The archive: papers of the Friends of Gainsborough Old Hall
The Friends of Gainsborough Old Hall have produced papers since 1949: lecture programmes, exhibition notes, press files and press releases. Eight of those documents are scanned and indexed here, running from the 2007 Pilgrim Fathers events schedule to the 2016 events programme.
The set is uneven, as such sets are. One document is a substantial piece of research; two are press cuttings kept because they touched on the building. The Richard III material is here for a concrete reason: the king was at the hall in the 1480s, on a date the sources give variously as October 1483 and 1484, and the association followed the Leicester excavation closely.
Documents
| Document | Extent |
|---|---|
| Rose Throckmorton, 1526–1613 The fullest document in the set. Prepared for the exhibition held at the hall in 2013, four hundred years after her death, around the portrait of her kept there. Rose Throckmorton was born Rose Locke, daughter of the London mercer Sir William Locke, and became a Hickman by her marriage to Anthony Hickman in 1545; her memoir is one of the earliest first-person accounts by an Englishwoman of the Marian exile. | 13 pages |
| The Pilgrim Fathers: 2007 events schedule A year of commemoration across Gainsborough, Willoughby and London, tied to the Jamestown anniversary. Useful now less as a programme than as a record of which separatist sites were considered part of the story. | 3 pages |
| The search for Richard III Press coverage of the Leicester excavation, kept because Richard III was at the hall as the guest of Sir Thomas Burgh. This cutting dates the visit to October 1483; English Heritage dates it to 1484. | 3 pages |
| Revealing the face of the Greyfriars skeleton The Richard III Society release of 27 December 2012 announcing that it would fund the facial reconstruction. | 2 pages |
| The woman's skeleton at Greyfriars The second burial found during the same excavation, and the questions it raised about who else lay in the friary church. | 2 pages |
| Notes on The White Queen Compiled when the BBC series was broadcast. The hall was not a filming location; the interest is in the reigns the series covers, which are the reigns the hall was built under. | 3 pages |
| The president of the Friends A single sheet on Sir Nicholas Bacon, Premier Baronet of England, who held the presidency of the association. | 1 page |
| Events programme, 2016 A later season of the First Tuesday lectures and the Sunderland series. Ticket prices and contact details in the original are long out of date. | 2 pages |
Where these came from, and what state they are in
The documents were produced and published by the association itself, and are reproduced here as scans of the original files. The pagination and the typesetting are therefore the originals', and nothing has been re-set or rewritten. Contact details belonging to private individuals have been removed from the files in which they appeared, which is the only alteration made to any of them and is ordinary practice for papers of this kind.
Where a document named in an older citation is one of the eight listed above, it is there with its extent given; where it is not, it has not survived in scanned form. This index is the complete list of what has. No larger collection is held here, and there is no separate request procedure.
Photographs and drawings
The photographic record is thinner than the paper one. The views page carries the room-by-room sequence, and the kitchen and the buttery are the best of it. Interiors of this date were shot on film in low light without wide lenses, which is the reason the frames are tight and the roof structure is almost never in view.
Questions about the archive
Which document is the most substantial?
The Rose Throckmorton material, at thirteen pages. It was prepared for the 2013 exhibition and traces Rose Locke, born in 1526, who married Anthony Hickman, through her exile in Antwerp during Mary's reign and her return under Elizabeth.
Is this the complete set of the association's papers?
No. It is what survives in accessible scanned form. Lecture handouts, most newsletters and the bulk of the photographic sequence are not among them.
Who was Rose Throckmorton?
Born Rose Locke in 1526, daughter of Sir William Locke, she married Anthony Hickman in 1545, went into exile with him in Antwerp under Mary I and wrote an account of it in old age. Her portrait hangs at the hall, and the 2013 exhibition marked four hundred years since her death.