The theme of Extraordinary Women was chosen by the national Heritage Open Days organisers (a branch of the National Trust) to commemorate 1918, when women were first permitted to vote in UK elections. The talks were so over-subscribed that the Civic Society decided to publish them as a book.
The Society found it easy to identify the town’s Extraordinary Women, and the twelve begin with St Hilda, an East Riding princess whose pupil founded Beverley, and ended with the designer Pat Albeck, who began to learn her great patterning skills at Beverley High School. The full list of twelve women and the speakers who described them are listed below.
St Hilda of Whitby Barbara English, Emeritus Professor of History
Johanna Crossley Barbara English, Emeritus Professor of History
Mary Wollstonecraft Janine Hatter, University of Hull
Elizabeth Lambert Sally Hayes, Beverley Curator (Treasure House)
Mary Braddon Janine Hatter, University of Hull
Mary Elwell Sally Hayes, Beverley Curator (Treasure House)
Eva Collet Reckitt Bernard Porter, Emeritus Professor of History
Nellie Collinson Pamela Eldred, great niece of Nellie Collinson
Hilda Lyon Nina Baker, historian of women in engineering
Winifred Holtby Janine Hater, University of Hull
Margaret Powell Barbara Powell, daughter of Margaret Powell
Pat Albeck Hannah Hoad, artist and teacher
Chairwoman for the talks Margaret Pinder
Designer of the book Kloskk Tyrer
The Extraordinary Women of Beverley include brief biographies from many centuries, with accounts of their talents and different experiences. Beverley Civic Society believes that readers will find much of interest in the different sections.
73 pages, fully illustrated in colour.
Price £7.50 plus postage if necessary, from Barbara English (benglish@newbegin.karoo.co.uk) or the Civic Society’s secretary or treasurer (please see contacts list on this website). Also available at the Tourist Information Centre and Local Studies Library within the Treasure House, Champney Road, Beverley and the Guildhall, Register Square. Beverley
NEW! You can also purchase the book by clicking on the link below:
BEVERLEY PASTURES by Barbara English was published by the Beverley Civic Society in 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Society. The common pastures that lie east and west of Beverley, an ancient market town in East Yorkshire, have a long and interesting history. Westwood, Hurn, Figham, and Swine Moor, they came into the possession of the town in the early middle ages, and are today governed by a group of Pasture Masters, chosen by Pasture Freemen and Freewomen in an archaic election held in the town’s medieval Guildhall.
The pastures are a much loved part of Beverley, and provide green spaces for people to walk, run, fly kites, sledge, play golf and go racing’ and also to find a wide variety of birds, mammals and reptiles, and wild flowers. The survival of the pastures (among the greatest of all urban commons in England) is remarkable, for there are endless pressures to ‘modernise’ them or even to build roads, car parks or cycle tracks on them.
The Beverley Civic Society offers this book in the hope that it may make the pastures even better known, and so help the Pasture Masters to continue to resist change that would harm these distinctive and much loved spaces. 88 pages, fully illustrated in colour.
Price £6 plus postage if necessary, from Barbara English (benglish@newbegin.karoo.co.uk) or the Civic Society’s secretary or treasurer (please see contacts list on this website).
NEW! You can also purchase the book by clicking on the link below:
'Beverley. So splendid, so precious' John Betjemen
