Search results
-
Celebrating the Charter of the Forest at BGU
The 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest will be commemorated in November, and Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln is joining in the celebrations. The 1217 Charter of the Forest re-established rights of access to the royal forest that were taken away by William the Conqueror. The charter complements Magna Carta and both documents can be viewed at Lincoln Castle, the only place in the world where two original copies of the documents can be found together. Lincoln Castle are hosting a celebration on 6 November 2017 where they will also launch a Charter for Trees, Woods and People for the 21st century. BGU will make a special contribution by having between 60 and 70 primary and secondary school students on campus. They will engage in age specific educational activities on the Charter of the Forest and the new Charter for Trees, Woods and People. BGU's special expertise in qualifying teachers and researchers at BGU on law and society will have its impact on these activities. The project is part of a major campaign, sponsored by the Woodland Trust, to work on Britain's environment for future generations. A ceremonial tree planting on the BGU campus will conclude the event. Interested in history? Find out more about studying History at BGU. -
BGU sponsors Gothic-themed Lincoln Book Festival
The Lincoln Book Festival is ‘Going Gothic’ this September and Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) is co-sponsoring a variety of events. The festival invites visitors to explore the Gothic at events celebrating the genre throughout the city. Literature, history, art and architecture are all on the line-up at the festival that ‘places history at its heart’. BGU is sponsoring a free workshop at the University of Lincoln on Gothic literature for local schools and colleges. Experts from both BGU and the University of Lincoln will jointly run the event on Wednesday 27 September. On Thursday 28 September, BGU’s Dr Claudia Capancioni chairs an evening of ‘Victorian Truths & Gothic Mysteries’ at The Collection alongside the University of Lincoln’s Dr Scott Brewer. The evening will see a talk from award-winning historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes telling ‘Tales of Flesh in the Ages of Decorum’. Author Diane Setterfield will then present her talk on ‘Fiction of a Gothic Disposition’. Dr Claudia Capancioni has also helped to organise a free event on Friday 29 September aimed at creative writers. ‘Writing Romance – Mills & Boon Style’ takes place at The Collection and the two invited speakers are both historical romance authors. The final BGU co-sponsored event of the festival is ‘An Afternoon of Architecture – Revived and Inspiring’ at BGU’s Robert Hardy Building on Saturday 30 September. The afternoon sees Geoff Brandwood guiding the audience through the revival of Gothic Architecture Victorian style and discussing the churches of Sir Gilbert Scott, including many examples in Lincolnshire. Author Pamela Holmes will also be speaking at the event. The festival also launched a Flash Fiction competition. Writers of any age and ability were encouraged to submit Gothic-themed short stories of exactly 50 words. Dr Claudia Capancioni was part of the judging panel tasked with shortlisting over 400 entries for the final judges. The winners in three categories (primary school age, secondary school age and adults) will be announced at the festival launch party on Monday 25 September. Speaking about the festival Dr Claudia Capancioni, Academic Coordinator for English at BGU, said, “this year’s festival is most exciting because of the Gothic theme and a new Flash Fiction competition. “The programme caters for the whole community with creative writing events as well as speakers who share their works. It is a great programme and I can say already that we have had a great response. “As the success of the Flash Fiction competition shows, there is interest in the events the programme presents. “We are pleased to be working with the organising committee, the community and colleagues at the University of Lincoln to make sure this year’s Lincoln Book Festival is most engaging with Gothic mystery, horror and romance.” The Lincoln Book Festival takes place from 25-30 September 2017 across a range of locations in Lincoln. Visit the Lincoln Book Festival website to book tickets now. -
BGU lecturer to speak at LUMEN Centre
Dr. Robert von Friedeburg, Reader at the School of Humanities at BGU in Lincoln, has been invited to speak to a research network in Denmark. Robert will lecture to the newly established research network of the LUMEN Centre for the Study of Lutheran Theology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and give a master class on October 23 and October 24 2017. The invitation comes in response to Robert's recent research monograph, published last year with Cambridge University Press, 'Luther's Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of the 'State' in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s'. There have already been two other invitations to discuss the book, a symposium on the book at the German Historical Institute in London, on March 21, and a symposium at the Department of History, Georgetown University, U.S.A., on April 20. The book, just as the volume edited with Cambridge and coming out this year, 'Monarchy Transformed', challenges the notion of the bureaucratic power state and emphasises instead the importance of moral values, not least embedded in the Christian faith, for the modern notion of state.' Robert has also been invited to speak in Budapest at the annual conference of the Academia Europaea on Sunday, September 3, on Europe and the Rule of Law in the context of these two publications. -
Research Boosted at BGU as Five Earn Promotions
Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln has appointed a professor and four readers from among its academic staff in recognition of their research work. Dr Kate Adams in the University’s Research and Innovation Centre becomes a professor, while Dr Jack Cunningham and Dr Sibylle Erle in the School of Humanities and Dr Caroline Horton and Dr Emma Pearson in the School of Social Sciences become readers. Professor Adams is an education specialist and the University’s Head of Research. Her research focuses on aspects of childhood from children’s perspectives, particularly on spirituality, and the implications of children’s understandings for the wellbeing agenda in education. Dr Cunningham is Academic Co-ordinator for Theology and has researched extensively into early modern and late medieval religious history. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Ordered Human Project based at BGU and a specialist in the life and work of Robert Grosseteste. Dr Erle is a Senior Lecturer in English and her research interests range from William Blake and Alfred, Lord Tennyson to 1790s politics and landscape gardening. She has lectured and given seminars at Tate Britain and the Wellcome Institute and most recently lectured at the Universities of Greifswald and Zürich. Dr Horton is the Academic Co-ordinator for the PhD programme. She also teaches on psychology courses and runs DrEAMSLab, the university’s Dreaming, Emotions, Associations and Memories in Sleep Laboratory. She is an active researcher in the field of sleep-dependent memory consolidation, with a particular interest in studying dreaming as a reflection of autobiographical memory consolidation processes. Dr Pearson is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Academic Co-ordinator for the Education Doctorate programme, and her research activities are centred on the study of socio-cultural contexts of learning. Her consultancy work with organisations such as UNICEF, UNESCO and the Asia Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood (ARNEC) has supported her research and involved travel to many countries, from North Korea to Vanuatu. “These appointments recognise the exceptional leadership and excellence in research which is being demonstrated by these members of staff,” said Professor David Rae, Executive Dean for Research and Knowledge exchange at BGU. “BGU has a long-term plan to develop research excellence, and recognising the talent and achievements of our top researchers is fundamental to this. The new professorship and four readerships aim to provide the research leadership for our entry into the next Research Excellence Framework in 2021 and beyond.” -
Monarchy Transformed book publication
Dr Robert von Friedeburg, Reader in History at Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln, is the editor of a new book about the long-running debate on state building and social change in Modern Europe. Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their elites in Early modern Western Europe will be published in August 2017 by Cambridge University Press. The book revises substantially older notions of 'state building' in early modern Europe. It is argued that there was as yet no notion of a modern state, but that instead dynasties brought together in a haphazard way dynastic agglomerates - like a family inheriting or buying together very different businesses. As this happened, a new elite aristocracy developed from those noble families able to fulfil functions in these new agglomerates and support the dynasty, in turn profiting from new offices. This is an entirely different notion than the older one of the making of some 'bureaucratic state'. Dr Robert von Friedeburg explains, “The upshot is that the modern state developed primarily not as a reality of power relations on the ground, but from the seventeenth century onwards as a conception in people's heads. The purpose of this conception was to re-stabilize monarchy against dynastic instability. “The other upshot is that we must not overlook or ignore anymore that the huge and substantial increases in the economy of scale of politics, from generally much smaller medieval polities to the considerable larger dynastic agglomerates of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, had major repercussions on the relations of monarchs and elites all over Western Europe.” The book contains more than a dozen articles by senior specialists and is a major revision to current approaches. -
BGU lecturer exhibits WW1 diary
A history lecturer from Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln is involved in an exhibition of an unpublished First World War diary at the Museum of Military Medicine. The exhibition explores the unpublished diary of Alfred Cockburn, a corporal who served within the sanitation section of the Royal Army Medical Corps (R.A.M.C) during the First World War. The diary offers a rare insight into the role of hygiene and sanitation within the R.A.M.C, an often-neglected area of military history. The exhibition is the culmination of a collaborative nine-month project between BGU’s Senior Lecturer in History Dr Claire Hubbard-Hall, Dr William Hunt and the Museum of Military Medicine. The research project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and Gateways to the First World War public engagement centre. Research around the diary initially came about after a BGU student discovered it whilst undertaking research for an undergraduate history dissertation. The diary belonged to a friend, the diarist’s grand-daughter, who graciously shared the rare document and whose continued support made the project possible. Over the past three years, BGU History and Heritage students worked tirelessly to scan and transcribe the diary. A number of these students then joined the funded project as volunteers in September 2016, which saw them undertake research around the content of the diary. This then fed into the museum exhibition where all four volumes of the diary can be viewed by visitors. The diarist Alfred Cockburn served with the 2nd London Sanitary Company R.A.M.C in Egypt and France throughout the war. He captured his experience of war in the diaries he kept, which took the form of small field notebooks. Alongside numerous sketches, he also collected an assortment of war-related ephemera and trench art that all features within the diary. Nearly twenty years later, looking back on his wartime experience, he rewrote his diaries, which, once completed, extended to four volumes and 1,200 pages. Contained within these pages are details about various hygiene and sanitation practices and technological devices relating to: personal hygiene, disease control and prevention, protection of water supply and its purification and distribution, latrines and urinals, burial of the dead, and disposal of refuse. The project and accompanying exhibition encourages a better understanding of the importance attached to military hygiene and sanitation practices during the First World War, alongside its relevancy to armed forces’ practices in the 21st century. The exhibition commemorates the men who served in the R.A.M.C. Sanitary Companies during the First World War. Entrance to the museum is free and the exhibition runs until 15 August 2017. Find out more. -
Retired RAF Service Woman Realises Her Dream at BGU
A Lincoln woman who spent over two decades in the Royal Air Force before retiring and returning to education will graduate with a degree from Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln this week. After moving to the UK from the Caribbean, Amanda Betts (47) joined the RAF and served as an Aerospace Systems Operator for 22 years before deciding to go to university. With an interest in primary school teaching she attended Lincoln College to study an Access to Higher Education course in teacher training in 2013. At the same time, she began volunteering as a Teaching Assistant at Chad Varah Primary School in Lincoln, before starting a three-year BA (Hons) degree in Education Studies and History at BGU in 2014. Amanda said: “It was always my intention to do some aspect of teaching, but it was only after getting into university that I thought that being a primary school teacher would be my next role,” While at university Amanda joined the Networking Club through the BGU Employability Award which helps students prepare for the workplace after graduation. After initially wanting to become a primary school teacher, she decided that she would be better suited in a slightly different role. “It’s not always easy knowing if a career or particular job will suit you but the Networking Club allowed me to speak to a range of teaching staff and experts all in one place. I soon realised that full-time teaching was not the path for me. “Instead I wanted to work in an environment with children using a wider range of activities and services which would help the child in life, not just academically.” Once back on track Amanda applied for a voluntary post to work with vulnerable children and adults at the St Giles Sure Start Children’s Centre during her third year. She said: “I met a variety of social workers and outreach workers who were dedicated to making sure each child received the best start possible. “I knew that by volunteering I could make a difference to children’s lives too, and this is when I discovered where my skills and interests would be best suited.” The road to graduation has not been an easy ride for Amanda, who not only found out she was dyslexic during her time at university but also got married part way through her degree! “I never did many academic examinations in the RAF apart from oral exams so getting used to reading and writing essays in a short space of time was hard for me. I just thought that I was having difficulties with the workload, especially being a mature student, but I never considered myself dyslexic. As well as all this I was adjusting to married life!” After graduation, Amanda will start volunteering at the St Giles Sure Start Children’s Centre and plans on using skills from her degree to facilitate activities for the children who visit the centre. Amanda Betts will graduate at Lincoln Cathedral with a BA (Hons) degree in Education Studies and History at 10.15am on Wednesday 19th July 2017. -
Lincoln’s Battles and Dynasties Exhibition
By Dr Andrew Jackson, Historian, Bishop Grosseteste University In a room in The Collection in Lincoln is to be found a quite extraordinary set of historical documents and artefacts. It is a collection of a status and importance that very few of us will have the fortune to encounter in our lifetimes. The leading ‘curtain opener’ to the exhibition is the story of the Battle of Lincoln of 1217. Much has been said over the last few months about that bloody fight, which took place between the walls of the castle and cathedral on 20 May, 800 years ago. The tale of the conflict in that year is a complex one, but easily and compellingly followed through The Collection’s displays and artefacts. The story of Lincoln in 1217 features its heroes and heroines, including the ‘man of the hour’, William Marshall, and the ‘woman of the hour’, Nichola de la Haye, Constable of Lincoln Castle. It is an episode that has passed quietly into history, just one of those many events, if a slightly more fraught one, that are a part of the chronicle of the life of the nation. The Battle of Lincoln, for political significance, was the most important military encounter after the Battle of Hastings, two hundred years earlier. If the French and their English allies had won in 1217, then that year would undoubtedly have found equal place in our popular historical memory alongside 1066. Few contests rival its importance and impact in later times: Bosworth and Naseby perhaps; the Boyne or Culloden; and then, of course, the combat that took place in the skies above our heads through the long and critical summer of 1940. After the account of the Battle of Lincoln, the exhibition charts the stories of Royal and aristocratic dynasties, and how they intertwine along with battles and other celebrated or notorious events through our history. Some of the documents are especially poignant. There is Henry VIII’s letter to the people of Lincolnshire in 1536, describing them as ‘rude’, and the county as the ‘most brute and beestelie of the hole realme’. There are the documents that, respectively, condemned Catherine Howard and Mary Queen of Scots to the executioner’s block. There is a letter to Charles II on ‘that monster Cromwell’, who ‘everie night…drinks himself drunke to sleep and forgets his fears’. The twentieth century is arrived at finally; and, from that time, can be read one of the most shock-reverberating announcements in our past: ‘After long and anxious consideration, I have determined to renounce the throne to which I succeeded on the death of My father, and I am now communicating this, My final and irrevocable decision’. So concluded Edward VIII, in his letter of abdication of 10 December 1936. Whatever your historical interests, it is a collection that will leave you rather weak at the knees. Faced by such documents, even the most sceptical will find it hard not to feel moved, and share some sense of wonder at the marvellous, if often messy, history that is Britain’s. If what is to be encountered at The Collection is not high enough in significance, then at the Castle there are also to be viewed the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, alongside the Domesday Book. Across city museums are at present some of the most precious and exceptional documents in our history. Each one you may have the opportunity to view just once in your life. To see them here together in small groups, and even more so as a whole gathering, is an experience that will never happen again in our lifetimes. >Bishop Grosseteste University is a sponsor of the Battles and Dynasties Exhibition. The exhibition lasts until 3 September 2017. Dr Andrew Jackson admiring a miniature portrait of Queen Elizabeth I from the Portland Collection -
Unbinding Gender and Ecology—and Foucault!—at BAVS 2017
The theme of the 2017 BAVS Conference at Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) was 'Victorians Unbound: Connections and Intersections'. Dr Pandora Syperek offers her thoughts... The ostensible theme of this year’s BAVS was the paradox between the parallel Victorian impulses to classify (knowledge, matter, people) into neat categories and to challenge established order and its inherent hierarchies through advancement and innovation. The goal was to consider what happens when the Victorians are ‘unbound’ from this seeming contradiction, instead granted the complexity to recognise that the one informed the other – the understanding of order and definition was necessary to blow it all apart and reorder and redefine. In order to do this we need to loosen the rigidity with which we have categorised the Victorians. In a way, this is a major thread running through my own research on the gendering of objects in the Natural History Museum, London: by looking at the less examined ‘jewel-like’ specimens on display—small, pretty, crafted, straddling art and science—and their resonance within the broader culture, I explore how categories of gender and genre were unstable and fluid. Like many Victorianists, I have been influenced by Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) and its reconception of Victorian attitudes to sexuality and the epistemic implications. Foucault’s thesis in Volume 1 is that what has traditionally been characterised as the modern repression of sexuality, culminating in the notorious prudery of the Victorians—aka the ‘repressive hypothesis’—in fact reveals an explosion of interest in sexuality, hence the scientia sexualis of the late nineteenth century, which spawned the new field of psychoanalysis and the new ‘species’, the homosexual. Foucault’s notion that sexuality is a cultural construct had major impact, and followed on from his concept of the episteme—the historical conditions of possibility of a given discourse—as developed in The Order of Things (1966). Instead of the transition from sexual repression to sexual science, the latter focused on the transition from classical natural history to modern biology. While Foucault may no longer be the ‘hot’ theorist he once was, his ideas remain influential: I detected a strong Foucauldian thread running through the talks at BAVS 2017 and their unifying theme of Victorians Unbound. Here I will consider how the dual Foucauldian themes of sexual and natural science emerged—were unbound—in discussions of gender and ecology. Ghosts of The History of Sexuality and The Order of Things haunted the keynote lectures and roundtables that in turn lingered throughout the panel sessions and in delegates’ consciousness, but the phantoms seemed to reconfigure themselves into new forms. Let’s call it Foucault 2.0. The opening round table highlighted the importance of things: Kate Hill argued that museum collections and their treatment disrupt Victorian boundaries, with the hierarchies of objects echoing those of people. Edwina Ehrman beautifully literalised the conference theme in her talk ‘Unlacing the Corset’. Interesting to me was that WH Flower, the second director of the Natural History Museum, campaigned against corsetry—in my paper a couple hours later I would describe how he campaigned against women’s adornment with exotic bird plumage. Who knew comparative anatomists were so concerned with women’s fashion? While the disfiguring of women’s bodies through corsetry might seem similarly cruel and barbaric to the murder of innocent birds, the museum director’s opposition points towards a counter-regulation of women’s activities and self-adornment. This despite the fact that he was personally responsible for the killing of numerous specimens. Meanwhile, non-corset-wearing women like female activists were seen as unfeminine. This is the type of complexity that requires unravelling in contemporary scholarship.Mike Huggins’s jovial keynote on Victorian respectability established a running joke throughout the conference proceedings that carried with it a Foucauldian flavour. To understand the Victorian episteme(s), we need to acknowledge our own. While this may be an impossible task, asking historiographical questions of our work as Victorianists—e.g. why are we so obsessed with Victorian respectability? Why not Victorian unrespectability?—is essential for recognising how the current period and its concerns shape our vision of the Victorian era, and why it matters to us. The contemporary interest in the period in fiction and popular culture emerged in panels examining Steam Punk and NeoVictorianism, again questioning our relationship to the past via its representation in the present. The weight these areas were given marked an important development for Victorian studies and was fitting seeing as directly following the conference in Lincoln was a steam punk festival! These themes and Huggins’s talk set the tone for prioritising everyday realities and ‘low culture’ as much as high discourse. I’d have to say the most revealing experience for me was a tour of the Victorian Prison following the drinks reception on the beautiful grounds at Lincoln Castle—descriptions of cell conditions for inmates including children and women with babies, as well as public hangings, brought home some of the grimmest aspects of Victorian life. As well as topics of gender and natural science, as an art historian I was drawn to the art and visual culture panels—luckily for me, a number of talks combined these fields. In the panel ‘Sex, Sexiness, Sexlessness: Problems of Eroticism in Victorian Classical Forms’, Rebecca Mellor and Melissa Gustin’s papers examined how queer sexuality can and has been both overemphasised and underemphasised, respectively, to the detriment of art historical narratives in the cases of Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon and American Neoclassical sculptor Harriet Hosmer. The artists’ gender is implicated here, in that art historians have traditionally overlooked beauty as the embodiment of intellectual and spiritual ideals in Solomon in favour of an oversexed reading of homoeroticism, according to Mellor, while Gustin argued—in her excellently titled paper ‘Fifty Shades of Gay’—that conversely art historians have tripped over themselves to ignore and deny Hosmer’s lesbianism and its influence on her work. The consensus was to reclaim the queer gaze whilst broadening our conception of the erotic to go beyond the physical. While contemporary theories of gender and sexuality can facilitate new understandings of such material, a historicised conception of sexual categories, à la Foucault, is essential.Also on the positioning of gender in between lived experience and representation, in their panel ‘Transgender’, Ann Heilmann, Billie-Gina Thomason and Rachel Egloff discussed transgenderism in Victorian lived realities and textual personae. A recurring problem was the privileging of ‘biology’ in both historical and current discourse—e.g. the Victorians’ determination of gender through breasts and external genitalia, and recent biographers’ insistence that James Miranda Barry was female, despite living as a man for over fifty years. As with the panel on queer artists, unpacking trans histories brings up important methodological questions for how we address these histories whilst, as Thomason urged, avoiding the problem of presentism—imposing our current understanding, or episteme, on the past. And yet this does not only comprise current debates such as those surrounding trans rights, but equally broader categories developed during the Victorian era, such as modern biology.Subtler modes of categorisation were explored in panels such as ‘Decadent Spaces/Pleasurable Places’, which featured Joanne Knowles on the geographically and socially liminal space of the pleasure pier, Joseph Thorne on marginality and hybridity in Decadent cosmopolitanism and Giles Whiteley on the ‘curious effects’ of Wilde’s psychogeography. Rayanne Eskandari and Stuart McWilliams discussed the ‘Politics and Medievalism’ of John Ruskin and William Morris, respectively, and their paradoxes of authority and subversion in the case of Ruskin, and populism and scarcity in the case of Morris. In one of the few explicitly art focused panels, ‘Sculpture: Connections and Intersections’, Katie Faulkner discussed the gender and genre performance of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, as engaging with both sculpture and theatre to construct a particular vision of femininity. Jordan Kistler reconsidered evolutionism in Walter Pater’s theory of artistic development as representing a taxonomy based on the Lamarckian archetype, as promoted by Richard Owen (founder of the Natural History Museum) rather than an illustration of Darwinian progress. The implication, according to Kistler, is that in Pater’s formulation sculpture may come out favourably, as the epitome of art rather than its lowest form. In my own panel, simply titled ‘Objects’, Leonard Driscoll discussed things unrealistic but real in HR Haggard’s paratexts, taking the discourse of naturalism beyond the literary genre (which Haggard found rather ugly and smelly) to explore liaisons with archaeology. While the ‘connections and intersections’ between Leonard’s paper and my own on gendering taxidermied hummingbirds were not immediately obvious, parallels concerning the real or more-than-real and corresponding issues of taste and authenticity quickly emerged between these historically marginalised artefacts. Throughout BAVS 2017 there was an emphasis on the everyday and its objects. As Kate Flint stated in her beautifully illustrated keynote on the cultural history of dandelions: the attention to the ordinary, commonplace and overlooked was one of the Victorians’ greatest contributions. This sentiment was echoed in the final President’s Panel speakers Katherine Newey’s enthusiasm for studying theatre with its liberating marginality and infinite materiality and Brian Maidment’s call for more studies of songbooks and almanacs and the need to experience archives in the flesh. This theme was fostered by, and in turn facilitated, a sense of fluidity or boundlessness of disciplines. And yet disciplinary demarcations were still apparent in different approaches taken, confirming there is still much to be learnt from one other. As a non-literary studies person, I felt like a tourist. But then again maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much. The historian Peter Gay has written that Foucault’s ‘accustomed technique…of turning accepted ideas upside down’ is reminiscent of the principle underlying Oscar Wilde’s humour. This method is as relevant now as it was to the Victorians.Pandora Syperek is a postdoctoral researcher who recently completed a fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She is developing a monograph titled Jewels of the Natural History Museum: Gender, Display and the Nonhuman, 1851-1901. She received her PhD in the History of Art at UCL in 2015. -
Tree-mendous Event Will Plant Seeds of Knowledge for Future
Two trees will be planted at Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln and school children will learn about the importance of trees and forests at an event marking the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest. On the same day The Woodland Trust, a national charity based in Grantham, will launch its new Charter for Trees, Woods and People at Lincoln Castle – home to one of the two remaining 1217 Charters of the Forest. BGU has invited school pupils onto its campus in Lincoln on Monday 6th November as part of a major campaign, sponsored by the Woodland Trust, to work on Britain’s environment for future generations. The schools involved are Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Horncastle, Ravensthorpe Primary School in Peterborough, Morton Trentside Primary School near Gainsborough and Brockley Primary School near Chesterfield. They will take part in educational activities relating to the Charter of the Forest and the Charter for Trees, Woods and People. The primary school pupils will make lanterns with handles made of sustainable, locally coppiced hazel, and they will be invited to attend a lantern parade being held as part of the TreeCharter launch that evening at Lincoln Castle. They will also be invited to think about why woods and trees are important to them and to add their thoughts to the lanterns. PGCE secondary Art and Design students will work with the primary school pupils on art activities using natural forms, with a special emphasis on materials derived from trees to create artworks that can be displayed in natural environments. The grammar school students will learn more about the 1217 Charter of the Forest and how it became part of the ‘Ancient Constitution’ of the kingdom, a notion of vital importance for the political and constitutional history of the British Isles, and eventually its American colonies. The event, from 10.45am until 2.30pm on Monday 6th November, will end with the ceremonial planting of a hornbeam tree and a wild cherry tree on campus at BGU. Robert von Friedeburg, a Reader in History at BGU who is organising the event, said: “England has lost a lot of historic woodland over the centuries and the Government’s reforestation plans are behind schedule, so civil society needs to jump in and engage for the good of us all. “This Woodland Trust campaign is almost too good to be true, and we’re pleased to be taking part in it. At BGU we teach good people to become good teachers, and good teachers are essential to teaching our children well. “For the younger pupils the event will help them to understand that nature is important, that we can do stuff with nature, but that we need to preserve it for future generations. The world does not only consist of electronically made illusions on smartphones!” The Charter of the Forest was sealed by King Henry III in 1217 and re-established for free men rights of access to the royal forest that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs. It was in many ways a companion document to the Magna Carta signed by King John two years earlier. More than 70 organisations and 300 local community groups have helped The Woodland Trust to collect over 60,000 tree stories from across the UK, demonstrating the important role that trees play in their lives. These stories helped to define the 10 Principles of the Tree Charter, ensuring that it stands for every tree and every person in the UK. Find out more about History at BGU.
Explore BGU
Browse our wide range of degree courses and find the perfect one for you.
Open days are the best way to find out what BGU has to offer.
Download your copy of our prospectus to find out more about life at BGU.