RSS 1.0History and Archaeology
The History and Archaeology Department is based in a modern purpose-built building at the heart of the University's main Chester Campus. The Department of History and Archaeology has very good links with heritage, museum and archive agencies within the city of Chester, from which students are able to benefit during the course of their studies. The Department is also one of the leading research units within the University. The research interests and specialisms of the Department are diverse, ranging over the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and over local, British, European, American and international history.
This collection is licenced under a Creative Commons licence. Copyright belongs to the authors. The collection may be reproduced for non-commerical use and without modification, providing that copyright is acknowledged.
Recent Submissions
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Necro-VikingismsWhy does Viking period mortuary practice matter in contemporary society? Necro-Vikingisms in contemporary society are inspired by mythology and historical sources, and informed by ever-increasing archaeological evidence. In this way, Viking period Scandinavian attitudes and practices towards dying, death and the dead pervade our popular culture far beyond academia, museums and heritage sites. As a case study in contemporary Necro-Vikingisms, this paper critically evaluates the prominent multiple funerals of the long-running and popular television show Vikings (2013–2020) as a means of exploring modern-day uses of Viking death ways and their relationship with mortalities past and present. The chapter focuseson the varied, complex and extravagant funerals in the twenty episodes of season 5 which first aired from 29 November 2017 to 30 January 2019.
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Materiality and virtuality, reconstructing and exploring the past through objects: Mobility of objects across boundariesThis chapter examines how the Mobility of Objects project sought to enhance the visibility and accessibility of regional museum collections in the UK and Western Europe, leading collaborators to engage critically with the relationship between virtuality and materiality. It addresses three interconnected issues: first, the conceptualisation and application of the terms virtuality, materiality, the virtual, and the material; second, the role of haptic and sensory engagement by academics, pupils, and the public in revealing the multiplicity and “realities” of medieval materials; and third, the potential of digital and virtual-reality reconstructions to open medieval objects to wider audiences and illuminate the dynamic interplay between the virtual and the material. Rob Shields’s observation that “the digitally virtual is […] embedded in the ongoing life of the concrete,” offering both imaginative possibility and a basis for material-world action, provides a critical point of departure for this discussion.
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The contemporary archaeology of Offa’s DykeThis article evaluates the present-day material cultures of Offa’s Dyke, Britain’s longest linear monument. Having previously considered how Offa’s Dyke is constituted in today’s landscape through road and residence signs (Williams 2020), artistic heritage trails (Williams 2023a) and heritage interpretation panels (Williams 2025), here I consider the broader assemblage of art, material cultures, monuments, waymarkers and local landscape features between Sedbury (Gloucestershire) to Prestatyn (Denbighshire) that together constitute a variegated landscape-scale assemblage we can define as ‘today’s Offa’s Dyke’. While elements are designed to support the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail, other components have accrued by happenstance to waymark, interpret and commemorate Offa’s Dyke both along the surviving line of the monument, following the path, but also in locations disconnected from either. Today’s Offa’s Dyke is a late-modern hybrid of embodied practice and diverse materialities. This perspective invites reconsideration of the monument’s role within the contemporary landscape. It offers recommendations for enhancing heritage interpretation in the Welsh Marches, with attention to the complex interplay of landscape, monument, and borderland identities.
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A drone photographic and photogrammetric portrait of Offa’s DykeThis preliminary article applies drone photograph and photogrammetry visualisations to four significant sections of Offa’s Dyke to provide fresh insights into specific features of the monument. Also demonstrated is the role of drones as a means to record the present state of features for future reference, and as a tool for the discovery of subtle features not previously recorded. The four case studies chosen for this article are part of a drone survey that covers an effectively continuous 16km ribbon of the Dyke plus the sections of Hergest Corner and Rushock Hill. Together with the complete set of Offa’s Dyke drone photography undertaken, they establish a platform for future work.
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Flags and frontiers: Linear monuments research in 2025Providing context and introduction to this seventh volume of the Offa’s Dyke Journal (ODJ), this article reviews the contents as well as select recent related research published elsewhere on linear monuments. The introduction also reviews the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory’s activities during 2025. The context of Britain’s ongoing public discourse focused on migration and its perceived threats to British and English identities is recognised, with the flag fervour of the summer of 2025 illustrating the ongoing need for academic critiques and comparative research on linear monuments, frontiers and borderlands. Specifically, it argues for the need for resesarch to take into account ephemeral material cultures, signs and symbols as well as monumental architecture in considering how divisions and demarcations are established and perpetuated in landscapes past and present.
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‘The whole party of the King’s in this county being engaged, directly or indirectly, in this business’: Shropshire and the regional conflict in 1648Histories of the so-called ‘Second English Civil War’, fought during 1648, have concentrated on the main areas of military operations – the north-west and south-east of England, and south Wales. While these, ultimately, were the decisive theatres of war, the region encompassing the westerly midland shires of England – including Shropshire – and also northerly Wales has received much less historiographical consideration. However, from the outbreak of the first war in 1642 partisan support for King Charles I was widespread across this territory, and historians have categorised Shropshire as a strongly royalist county. In 1648 militant royalism re-emerged in Shropshire and elsewhere in opposition to the parliamentarian regime victorious by 1646. Parliament’s failure during the interwar period to achieve a constitutional settlement with the king, coupled to unpopular fiscal and governmental policies involving the maintenance of powerful armed forces, emboldened opponents to engage in armed revolt in 1648. However, royalist uprisings attempted across Shropshire’s region failed to achieve serious military momentum – all were either aborted or nipped in the bud by defeat in skirmishing by parliamentary action. This chapter re-evaluates this territorial conflict. Shropshire is central to the analysis, but given the association of events coverage extends to adjacent counties. While historians have tended to dismiss royalist insurgency as being uniformly ineffective, a more nuanced view is taken here. Shropshire is also considered as a case study of popular discontents with the parliamentary regime considered to have inflamed renewed national civil conflict in 1648.
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Inventing a Medieval Liberty in the landscape: Materiality, virtuality, and the Liberty of Whitby StrandA contribution to the scholarship on jurisdictional immunities, this chapter uses the ideas of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on the relationship between materiality and virtuality to analyse the creation of the Liberty of Whitby Strand in the late twelfth century. Building on the conception of jurisdictional immunities as constitutional structures, social phenomena, and mediums for communication, this chapter argues they were virtual realities emerging from an ongoing dialogue between the material and the virtual. It suggests that an existing physical space - matter, the problems it posed and the human solutions to those problems - was already virtualised in ways which made the invention of a jurisdictional immunity possible and probable, and considers how the people of Whitby Strand actualised this immunity.
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Nationalising bodies, shifting loyalties: Exhuming the war dead in a changing EuropeThroughout Europe, thousands of national cemeteries contain the bodies of soldiers killed in the two world wars, each carefully divided according to nationality. Yet, as this essay argues, determining the nationality of the dead was never so clear cut. Focusing on burials within Britain, it explores four categories of dead that demonstrate the fluidity of national belonging. The first group are the erroneously identified dead, who had been incorrectly identified during conflict. Second are the unwanted dead. These were the bodies of spies or people branded as traitors, who were stripped of their nationality post-war and barred from national cemeteries. Third are the contested dead; soldiers who died in the uniform of one army, but were later reclaimed by another country. Finally, there are the convenient dead, who were simply assigned a nationality in the wake of conflict. Military cemeteries, as the article concludes, were artificial creations, based not only on national identity, but also on post-war decision making.
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Later medieval ecclesiastical vestments: Commercial networksThis chapter foregrounds the form and materiality of the St John’s textiles by exploring commercial networks across the period 1300 to 1500.
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Book review: Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022Book review of Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022
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A meeting of peoples: PAS metalwork, material, and documentary evidence for cultural exchange in Anglo-Saxon Shropshire and the Mercian West MidlandsThis paper analyses the intractable and fragmented history of Shropshire from c.500–1050. The written sources for this period are extremely poor in Shropshire’s case but are now being enriched by excavations and, more widely, by PAS finds and sculpture. The concept of ‘persistent places’ in the landscape is used to pursue key sites through specific episodes in Anglo-Saxon Shropshire’s history that can be established by reference to the wider historical events within the emerging kingdoms of England. Through this mechanism, a more detailed picture emerges of how Mercian Shropshire gradually came together so that by the eleventh century, the new shire had been created as a stable entity with rich cultural relationships in the face of external threats from its surrounding polities: Welsh, English and Viking.
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A reassessment of the Galli and the Archigalli of Magna Mater, their differences and their citizen status in RomeAcademics have regularly debated the question of how the Galli, priests of Magna Mater/Cybele, fit into the Roman social milieu. Several have argued that membership of the Galli was restricted to foreign citizens only (citing Domitian’s legislation) whilst others have argued that the chief priests—the Archigalli—were Roman citizens, while the ‘lower’ Galli were non-citizens, thus separating both within the Cybele cult. These views remain prevalent in modern discussions on the cult, and have not undergone significant scrutiny or analysis. By assessing these views and the existing material and literary evidence for the Galli, this article argues that the Archigalli and Galli were indistinct in terms of behaviour and affiliation. Moreover, this article uses archaeological and literary evidence to suggest that the Galli most likely included Roman citizens among their members, contrasting with the prevailing view of them as foreign residents in Rome.
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Living amongst and with trees: Botanical agency and the archaeology of plant-human relationshipsThe last decade has seen a significant change in the way the humanities have approached the study of botanical life. Termed ‘the plant turn’, this questions traditional views of plants as a largely passive form of life, seeing them instead as living beings capable of acting upon and with other elements of the world. This paper argues that such a perspective offers significant potential for the archaeological study of human-plant relationships. Using a case-study on the lives of trees and humans at the early Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr (UK) it shows that by viewing plants as active participants in past worlds we can achieve a richer understanding of both non-human and human life, and the complex ways they interacted with each other. It also suggests that by making more of this approach, archaeology can help address our own, contemporary relationship with the botanical world.
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Great works by great men? Rethinking linear earthworksIntroducing the sixth volume of the Offa’s Dyke Journal (ODJ) for 2024, the introduction surveys the contents and recent related research published elsewhere as well as the main Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory’s activities during late 2023 and 2024.
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Today’s Offa’s Dyke: Heritage interpretation for Britain’s longest linear monumentHow is Offa’s Dyke interpreted for visitors and locals in the contemporary landscape? The article considers the present-day heritage interpretation of Britain’s longest linear monument: the early medieval Mercian frontier work of Offa’s Dyke. I survey and evaluate panels, plaques and signs that follow the course of the surviving early medieval linear earthwork from Sedbury in Gloucestershire, north to Treuddyn in Flintshire, and along stretches away from the surviving earthwork and north to Prestatyn, Denbighshire along the line of the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail. Critiquing for the overarching narratives and envisionings of Offa’s Dyke the first time, I identify how anachronistic ethnonationalist narratives pervade its interpretation: pertaining to the origins of both England and the English, and Wales and the Welsh. As such, the article provides a baseline for further research into the contemporary archaeology and heritage of Offa’s Dyke and affords insights of application to other ancient linear monuments in today’s world. I conclude with reflections and recommendations for future heritage interpretation of the monument in relation to the national trail, the border and borderlands identities.
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More than a moment: German Jews and the First World WarWith the spotlight on the census, other aspects of the German-Jewish war experience gradually faded into the background. In the post-war years, few people wanted to talk about army rabbis or Jewish sailors. The charitable efforts of synagogue communities or Jewish female volunteers in hospitals and at railway stations was also quickly forgotten. What had once been an extremely varied and diverse experience of conflict descended into little more than a public battle over statistics. For the most part, this narrative of national sacrifice rewarded with a brutal betrayal has been the mainstay of historical writing too. Yet, for German Jews, the census was always just a single brief moment in what was a much longer First World War.
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What to do with the dead?Tim Grady explains what the treatment of German and British dead following the two world wars reveals about the two nations’ ongoing relationship.
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Book Review: Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under HitlerBook review of Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under Hitler
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The Liberty of Whitby Strand: The Origins and Significance of a Jurisdictional ImmunityThe medieval abbey at Whitby, North Yorkshire, controlled a jurisdictional immunity from royal administration, which was territorial and was known as the Liberty of Whitby Strand. Since Frederick William Maitland, historians have analysed such jurisdictional immunities as an index of royal authority and power. However, the surviving documentation for jurisdictional immunities means that it is often difficult to establish precisely when they were created or what franchises they included. Whitby Abbey claimed that the Liberty of Whitby Strand originated in a grant of King William I and this was accepted by the Victoria County History at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, the Liberty has been almost completely ignored. This article revisits the evidence, suggesting that it is possible to pinpoint its origins with rare precision. It argues that the Whitby monks forged a series of charters to persuade King Richard I and King John to transform a narrower portfolio of franchises into the wider territorial Liberty. This article further considers the politics surrounding its creation under Richard and John, and its implications for our understanding of royal authority and power.
