Hooray for Sheffield Archives! (And Uni!)

Considering this day started with my half-frustrated blog on time constraints, things have begun to considerably look up today.

Image courtesy of Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield (!)

Firstly we received an email from the Archaeology department at Sheffield giving us copyright to use the reconstructed image of Sheffield Castle in the Middle Ages (Yes!) And the lovely lady who emailed us also included reconstructions of Manor Lodge. Although we hadn't been planning to have a section on the Manor, actually having the reconstructions of them means we can start to show more of how Sheffield might have looked in the early modern period.
So we were very pleased about that!

We then split into two groups, Rob and Johare to do some interviews at the market, Tessa and I to the archives where we had another bout of brilliant revelations. We found summarised versions of the most modern archaeological digs, with a plan/map of the castle ruins and it was clearly labelled with explanantions, which makes my job of trying to make maps to show change over time a whole lot easier. Plus there were even some photographs of the dig, including stonework which has now been covered over. Hopefully our trip to the South Yorkshire Archaeology HQ will allow us a chance to look at some of this in more detail.

We also managed to locate images of Sheffield's charter and the letters from Mary Queen of Scots written in the castle (out on loan for an exhibition until next week- but we can have access to them). As well as that we found a manuscript listing armour held at Sheffield- we'll be needing Tessa's paleography skills to decipher it. Then we found a copy of a document listing who purchased what from Sheffield castle when it was demolished, and a list of who was paid what to carry out certain parts of the demolition. The originals happen to be in Leeds Uni library so hopefully we'll have a trip over there to sort that out.

We have to say a massive thank you to everyone at the archives, they were brilliantly helpful, especially in locating sources which had been falsely labelled in external publications, and in letting us know what's available- they had an entire folder labelled 'Sources on the Castle'. We found so much stuff we're definitely going to be heading back.

Unfortunately, Rob and Johare had some bad luck at the markets. After getting permission to film and -by the sounds of it- making good friends with the staff, the battery in the camera they rented from Uni died during the first interview. So they'll need to go back tomorrow. Hopefully though the weather will stay good and then when we meet up to collate stuff tomorrow we can do it in a beer garden and forgot all the little hiccups.