New video illuminates medieval Lancaster
Lancaster University’s award-winning Regional Heritage Centre has launched a new YouTube channel to bring the region’s history to worldwide audiences.
The Regional Heritage Centre promotes and celebrates the fascinating and varied heritage of north-west England by engaging with the regional community. The new channel is the latest innovation introduced by the Centre as part of its mission to educate and inform contemporary audiences with historic stories and images.
The first video on the channel will showcase ‘The Great Cowcher’, a monumental work of projection art unveiled at Light Up Lancaster in November 2023. Over 72,000 visitors witnessed this magnificent sound and light display - and anyone who missed it can now view the event on video.
Researchers at Lancaster University worked with the Duchy of Lancaster and projection artists Illuminos to create the display, which showcased the history of the Duchy of Lancaster and the centrepiece of its medieval archive, the Great Cowcher Book, at its ancestral home.
Around 1402, King Henry IV, who was heir to the Duchy of Lancaster, commissioned the Great Cowcher Book: a record of land, titles and rights within the Duchy of Lancaster ownership.
The Cowcher includes copies of 2,433 documents, written in Latin and French, making it second only to William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book as a record of medieval landholding and the lives of ordinary people and communities in medieval England.
Unlike Domesday, though, The Cowcher (which derives from Anglo-Norman French ‘couchour’, meaning here a large book that lies on a table) is richly illuminated. The scribes used precious inks to decorate the text and create captivating drawings of the earls and dukes across the centuries, as well as heraldic banners.
Over the nights of November 2nd to 4th 2023, the Duchy’s medieval archive – from the magnificent illustrations from the Great Cowcher to the Duchy’s charters and its records of forests in Lancashire and beyond – transformed the Castle walls into a living, breathing representation of bygone times, amidst a dramatic soundscape including readings from the Great Cowcher.
This display was an innovative and appealing way to engage a wide audience with Lancaster’s regional history and research.
The Duchy of Lancaster began life in 1267, when the earldom of Lancaster was created by King Henry III for his second son, Edmund. The new earldom incorporated the Honour of Lancaster, a collection of landholdings focused on Lancaster Castle, as well as the estates of disinherited rebels.
The title ‘Duke of Lancaster’ was first used in 1351. In 1399, the inheritance fell to Henry Bolingbroke, who seized the English throne, becoming Henry IV. He decreed that the Duchy should be held separately from all other Crown possessions and descend through the monarchy as a private estate.
Today the estates of the Duchy belong to His Majesty the King and cover more than 18,228 hectares across England and Wales.
The Great Cowcher Book sits within the Duchy of Lancaster’s archive, housed at The National Archives (TNA): one of the largest private archives of medieval documents in the world.
Lancaster University historians Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler and Professor Fiona Edmonds are working with colleagues at TNA and the University of Lincoln to explore these records to see what they can reveal about how the inhabitants of the Duchy’s lands experienced the political and military strife of their day and the environmental change of the medieval era.
Professor Edmonds, the Director of the Regional Heritage Centre at Lancaster University, says: “The Great Cowcher book contains vital records of a formative period in the history of Lancashire and beyond. It was really exciting to bring this manuscript to wider attention through Illuminos’ exhilarating light and sound art. We were delighted to work with the Duchy of Lancaster to bring this display to historic Lancaster Castle as part of Light Up Lancaster and the Regional Heritage Centre’s 50th anniversary programme. The video now makes this captivating work accessible to new audiences.”
Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler, a Reader in Medieval History at Lancaster, says: “The earldom and then Duchy of Lancaster is tied to momentous events in British History – from England’s First Revolution of 1258-67, with the lands of crown enemies used to create the earldom, to the Anglo-Scottish wars of the fourteenth century that ravaged much of northern England, and to the deposition of King Richard II by Henry IV. Showcasing the Duchy’s history at Light Up Lancaster brought this history to life.”
The display can be viewed on the Regional Heritage Centre channel on YouTube:
Find out more:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/history/medieval-duchy-of-lancaster/
Illuminos <https://www.illuminos.co.uk/>
info.dukeslancaster.org/p/777E-BI0/lightuplancaster23
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