Celebrating YODL and Opportunities Ahead

You may recently have noticed that York Digital Library (or YODL as it was known) is no longer with us. Since it first launched in 2010, YODL has provided digital access to a range of our unique and distinctive collections, from 13th century church manuscripts to 20th century scientific instruments. But as is true of us all, YODL got old–and with age comes (what I hope will be a very happy) retirement.

The York Digital Library home page--to which we say a fond farewell

And so we enter a new phase of York’s digital collections, one which we hope will offer the opportunity to rethink how we deliver digital access in order to better support a range of research and uses. Regular readers of the Borthwick blog will know that we are home to archives, rare books, and artworks that span centuries. These materials tell stories that you won’t find elsewhere. The ongoing development of our new digital library, Discover.York, will let our users interact with these important collections and discover the stories they tell, whether they are down the road or across the globe.

But in addition to increasing the reach of our collections, digital access provides opportunities for users to explore and understand our collections in new ways. As the team here at York continue to plan for the development of Discover.York, we have been inspired by examples at other organisations where digital content can be annotated and transcribed, curated into insightful digital exhibitions, and shared and compared with collections held elsewhere. We have been excited to see research based on large corpuses of digital content, using machine learning, topic modelling, and named entity recognition. Such methods can reveal patterns and threads that might otherwise have been impossible to spot. And we have been curious about how the discovery of digital collections can help our user communities tell their own stories. In all of these examples, we see opportunities for our collections and our users.

The homepage of our new digital library, Discover.York

So, what’s next for York’s digital collections? Well, work on Discover.York is already underway, with a handful of collections now available. We’ve plans to add a further three collections over the coming weeks, including the Lord Halifax diaries (1940-6), and photographs from the Vickers Instruments Archive and the University of York Archive, with more to follow as development progresses. You’ll also find digitised content in our YorSearch Rare Books Collection. Looking further into the future, we’ll be working hard to enhance Discover.York with a range of features that will let our users discover, explore, and interact with our unique collections. This will be a gradual process and one that will take time. Our goals are ambitious and there will doubtless be many lessons learned along the way. We’ll continue to share updates with you for the duration of this work. In the meantime, if you have questions about digital collections that were previously accessible via YODL, please contact our team at dti-service-desk-group@york.ac.uk.

We hope you’ll join us in thanking YODL for its fine service and we look forward to sharing more about the ongoing development of Discover.York over the coming months and years.

"Mad on Plain-song": music and the mission archive

 

 By Dr Philip Burnett, School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York

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A few months ago, while working in the Borthwick on the papers of the Society of the Sacred Mission (SSM), I came across a document written in 1904. It contained a series of character sketches of the missionaries working at Modderpoort, a mission station established amongst the Basotho people in the Orange Free State (as it was then known) of South Africa.

Figure 1. The Priory buildings and Chapel at Modderpoort (date unknown) 

[Borthwick Institute, SSM/Photo 7]

The handwriting was difficult to read, but out of the faded and smudged lettering appeared a phrase referring to the missionary William Norton: ‘a bit of poet, a beautiful linguist, and mad on plain-song’ [SSM Archive, SSM/DIR/D/SA/4/1].

As a music historian, I look for sounds that were once heard, research how they were created, and try to understand the different ways people heard them. The mission archive is a particularly rich source for this work, as my find in the papers of the SSM exemplifies.

So, I was intrigued by this sketch of Norton and wanted to know more. It was interesting in its own right, but also because by understanding more about why he was so ‘mad on plain-song’ we can learn more about the ways in which missionaries made sense of the worlds in which they worked; and, indeed, how those worlds made sense of and responded to them. Elsewhere, I’ve examined the backgrounds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British missionaries and found that while missionaries were often required to have a broad skill set – as they had to turn their hand to anything from carpentry, to masonry, to riding a horse –, wherever they worked in the world they always needed to have music in their toolkit. Music was fundamental to how both missionaries and converts expressed their worldview and beliefs.

An obituary of Norton published in The South African Journal of Science in 1962, tells us that he was born in 1870 in Exeter where he was educated at the Grammar School. He then went to Exeter College, Oxford where he read for an undergraduate degree in “Greats”, also known as Classics. He was a gifted linguist and stayed at Oxford on a postgraduate scholarship to study for a BLitt in Philology. After Oxford, he was ordained and worked as a priest in Cornwall for seven years. He then joined the SSM and went out to South Africa in 1903 to join the community at Modderpoort in the Orange Free State.

The missionaries at Modderpoort lived like a monastic community, which involved coming together for prayer several times a day. In the chapel (see Figure 2), they sang psalms and office hymns to plain-song, also known as plainchant.

Figure 2. Interior of the Priory Church at Modderport (date unknown)
[Borthwick Institute, SSM/Photo 7] 

Plainsong (as it is often also spelled) is one of the oldest styles of European sacred music and usually consists of a text sung by unaccompanied voices to a single line of melody.  To give an idea of what that sounds like, here is an example of the evening office hymn sung in the chapel at Modderpoort in August 2023:

In the SSM’s Quarterly Papers (see Figure 3), which collated news and reports of missions all over the world, we find mention of Norton and plainsong. In April 1903, it was noted that Norton was ‘very busy with plainsong, teaching the sisters and adapting the tones to Sesuto [sic.]’, while in July of the same year Fr Wrenford, a priest on one of the outstations, recalled how when he visited Modderpoort, ‘Fr Norton soon coaxed me into a small choir practice of plainsong.’ It seems that Norton was keen for all his fellow clergy and mission workers to be competent in plainsong, and this suggests, further, that plainsong was used not just at Modderpoort, but also in outstation churches.

Figure 3. Cover of SSM Quarterly Paper (July 1903)
[Borthwick Institute, SSM/DIR/S/QP/1] 

Norton’s reputation, it seems, went beyond Modderpoort and Bloemfontein. Robert Carroll, a young priest who went to work at Inhambane in Lebombo diocese (part of present-day Mozambique) corresponded with Norton about how to use plainsong in mission work and adapting to different languages. Carroll wrote that Norton had asked him to, ‘use my influence with the Bishop [of Lebombo] for the introduction of plainsong liturgical music.’ [SSM/PP/4/8 iii (6) [1909]]

At Modderpoort, Norton was involved in other aspects of the music making. His linguistic skills meant he was kept busy with translation, and he worked with the committee that produced Sesotho hymnbooks. When it came to adapting hymns, he had some forthright opinions, as his correspondence reveals. In 1904, Norton drew up a geographical report of the Modderpoort area [SSM/DIR/D/SA/6/3]. On one side is a typed report of the area and some suggestions for where new mission outposts could be established. On the other side is a handwritten letter in which Norton outlines his thoughts on how English hymns could be successfully adapted into Sesotho. “I wanted to chuck the old hymns & tunes, & start afresh, but knew it was too revolutionary,” writes Norton. The versions of hymns then in use had been written in English metres, unsuited to the shape and rhythm of the Sesotho language.

Norton’s career as a missionary came to an end in 1917 when he got married. For the SSM, which insisted that its members remained celibate, this was a taboo, and so Norton had to leave the order, whereupon he pursued a career as a parish priest and an academic, eventually becoming a professor of African languages at the University of Cape Town. While he built a separate reputation in those spheres, his legacy in the SSM was his contribution to plainsong. In 1952, Fr Harold Firkins, a fellow SSM missionary, in a memoir of his time in South Africa, noted of Norton: ‘We owe him gratitude for having established Plainsong in our Sesuto [sic.] Mass, so well that it flourishes to this day’ [SSM/PP/40].

What do we learn from Norton who was ‘mad on plain-song’? Foremost, it is that music was an important part of missionary practice, to which many in the mission field devoted a lot of energy and time. But while he was celebrated by his peers, Norton’s legacy, however, is not so straightforward. The archival papers tell us next to nothing of the local agents and informants who would have helped him in his work of adapting plainsong for use with Sesotho, nor what the Basotho people thought of this new music. Language, not least musical language, was a highly contested realm of the mission field with missionaries often struggling to translate effectively their texts into local languages and dialects. What did happen is that the musical language of plainsong and the pre-existing musical systems found at Modderpoort came to shape and influence each other in complicated ways. That find in the Borthwick that prompted me to look further at Norton and his plainsong, therefore, points us to the complex story of colonial missions, and this is the focus of the current phase of the research for my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

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Acknowledgments: I’m very grateful to Charles Fonge and the Staff at the Borthwick for their assistance with my research.

Further information: If you'd like to find out more about this story and the history and music of colonial missions, Dr Burnett will be expanding on his research in an online seminar on Wednesday 28 February 2024, 4pm to 6pm. It is open to staff, students, the public. Details can be found through the link.

The Order of Service for a Coronation: A Mystery in the Register of Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, 1374-1388

As we get ready to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III this weekend, our guest blogger Helen Watt investigates an intriguing set of entries relating to a past coronation, which she found in one of our medieval Archbishops' registers during a recent project.

On 6 May 2023, Charles, formerly Prince of Wales, will be crowned King Charles III, following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, last year. The coronation ceremony will take place in Westminster Abbey, where kings and queens of England have been crowned since 1066. Although King Charles is intending to have a shorter ceremony than that of his mother in 1953, the solemnities will presumably still largely follow that same order of service which has been used for English royal coronations since the fourteenth century. Details are found in the Liber Regalis, an illuminated manuscript belonging to the Abbey, thought to have been created around 1382, probably for the coronation of Queen Anne of Bohemia, the first wife of King Richard II.[1]

Cover of a programme for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 1953, from the author's own family papers. 

The Liber Regalis shows that the coronation ceremony is performed by the archbishop of Canterbury, with the bishop of Durham and the bishop of Bath and Wells as supporters of the new monarch. What then was the role of the archbishop of York in the proceedings? No particular actions by him are mentioned in the order of service and it seems likely that the archbishop at the time would simply have been present as the second highest-ranking member of the clergy alongside the archbishop of Canterbury. So it is all the more intriguing to find the order of service for the coronation of a king in the register of Alexander Neville, archbishop of York, 1374-1388, ‘Ordo coronandi Regem’ (Order of crowning a king).[2] This entry is found alongside two others relating to the coronation of King Richard II and a third relating to the manner of performing the coronation of a king and queen, ‘Qua solemp[nita]te ac sub q[ui]buz m[od]o & for[m]a Rex & Regina debeant coronari’ (By which solemnity and under what manner and form a king and queen should be crowned).[3] All four entries have come to light following successive projects to work on the registers of the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650, carried out by the Borthwick Institute for Archives and Department of History at the University of York. The first of these projects, entitled ‘Archbishops’ Registers Revealed’, completed between 2014 and 2015 in the Borthwick and generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, resulted in the digitisation of the registers of the Archbishops of York, 1225-1650.[4] It produced high quality images of the registers contained in an online database and included entries from the register of Archbishop Neville, which had been indexed as part of the pilot for the project in 2012, also funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.[5] Following on from that project and a subsequent project generously funded by the Marc Fitch Fund also carried out in the Borthwick between 2015 and 2016 to index the registers, 1576-1650, ‘The Northern Way’ project, generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, ran from 2019 to 2022 and was managed by the Department of History in partnership with The National Archives, Kew, and with the support of York Minster.[6] That project carried out indexing of all the fourteenth century York Archbishops’ registers, and so further highlighted entries from Neville’s registers, including those relating to the coronation of Richard II and the order of service for coronations of a king and a king and queen.

Registers of Archbishop Neville on the shelves in the Borthwick strongroom, 2023.

The register of Archbishop Neville containing entries for the coronation of King Richard II. 

Thinking of the latter two entries and taking into account the duration of the reign of Richard II, 1377-1399, and the period during which Neville was archbishop, 1374-1388, could the first entry relate to the coronation of Richard II in 1377 and predate the Liber Regalis, and the second, to the coronation of Richard II’s queen in 1382 and follow the Liber Regalis? As we shall see, the answer is not so simple. The first point to consider is that the initial entry firmly identifiable with the coronation of Richard II consists of the royal order to the archbishop, dated 26 June 1377, to attend that coronation, which was to take place on 16 July 1377 at Westminster Abbey. This order is identical to that sent out to the archbishop of Canterbury and presumably to all those dignitaries who were to attend.[7] However, the second entry in the register consists of a royal letter dated 4 July 1377, excusing Archbishop Neville from attending, for fear of invasions by the Scots and enemies approaching by sea. These reasons seem to make it very plausible that the archbishop would not travel to London at that time; nevertheless he is described as only ever having left his archdiocese during his first ten years in office, mostly for short spaces at a time to attend Parliament.[8] The only other period he spent outside his own diocese was to assist in defending the border with Scotland during threats of invasions in 1383 and 1384, and not in 1377.[9] Although taxation, specifically two clerical tenths from Canterbury and York, was to be raised at the very beginning of the reign of Richard II to finance resisting enemy invasions, this request may well have applied equally to naval attacks launched by the French, as to invasions by the Scots.[10] Therefore, it seems very likely that Archbishop Neville was simply not intending to make the journey to London for the coronation, but to stay in the north, probably at his palace at Cawood, on which he spent much time and money improving.[11]

The first two entries relating to the coronation from the register of Archbishop Neville: the Royal writ of King Richard II ordering the archbishop of York to attend his coronation on 16 July 1377 at Westminster, and copy of a letter of Richard II excusing the archbishop from attending his coronation.

Following the royal order and letter are the two entries relating to the order of service for the coronation of a king and of a king and queen, as already mentioned. These entries are undated, but are preceded by those noted above, dated in 1377, and followed by others, also dated in 1377, although not in strict date order.[12] Does this order in the register suggest that the entries relating to the coronation service also date from 1377 and so pre-date the coronation of Queen Anne of Bohemia? If not, could they have been copied into the register, but not in chronological order? One answer to these questions might be to look at the overall makeup of the register; as with most of the fourteenth-century registers of the Archbishops of York, it is divided into various sections and these entries fall within the section entitled ‘Diverse Letters’. This section contains entries, as the title suggests, covering a range of subjects, but generally dated between 1377 and 1384. Certainly, the first few folios of this section, ff. 100-7, including f. 104 in which the entries relating to the coronation are found, do appear to be arranged in chronological order between 1377 and 1382, although f. 105r includes an entry containing a copy of a document dated in 1222, and f. 107r, an entry dated in May 1378, in between others dated in 1381 and 1382, therefore perhaps out of place. Given this general arrangement, it is possible to conclude that the coronation entries, because they appear between entries dated in 1377, may well pre-date 1382, and so perhaps relate to an earlier period, perhaps to 1377 or before.

Entries relating to the order of service for the coronation of a king and of a king and queen, found in the register of Archbishop Neville, c.1377.

Turning back to the Liber Regalis, as well as existing in manuscript form, as described above, and as well as having been printed in volume 93 of the series of publications of the Roxburghe Club,[13] the manuscript also appears in print, in the original Latin with an English translation, alongside several other documents relating to coronations of English kings and queens in another volume, English Coronation Records.[14] Therefore, these two works provide ample means of comparing the text of the Liber Regalis with the entries found in Archbishop Neville’s register, in an attempt to discover the origin of the register entries. The editor of English Coronation Records also provides details of the recensions, or various forms which the medieval coronation service took and describes the Liber Regalis as the fourth recension of the text, the fullest thus far.[15] The editor was also of the opinion that this particular version was used at the coronation of King Edward II, which took place in 1308, but only contained short rubrics or criteria for the service, with more detail included later, perhaps in the reign of Richard II.[16]

Could this identification of the text of the Liber Regalis provide further corroboration of the date of the entries in the archbishop’s register or not? The only way to find out was to compare the entries with the text of the Liber Regalis, line by line and word for word. This exercise proved very fruitful and although it answers the question in part, also raises other points. The results of the comparison appear to confirm that the register entries only contain the short rubrics of the coronation service, whereas the Liber Regalis is a much fuller version of the text. Therefore, it does seem likely that the register entries predate the more detailed order of service used in the coronation of Anne of Bohemia, but by how much? The editor of English Coronation Records also compared the Liber Regalis with another document, a fourteenth-century Pontifical of Westminster Abbey in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[17] Looking at the variations in the text of the Liber Regalis found in the Westminster Pontifical, it is clear that the entries in the York archbishop’s register follow those variations very closely, if not exactly, and so the entries must pre-date the Liber Regalis. Indeed, the editor of a text for a coronation order of service printed in another volume, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, specifically identifies the Westminster Pontifical variations as relating to the order of service for Edward II.[18] However, also published in English Coronation Records is a document entitled ‘Forma et Modus’, which is said to be reminiscent of the rubrics of the Liber Regalis, but is thought to date from the fifteenth century.[19] Although the first register entry relating to the coronation contains the words ‘m[od]o & for[m]a’, as noted above, so that the same words appear in the title and heading of each, the texts do not match and so the register entry may still relate to an earlier period.

Nevertheless, the register entries appear to have been copied from another text, since there are evidently copying errors, where the scribe has missed a line, realised his mistake, crossed out a few words and started again.[20] Another aspect of the register entries is that when compared with the Liber Regalis, they are not in order, but that the first of the entries, relating to the coronation of a king and queen, noted above, should fall within the second, relating to the coronation of a king.

Could it be possible that the register entries were copied from a manuscript belonging to Westminster Abbey, containing details of the order of service of the coronation, probably for Edward II, and if so, how and why? If Archbishop Neville rarely left his archdiocese, did his clerks also stay with him in the north or have access to manuscripts in the south? Or were there other manuscripts in York archdiocese containing the recension of the coronation service earlier than that fuller version thought to have been produced during the reign of Richard II? If the archbishop had no intention of attending the coronation ceremony, why was the order of service copied into his register together with the other documents in the first place? At present, all these questions are intriguing and remain unanswered, but still show that there was perhaps the same interest in the coronation of a new king in the late fourteenth century as there will be today. 

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[1] See the illustrated description of the Liber Regalis on Westminster Abbey’s website, available via  https://www.westminster-abbey.org/about-the-abbey/history/coronations-at-the-abbey/spotlight-on-coronations/the-liber-regalis (accessed 14 April 2023). The Liber Regalis is printed in F. Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, ‘Liber Regalis’, Roxburghe Club (London, 1870), with a manuscript of a translation available in the Society of Antiquaries of London, SAL/MS/231.

[2] BIA YDA/2/Abp Reg 12, f. 104 r, entry 4, available via the York Archbishops’ Registers database https://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk/browse/registers?folio=237&register_id=j67314178 (accessed 14 April 2023).

[3] BIA YDA/2/Abp Reg 12, f. 104 r, entries 1-3. All four entries are printed in J. Raine (ed.), Historical Papers and Letters from the Northern Registers (London, 1873), pp. 411-16.

[4] Details of the project are available via https://www.york.ac.uk/borthwick/resources/archbishops-registers/#tab-1 (accessed 20 April 2023).

[5] The York Archbishops’ Database is available via https://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk/home_page/index (accessed 20 April 2023).

[6] See ‘The Northern Way: The Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304-1405’, available via https://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/northern-way/ (accessed 20 April 2023).

[7] See F. D. Logan (ed.), ‘The Register of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1375-1381’, Canterbury and York Society, 110 (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 293, no. 798.

[8] R. G. Davies, ‘Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, 1374-1388’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 47 (1975), 87-101 (93).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Two clerical tenths from Canterbury Province, granted 5 December 1377 and two clerical tenths from York Province, granted 22 March 1378, ‘to support the charges of resisting the invasion of [the king’s] enemies’, see the E 179 database, available via the website of The National Archives https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/default.asp (accessed 14 April 2023).

[11] Dobson, R.  Neville, Alexander (c. 1332–1392), archbishop of York. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-19922) (accessed 17 April 2023); R. G. Davies, ‘Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, 1374-1388’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 47 (1975), 87-101 (93).

[12] The entries immediately following those relating to the coronation service are dated 16 July, 12 August, 2 September and 24 August 1377, see BIA YDA/2/Abp 12, f. 104 v, entries 1-6.

[13] F. Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, ‘Liber Regalis’, Roxburghe Club (London, 1870).

[14] L. G. Wickham Legg (ed.), English Coronation Records (Westminster, 1901), XIII, pp. 81-130.

[15] Ibid., p. 81.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Wickham Legg (ed.), English Coronation Records, XVI, pp. 172-190 (81), the document being University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. C. 425, ff. 60-80.

[18] See W. Maskell (ed.), Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 3 vols. (London, 1847), III, pp. 1-48, ‘De Benedictione et Coronatione Regis’ (3, note 1); also cited in footnotes are other Pontificals besides that of Westminster Abbey.

[19] Wickham Legg (ed.), English Coronation Records, XVI, pp. 172-190 (172).

[20] In the lines relating to part of the coronation oath, the words ‘Faciam ?concedis iustas consuetudines’ have been struck through (BIA YDA/2/Abp Reg 12, f. 104v, line 1), only to appear in the correct place later (BIA YDA/2/Abp Reg 12, f. 104v, line 3); the word ‘servabo’ which should appear in line 1 before the words that have been struck through, has had to be inserted above the line, pointing to another copying error.

#YorStory: public history and the University Archive

Last term we hosted a Masters student from the University's MA in Modern History. As part of their Public History Placement module, students are asked to undertake a public history engagement project. In this blog our student, Izzy, reflects on her experience with us and the social media campaign she has created around the University's history and archive.  

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Introduction

Hi, I’m Izzy, a Modern History MA student at the University of York. For the last 10 weeks I have been undertaking a Public History placement with the Borthwick Institute for Archives. At the end of autumn term last year, we were asked to make a decision on our desired projects, choosing from a set of options provided by a range of heritage partners. The projects ranged from planning and delivering history lessons to children, to working with archives on their social media strategy. I chose to go more down the route of archives as they interest me a lot, and the project allowed me to research some valuable skills around social media engagement and communication of history to the public. The placement initially stood out to me as it matched with some of my interests and skills. I like archival research and, in another job role, I am responsible for communicating and marketing ideas to a team - something I thought I could bring to this. I also feel like this project was a lot about organisation and strategy (both of which I love), so I put it down as one of my top choices!

The project brief asked me to design a social media campaign that would engage the many audiences of the Borthwick Twitter account. There needed to be a coherent element and tweets needed to go out weekly. The tweets had to be interesting and allow for a two-way conversation between the archive and audience, and be based around the University Archive. They could showcase any University 'firsts' and link to wider events, such as LGBT History Month or Black History Month where possible. I realised quickly that the key to success would be focusing my efforts on one range of documents in particular - York's long-standing student newspaper, Nouse. The Twitter campaign had a dual-aspect as it would coincide with, and help celebrate , the University’s 60th anniversary. The anniversary provides an opportunity to look forward as well as back, and to reflect on the University’s past work in combating inequality and championing social justice, diversity and inclusion. I knew this was important to incorporate into the campaign and kept it in mind when I was reading the newspaper for information.

Nouse masthead (1984)

Construction of the project

I decided early on to focus on the newspaper Nouse. I sat in the archive searchroom and surveyed Nouse from 1964-2004. I looked for key themes I thought I could use, any good cartoons, and trivia. As well as looking at the details, I also tried to focus on the project’s wider context. I created a spreadsheet which highlighted the tweet content and the date it would be released. I needed to fill in each week with a unique theme. Some weeks were obvious and related to wider national or University events, others were trickier. A particular issue was thinking of themes for over the summer as Nouse wasn’t published then. After having identified the majority of my themes, I went about searching for the material to populate the tweets.

Constructing the tweets got easier as time went on. I found a voice that I liked and rolled with it. The hardest part was trying to create something that people would want to engage with. I felt that the content of the tweets were interesting and people would like the campaign, but would it inspire them to respond or engage? Measuring the impact of the tweets was also hard and in the back of my mind I was thinking about the essay I had to write for my Masters which reflected on how I communicated the history through the tweets and the engagement as a result of that. I will go more in depth into how I tried to create engagement later in this blog.

Launch tweet for the YorStory campaign

 
The decisions I had to make while designing the project were also crucial. I had to think about what Nouse content I included and then how I would frame this in the tweets. I found myself feeling very conscious about my role as the curator of the project. I had the power to make the decisions as to the tweets’ content and therefore present a curated and highly selective history. I did not try to follow a specific agenda to shape the perception of the University’s history, but this will have happened unconsciously. The forward looking perspective in the University’s vision for the 60th anniversary led me to be more engaged with material on gay rights and environmental issues, and to move away from histories that required more nuance in their telling, such as Enoch Powell being invited by a group to speak on campus in 1968 (the invitation was quickly withdrawn). Students’ Unions and societies have often brought students into contact with challenging speakers, but this history requires more detailed explanation than a single tweet would allow. Therefore, it was left out, not through disengagement with that particular content, but a difficulty in communicating the nuances of this event to the readers of the campaign. I think that is where most of the tension came from in formulating this project. The inherently uneven weight I gave to certain aspects of the newspaper and the subsequent perception of these for the readers. The importance and responsibilities of the role of the curator is something I think that struck me most during this placement. I also learnt quite how difficult and strategic it is to design and run a social media campaign.

Engagement and marketing

I never really thought about the role of marketing (in its broadest sense) at the beginning of the placement, but as I thought about the project’s objectives, Twitter as a tool for engagement, and the different audiences involved, I realised that the marketing of the tweets was as, if not more, important as the actual content of them. An objective of the campaign was the two-way engagement between archive and audience. We were defining ‘engagement’ quite broadly. We were wanting anything from a like and retweet to an audience member reaching out to donate material or collaborate on a project. This not only made the success of the project hard to define, but it made me aware of lots of different ways people can engage with online media. I wanted to encourage more ‘tangible’ forms of engagement. By this I mean people emailing the archive, asking to do projects, donating materials etc. rather than likes and retweets - although both were desirable. I found this quite difficult. My approach was to give clear routes on how to act if they wanted to i.e. a link taking them directly to the ‘Student Life Collection’ web page if they had photos or archive material to donate. I also wanted to build a community and, with that, trust. By doing online polls and nostalgia posts, I was attempting to build a rapport with the audience (whether they physically interacted or not). This was with the hope that when I introduced a call to action people would act on it.

Detail from the Student Life Collection webpage

 
During the placement, I also engaged with the social media manager at the Library who gave me some valuable insights into his strategies to increase engagement. I was struck by how data driven he said social media marketing was. I was told that community and trust were the most important ingredients to an engaged audience. In the final part of this blog I will use my experience of the placement and the things I have learnt from the various people I engaged with to suggest some points for future social media campaigns.

Reflections

I have very much enjoyed my placement with Borthwick Institute for Archives. Not only has it given me insight into archival material, but it has given me a chance to put research, communication, and social media skills into practice. It has made me think about some of the difficulties around curated campaigns with short-length outputs and different types of engagement styles. Most of all, it has taught me the difficulty of communicating the past to the public and the types of decisions you have to make while doing it. I want to thank Charles specifically for being an excellent mentor and always being there for our weekly meetings. He has been very clear in his vision while also flexible in how I wanted to shape and deliver the project. I have learnt a lot over these last 10 weeks and now all there is to do is the assessment!!!

Thanks a lot!

Izzy

The Retreat Letters Project: The Proctor family

Many researchers into the history of mental health treatment will already be familiar with the Borthwick’s Retreat Collection, an extensive archive from York’s Quaker mental health asylum, established in 1796 by Samuel Tuke.[i] But the collection should also be helpful to many others, including social, family and Quaker historians. Of particular interest to this group will be the Retreat’s incoming correspondence. Following a recent update to the catalogue, summary information on the 12,000 letters the Retreat received between 1795 and 1852 is now available online.[ii] Each letter can also be viewed online at the Wellcome Collection (bundled by year).[iii]

The Proctor family’s story of coping with mental illness in the family is one of many told in these letters.

An 1826 envelope from the correspondence series

 “Stockton 24 / 3^mo 1826

Respected Friend,

I duly received thy acceptable favor this morning and it has indeed afforded us the greatest satisfaction to find that our dear son appears pretty comfortable and I trust that thro’ divine favor he will in time be restor’d to us. … … …

Thy Assured Friend, John Proctor”[iv]

John Proctor was plainly relieved to hear from the Retreat’s Superintendent that his son, also John, was settled and was optimistic about his chances of recovery. John Jnr had suffered from a fear of personal injury since he was twelve. Now, aged twenty-six, things had come to a head. His phobia was causing him such severe depression that after a particularly severe attack, his Quaker parents sought help from the Retreat in York.[v]^,[vi],[vii]

Sadly, despite many years of care and treatment, John never fully recovered from his mental anguish. Over his adult lifetime, John Jnr was discharged from the Retreat several times, only to be re-admitted following the recurrence of his symptoms.

Throughout that time, his family’s support and feelings for their son are evident in the letters they sent to the Retreat. In fact, the Proctor family were prolific writers, and their letters chart the highs and lows of their experience.

Many of the letters are very practical, and his family often advised the Retreat of parcels of food or clothing they were sending to make John comfortable. New coats were especially popular! Others share items of news that may interest him, such as family events or alerting him to their upcoming visits.

Letter from Jane Thomas to Thomas Allis, 1836

But the letters also reveal tensions. Two years before admission to the Retreat, John had married Jane Spence, and she often disagreed with his parents on his treatment. On one occasion in 1836, Jane was keen to see him return home, where she felt he would be less anxious and have a better chance of recovery.[viii]

His parents, especially his mother, Mary, disagreed with this, although later said there had been a misunderstanding.[ix]^,[x] On another occasion, John Snr was so frank that he ended his letter asking that it be burnt after perusal.[xi] Several more bursts of letter-writing can be found lobbying the Retreat regarding John’s discharge. Such family disagreements were not limited to the Proctors. For instance, in 1848, Isaac Wright asked that his sister-in-law Elizabeth Wright be prevented from meeting her husband and removing him from the Retreat.[xii]

Most letters in the Retreat collection use a distinctive writing style; kind, considerate, humble and supportive. However, the writer rarely gives you a glimpse of their underlying emotions, making you wonder, “what are you really thinking?” or “how do you really feel?”

Long-term correspondents like the Proctors occasionally relax their writing style, giving you a glimpse

Letter from John Bright to John Candler, 1845

of their underlying feelings. For instance, in her later letters, Jane’s writing strays beyond a ”functional” exchange about clothing and provisions. Instead, you get a deeper insight into her feelings for John and how his absence affects her. In a touching letter addressed to her “dearly beloved Husband”, Jane tries to lift his mood, assuring him, “thou are not forgotten, my love”.[xiii] She talks in poetic terms about the arrival of good weather, recalling his enjoyment of hay-time and how he used to like its “getting up”. “I hardly know what is sweeter than new made hay”, she says. In another letter, Jane is remarkably open with John Candler, the Superintendent at the time.[xiv] She explains that she had been unaware of John’s condition when they married and that “the sympathy of our friends is a mitigation”. However, she now finds herself quite embittered at their fortune and feeling “hardly [unfairly] dealt with in 19 years out of not quite 21, being so bereft”.

John died at the Retreat aged fifty-two, and Jane sent her final letter in July 1852, ending twenty-six years of correspondence.[xv]

Letter from Proctor and Son, 1849

The archive’s incoming correspondence is a fantastic research resource and is not limited to family letters. For example, there are regular letters from a wide range of Friends’ Meetings across England, sending subscription payments to support the Retreat’s work or paying the accounts of Friends they have placed there. In addition, prominent Quakers often made contact. Sometimes they requested admission for Friends in need or sought advice on setting up and running their own asylums. Occasionally they engaged in discussion about important topics of the day. For example, the 1845 Lunatics Bill prompted a flurry of letters expressing concern that the introduction of new commissioners could interfere with the smooth running of the Retreat.[xvi]^,[xvii]

The correspondence also gives a flavour of life in the early nineteenth century. For example, visitors

from afar often explained the types and routes of transport they would take, whether road, river, or rail. In addition, the postal options appear to be very efficient, with many letters being received the next day. Some even arrived on the same day!

There are letters relating to running the Retreat, such as introductions for potential employees or purchasing goods and provisions. The records show that the Retreat was a big consumer of cheese. It received regular deliveries from Proctors of Selby, transported by steam packet along the Ouse. A typical order could amount to 4cwt of cheese, costing the equivalent of £1,400 in today’s money.[xviii]

The catalogue has been created by a small team of volunteers whose work has not always been plain sailing. They developed a skill in reading a wide variety of handwriting – some of which appears to have been done under candlelight using a broken ink quill! The writing of William Nainby is particularly challenging, closely followed by the cross-writing some authors used as a way of saving precious paper.[xix]^,[xx]

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Borthwick’s Retreat Collection, information can be found at https://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/named-collections/retreatcollection/

Index of Incoming Correspondence https://borthcat.york.ac.uk/index.php/ret-1-5-1

Images of Incoming Correspondence https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g522gcy8

Written by Paul Wainwright, Retreat Letters Project volunteer

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[i] The Retreat Collection https://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/named-collections/retreatcollection/

[ii] Incoming Correspondence subseries RET/1/5/1 https://borthcat.york.ac.uk/index.php/ret-1-5-1

[iii] Wellcome Foundation Images https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g522gcy8

[iv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/30 (1826) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ve2d7urv/items?canvas=102

[v] Admission Register RET/6/2/1/1 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/en2eated/items?canvas=68

[vi] Admission Papers RET/6/1/1 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kvxqcqmq/items?canvas=683

[vii] Case Book RET/6/5/1/1A https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fe9cszjf/items?canvas=331

[viii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/5/22 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=399

[ix] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/6/8 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=472

[x] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/7/2 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=588

[xi] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/5/1 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=429

[xii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/51/9/14 (1848) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cxhgsxx2/items?canvas=759

[xiii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/16 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=819

[xiv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/5/17 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=637

[xv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/55/8/23 (1852) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tndc2npc/items?canvas=689

[xvi] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/2 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=741

[xvii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/20 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=767

[xviii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/52/5/11 (1849) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pqquupp6/items?canvas=343

[xix] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/60/6/20 (1857) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zmzwux7n/items?canvas=543

[xx] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/44/2/17 (1840)  https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pcu4jg6p/items?canvas=175