Peter Foden Research

18/04/2023

Which archive, with its sentinel swan, have I been researching in today?

30/01/2023

Is memory blue or green?
We’re all familiar with ‘Blue Plaques’ aren’t we? The idea spread from London, where the process is strictly controlled. I’ve helped with a couple of application: one was rejected because the person was already commemorated with an official London Blue Plaque. You must argue your case from historical evidence, and then wait for a decision!
Outside London there is less regulation. You can even buy a spoof blue plaque for your own house (‘Nothing Ever Happened here’ etc).
The town of Usk has some of the best blue plaques I have ever noticed, full of historical detail in both languages of Wales.
Now some smaller, new, green plaques have appeared alongside the Usk Civic Society blue ones. ‘Scan QR with mobile for instant history’. Suspecting it would go to the identical text about the Japanning Works, I scanned, and was surprised to find the story in even more detail, more than I could take in while standing on the narrow pavement of New Market Street!
Back home, I followed up my discovery, and became more and more impressed with ‘History points’ - the organisation developing this geo-referenced free service across Wales. It also comes up when googling. Having heard Vrï performing the doleful Welsh folk song ‘Cob Malltraeth’, I searched for more information about the song, and one of the top hits was to one of these Historypoints on the Cob or sea wall itself (on Anglesey): the QR code even opens a recording of the song as sung locally over a hundred years ago. History is multi-dimensional and multi-modal, and Historypoint is working to enrich our experience. Some historic sites use similar technology, but this extends across our whole nation.
The green ‘plaques’ are very discreet but can take us deep into our shared past. I can imagine half a dozen locations in our own community that would be enhanced by them. How about yours?
Www.historypoints.org

04/10/2022

‘DIY History’
Over the years, I’ve helped quite a few local historians with their projects. Sometimes it’s a ‘Lone Ranger’ faithfully writing a village history on their own, valiantly tackling every available source. Sometimes it’s been almost a corporate venture, with dozens of volunteers and Heritage Lottery Fund applications. It has always been a pleasure to work with and for people like you!
In our village in Monmouthshire, we are just setting up a new group, to take turns to share our discoveries and memories about the locality. There are local societies with programmes of eminent visiting speakers, and we’re not trying to copy them, but to do something for ourselves. Several people have been working away quietly for years, and the availability of historical records online is particularly good in Wales, providing new possibilities for this kind of research. No doubt, in time, we’ll have our own website and our own unique name too. As my Facebook Blog here has been put up in the interim as a contact for the new Llangibby History Group, I’m writing this note now to join up the dots. This activity is a hobby rather than part of my work. If you have an interest in Llangybi (Monmouthshire) and would like to join the group, even if you live somewhere else, do please message me via this page, and I’ll add you to the mailing list.

30/08/2022

“The Reveal”
Friday night was storytelling night at the White Hart. I shared with regulars and visitors tales of former landlords and customers over the past 300 years. The bloody breakfast of Thomas Burns, the hungry handcuffed remand prisoner who stopped here for bacon and egg on his way to Usk Gaol in 1845. The sadness of so many Coroners’ Inquests held here. Mrs Llewelyn’s famous and delicious Club Dinners. The steeplechase wager that ended in a beating for the bookmaker in 1857. Poor Richard Jenkins, the overstretched borrower, who lost the White Hart to the farmer of Clawdd y Parc in 1730.
Discovering the Inn’s ancient association with the mediaeval Knights Hospitallers was genuinely news to most local people. There’s more to learn I am sure. The present double-house may have been built between 1590 and 1650, but the site has been important locally for centuries.
Every pub has a story to tell; many will be long and entertaining. Which one shall I research next? Please let me know if you’d like to commission yours.

23/08/2022

Barely two years since I first stepped into the White Hart Inn (to celebrate my birthday), I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about its long history on Friday 26th August at 7pm. Please book with Khaled on the White Hart FB page. I’ll try not to put you off your dinner, but some anecdotes will be gruesome. Discover what being the ‘heart of the community’ used to mean. And ponder some of the mysteries that remain….

02/08/2022

My research desk today was just over the border in Herefordshire. HARC is the Herefordshire Archives & Records Centre. All staff were very helpful. As so often the case, the online catalogue is useful and you do have to book your visit in advance, but there’s always more to be found once you have access to older handwritten and typescript lists and indexes. My geographical range for historical research is Wales and the Marches, including Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.
I’m currently investigating the history of The White Hart in Llangybi, near Usk, where I’ll be telling a few tales on the evening of Friday 26th August. Come along if you’d like to hear them!

28/07/2022

What’s it called?
This is my favourite footpath in our local woods. It’s a very old right of way, and climbs steeply through lush ferns and mixed woodland to a sunny meadow plateau. I’ve asked around, and no one seems to know its name. Even the tithe map, beloved of place-name scholars, fails to name it.
Local placenames are precious, especially in Wales, where they often preserve local dialects as spoken hundreds of years ago. They can be controversial, where English names sometimes supplant Cymraeg for the questionable benefit of tourists. Work is underway to research historic local names in Wales: https://rcahmw.gov.uk/five-year-report-the-list-of-historic-place-names/
The footpath through the woods remains nameless, for now, but I have discovered the name of the meadow beyond the top gate. In 1758 it was “Tir y fainc” - “the land of the Bench”. Was this simply a Picturesque viewpoint over parkland? The word Bainc, a loan word from English, can also, as in English, have the sense of a Judge’s Bench. Hilltops have sometimes been used as open-air courts. That might also explain the purpose of the path. But this is pure speculation. The recording of names, with sources and dates, is the first step. The journey could take us a long way into our history, geography and culture.

13/07/2022

‘My local’
No, not our village pub, but our regional archive for the whole of Gwent, in grand old industrial offices in Ebbw Vale. I’m available for research here and in other archives in Wales and the Marches.
Historical documents about Monmouthshire are plentiful here - far more than indicated online at https://www.gwentarchives.gov.uk
And staff were very helpful, both when booking my visit with advance document requests, and on the day.

08/06/2022

Ready for work
My website is up and running again: I’m learning how to edit it using Wordpress. Please send me feedback!
https://www.peterfoden.com/my-story/

I’m ready for new archival research projects in South Wales or the Marches, or for online research and transcription of historical documents if you have digital images.

Thanks to Dan at Wintersweb for his professional assistance.
https://wintersweb.co.uk/

Winters Web is a UK-BASED PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGN COMPANY. We build and maintain high-quality functional websites.

31/05/2022

'Men at work'
My new work website is at last 'in progress'. What's been the hold-up? I had to take it down in the autumn because of its vulnerability to hacking. The new site is being set up for me by my friend Dan Winters using WordPress. For a while I used to blog using WordPress so I am optimistic it will prove equally user-friendly as a website platform.
Finding suitable photos is the tricky thing. I don't want to use 'stock' photos: my old website for example used several facsimiles of continental documents whose palaeography was very different from my own expertise. I have thousands of document images taken in British Archives, whose copyright is reserved, and so reproducing them could be problematic.
The other big gap is pictures of me, ideally working. When's the last time you had a photo taken while you were working? Unless you work in TV perhaps!
Group photos don't really count: this photo of the engineers at Clayton & Shuttleworth's factory in Lincoln was taken in 1869 and includes one of my ancestors, Matthew Mitton. The firm built traction engines and Matthew was a Whitesmith, a worker of brass, copper and tin, but you wouldn't learn much about his work from this picture.
My great granddad, John Foden, was a gardener. We've got pictures of him with workmates outside the Glasshouse of the Buxton Pavilion Gardens, celebrating winning a trophy (what for?). Another photo, here, gives us a visual image of how hard he worked, but I think it's his own garden he's digging, and maybe even after retirement.
Press photos are often staged to make a point. This one was taken by a Staffordshire Sentinel photographer when I became City Archivist of Stoke on Trent in 1998, and shows off some of the colourful pottery pattern books in the archive at Hanley. I didn't spend all day every day looking at them however. So here's another of me, actually helping David Croft of the Norton Community Archaeology Group to check my translation of a manorial court roll in Hertfordshire Archives. It's a few years old now, but it'll have to do.
Have you come across any historic photo collections showing what people really did in their working day, rather than staged and commemorative groups? What jobs are best and worst illustrated?

06/05/2022

Still waiting for someone to hire me for research in Welsh Archives! Back to the Midlands of England again yesterday for some rights of way research. The Staffordshire Record Office is closed for building works, but because this was an urgent legal matter, they made an exception for me, and were very helpful. I had to go to the staff entrance for the first time in over 20 years: I used to be an archivist in the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archive Service myself, based at Hanley Library in the Potteries, but regularly attended team meetings here.
The serious brass plate is a reminder that many archives had their origins in County Council Administration under the Clerk of the Peace, Custos Rotulorum or Keeper of the Rolls. Legal searches like mine of yesterday would have been the bread-and-butter of these offices, and it was only gradually during the later 20th century that archivists reoriented towards family and community historians.