At the end of July, I took my daughter and her friend to the Fantasy Forest Festival at Sudeley Castle, near Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. They’ve been going for a few years, and I act as the taxi, running them down there, and to and from the bed and breakfast, and I then spend the weekend having some time to myself. Sometimes I tootle around the Cotswolds, but I always treat myself to some research time.

This year, like the last two, I have spent Friday evening in the White Hart with my computer and my Pilgrimage of Grace project. This year adn last year I have spent the evening indexing my transcriptions. I had a lovely chat with one of the staff (I’d like to say landlady, but I’m honestly not sure – I know she was there last year too) about what I was up to, as she is quite interested in history. And who doesn’t love a pub where a guy comes in with several parrots?

I had a pleasant meal, and got lots done. Basically, I am going through automatic transcriptions of hundreds of images of documents, not particularly to correct them (although there is a bit of that) but to create an index of people, places, and other notable stuff in the documents, and a calendar of the different documents. I’m particularly interested in references to sound and noise, and of course, news.

This is a project I’ve been working on for years. Honestly, it’s been years. So I’ll give you a quick recap. Not long after I finished my PhD, I ran a search on the State Papers Online to look for words like ‘ballad’, ‘rhyme’ and ‘song’, and found a cluster of hits around the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace. This caused me to write an article, which I submitted to a journal but it was rejected, and most of the comments from the peer reviewer asked for more explanation and exploration. The problem was that I had already submitted it to the journal that had the biggest word count I could find, and I didn’t know what to do next. A chat with Fiona Pogson helped me to realise that maybe it was another book rather than an article, and I’ve been working on it, on and off, ever since.

I received funding from a fairy godfather at Lancaster University to pay for the digitisation of images from the National Archives, and the faculty research fund paid for a trip to Lincoln and a subscription to Transkribus. With the help of Emily Kadens, who allowed me to use a trial version of a handwriting recognition model she had trained, I was able to get reasonable transcriptions of most of my images, and it is those that I am now working my way through, creating my index and calendar. I started it at my Festival Adjacent Weekend last year, and took a few days away in August that helped me to make some further progress. And then work stopped, because I was back at Lancaster, where things were very strained due to all the changes the university was making, while we were under threat of redundancy. And then I applied for the job at Hope, and having been appointed, I had new modules to write and teach, so until after Easter, nothing more happened. I spent a couple of days indexing in the spring, so it was good to get back to it in July.

From there I headed to Hailes Church and Abbey, on the recommendation of our lovely B and B host. The Abbey is only open very limited hours, so all I could do was peer at the ruins through the fence, but the church is fascinating, containing as it does some 14th century wall paintings.

I then carried on up the road to Hailes Fruit Farm, where I spent the afternoon drinking tea and indexing more documents. In the evening I went to pick up the girls (the festival finishes at a very civilised 7pm on the Sunday), got them some tea and then we went back to the B and B, where I went for a walk with my daughter, spotting some bats in the sunset. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable weekend.