This is the first in a short series of posts about the 2024 Historical Association Conference in Birmingham.

I haven’t been to the HA Conference since it was online during COVID, so it was lovely to go back this year. I went down the day before the conference started and spent a few hours looking at documents in the Library of Birmingham archives, then spent the evening working on my book – something I haven’t done for a long time.

The conference started with a keynote from HA President Alex Walsham on the history of forgetting, describing it as the younger sibling of remembrance in terms of its scholarship. She pointed out that it is more difficult to access because it leaves little record in the archive. After outlining the academic study of forgetting, she turned to look at the ways in which forgetting night have helped or hindered indurduals during the reformation. The reformation was, she argued, an act of collective forgetting. The most prominent way of dong this was iconoclasm – the destruction of physical memorials that night lead people to backslide into popery- sometimes battered fragments were left to help people remember to forget. But there were problems, for example attacks on funeral monuments threatened to undermine the honour of families so funeral monuments might be seen as genealogical rather than superstitious. Buildings associated with Catholicism such as abbeys were appropriated. Primers and missals were altered to reflect liturgical developments, but family books might be defaced but survive. Burning books prevented them perverting new generations but also gave them the oxygen of publicity.

She then outlined the changing attitudes to forgetting over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggesting that by the end of the seventeenth century people were challenging the ‘forgetting’ of elements of divine benevolence – they feared that forgetting would in themselves be the country’s undoing. The covering up of events that didn’t fit in with accounts of Englands triumphalism became part of the rise of nationalism. This was also reflected in the various acts of oblivion which were intended to draw a line under events and bring people together, unless the crimes were too heinous to forget. The statutes required people to subdue their memories. The irony was that such statutes drew attention to the problems and by keeping the memories alive in order to expel them, they acted in a cathartic manner.

Finally, she looked at the methodological challenges facing historians who want to recapture personal forgetting rather than public. One way to do so is to look at personal/family genealogical documents where Catholics such as monks or those who went on pilgrimage in the family’s past were played down. Sometimes self fashioning allowed people to forgive their ancestors for being misguided. She presented some interesting evidence from Archbishop Matthew Parker who did not leave England in the 1550s, despite all the religious upheavals of the period, Rose Hickman from Lincolnshire wrote memoirs in 1610 at age of 80+ and also Thomas Parr who claimed to be 152 when he died and wrote about living through all the religious changes of the 16th century.. She concluded that histories of the reformation were written out of the tapestry of remembering and forgetting. She finished by looking at the forgetfulness of old age which is familiar to those who have witnessed the effects of dementia.

The first session that I went to in the General strand was given by my Historian editorial board colleague, Steve Illingworth. This was a real pleasure to attend, as Steve’s subject was the role of Sawley in the biggest Tudor rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. At the time of the Pilgrimage, Sawley was in Yorkshire, although it is now in Lancashire. Sawley Abbey was closed during the 1536 closure of the small monasteries. Steve pointed out that there was little resistance at that point to Henry’s policy of closure.

Steve noted how the information board at the ruins rather understates the significant of the abbey and indeed the pilgrimage. The monasteries were the subject of affection of local communities not just for their spiritual role but also for theisocial role. It’s a remote place, and even so Henry was furious when he discovered the monks had been restored to Sawley during the rebellion, as it was close to Scotland and still very Catholic. Only 6 years later Scotland and England were at war, so he needed the northern lords on his side,and there were also strong trade links through the area, particularly with Ireland.

Sawley was one of the first monasteries to be reclaimed and inspired Robert aske to carry this out as part of national strategy. The rebels had already taken Whalley before the earl of Derby set out on the king’s orders to subdue the rebels, and he underestimated the strength of the rebel support. Steve suggested that not only was Derby reluctant to engage with the rebels, he claimed that Derby’s loyalty was questionable- so much so that Cromwell placed a spy in his household. The imperial ambassador, Chapuys, suggests that Derby would in fact move against the king. To cap it all Derby’s troops were not being paid.

Likewise Henry is often seen as calm, cunning and patient, negotiating a truce because he was in a weak position until he moved against the rebels when he war in a stronger position in early 1537. However in the short term, as Steve pointed out, you can see the anger in his instructions to deal with the rebels. On this occasion he called for immediate executions. This was not normal in the period. He finished by suggesting that if the battle of Sawley had gone ahead it, would have been a disaster for the king.

For the second session, I decided to take advantage of attending one of the Secondary Strand sessions : ‘Using English Skills in History’.  Caroline Chattaway and Michelle
Wohlschlegel argued that everything comes back to language, so there are a lot of similarities between English and history skills. Both rely on building an argument and using evidence and both rely on interpreting texts which use unfamiliar language. They discussed how both subjects’ examinations present the same roadblocks including using texts with difficult vocabulary, incorporating unseen texts into an argument, recalling key information and writing in a fluid style with sophisticated vocabulary. They also develop similar transferable skills: analysis of text, finding “bias”, developing interpretations and allowing for a breadth of interpretation, and providing evidence for arguments. Despite my serious misgivings about using the term ‘bias’, it was a really interesting session which confirmed something that I have been thinking for a long time – that history students at all levels need to be engaging the same skills that they were taught in GCSE English to identify key words, meaning, rhetorical strategies and the impact or effect of a text.

Chattaway and Wohlschlegel suggested that one way to get students to engage with reading is to provide them with key terms that they need to be able to define and big questions that they need be able to answer. They suggested that we might use quizzes to do this. Quizzies can generate many multiple choice questions from an uploaded article allowing students to read the text at the same time as answering the questions. While I can see that there are some advantages to this, I am slightly dubious about the software’s ability to process the nuanced arguments of advanced historical writing – the last time I put one of my articles into software that was supposed to summarise it, it did nothing of the sort. It picked out some random information and claimed it was my argument… Still, we’ll see.

They noted that in order to evaluate an argument to identify you need to be able to identify it. Normally in an examination text it will be the first or last sentence of a paragraph, or at the beginning or end of a work if you are looking at a whole text. They pointed out that in early modern sources, the sentence structure, especially in multi-clausal ones, is particularly challenging. Students need to track meaning through the paragraph. One way of doing this is to find the key sentence that gives the meaning of the whole text. They noted that listing sentences (where there is a list of material in the sentence) often lead to key ideas. Students should also read emotive speech marks such as questions and exclamation, while emotive language gives a clue to their feeling around it. With the climactic resolution of a text, you get a real sense of what the text is about. On the other hand, the passive voice sets things up as fact: this happened, this happened – making them appear not to be the actions of a person or individual.

They also addressed some unhelpful generalisations such as “This source is biased”-  suggesting that we ned to identify what is informing the author’s opinion – and of course that two opinions can exist in a source at the same time. They noted that two or more things can be in a text without being its focus.

This session was perfectly timed for me, as the next day I was in work I was teaching my Dates module, in which the focus is primarily on source analysis. I was able to implement some of the concepts in my teaching, so for once I got instant results from some CPD!

After this session, it was time for lunch, where I got to meet up with some of my colleagues from the editorial board of The Historian and, in an especially pleasant quirk of fate, I also got to see Sarah Fox, who has recently been appointed Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill, but was a student with me at Manchester when we were doing our PhDs. I’m not sure I’ve seen her since we left, although we did keep in touch, so it was really lovely to be able to catch up in person.