2018 Past Events

Two Talks

Talk 1: Cley Then & Now by Richard Jefferson

Talk 2: The story of a summer shawl made in Norwich by Diana Cooke”

Tuesday 30th January 2018


The Story of Norfolk Wool

Roger Arguile

Tuesday 27th February 2018


Saints and their badges: pilgrim badges from Norfolk and elsewhere

Dr Michael Lewis

Tuesday 27th March 2018


Scapegoat! The Avoidable Death of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse

Dr Martin Stephen

Tuesday 24th April 2018


400 Years at Holkham

Christine Hiskey (Holkham’s first archivist)

Tuesday 25 September 2018 7:30pm

Holkham Hall Animations

Christine read Modern History at Oxford and trained as a professional Archivist.  She was appointed as the first Archivist at Holkham in 1985. This entailed sorting and listing tens of thousands of documents which were transferred to newly-established archive rooms from the estate strong-room, chests & cupboards, outbuildings, cellars and even an old game larder.  In 2016 she published  ‘Holkham: the Social, Architectural & Landscape History of a Great English Country House’ .


Daniel Defoe’s Tour of the Eastern Counties in 1722: An 18th Century writer’s view of the region.

Sarah Doig, Ancestral Heritage

Tuesday 30 October 2018 7:30pm

Daniel Defoe

After a twenty-year career in the Foreign Office, Sarah returned to her native Suffolk to reinvent herself as a self-employed local historian and writer. She writes on local history in a number of magazines. To date she has written five local history books including “The Little History of Suffolk” which will be published by The History Press in October 2018. As a result of the success of these books, Sarah now has contracts for two more books on different aspects of East Anglian local history. In her talk, Sarah will explore Daniel Defoe’s written account of his 1722 tour of the Eastern Counties, which highlights rural and maritime life in the region shortly before the creep of industrialisation.

There will be a short AGM before the talk


Norfolk’s Rood Screens in their Regional and National Context

Dr Lucy Wrapson, Hamilton Kerr Institute

Tuesday 27 November 2018 7:30pm

East Anglia is pre-eminent in Europe in both the quality and quantity of its surviving late-medieval painted wooden church screens, and Norfolk is the county with the finest painted examples. This mainly takes the form of rood or chancel screens, which are termed rood screens because the great rood or Crucifix of the church was placed on or over them originally.

Dr Lucy Wrapson from the Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge has examined over 500 late-medieval screens in East Anglia and has uncovered connections between surviving screens, both of carpentry and painting workshops. She will talk about her methods, her findings and about Norfolk’s screens in particular, looking at them in a regional and national context.