麻豆社

In Chichester, the District Council鈥檚 Archaeologist, James Kenny, has recently completed a dig at the city鈥檚 Priory Park. Just by the boundary of the cricket ground they found a Roman bath house which, for the first time, sheds light on a very affluent neighbourhood in the Roman Town. James told Tom that he thinks it might be third or fourth century and puts its excellent condition down to its location as the park is one of the least developed places in Chichester.

Professor Stephen Baxter at St Peter鈥檚 College in Oxford is probably our leading historian of Domesday, the great audit of William鈥檚 new Anglo-Norman kingdom in 1086. A few years back he was doing some filming in Exeter Cathedral Library and Archives with the original copy of something called Exon Domesday, the only surviving books from the regional surveys carried out in the spring of 1086 and which provided the data for the final record. Stephen was alarmed at the condition of Exon Domesday and together with the Cathedral and other partners put together to restore the document and digitise it for posterity. During this phase, handwriting experts such as Professor Julia Crick at King鈥檚 College in London have, for the first time, been able to identify the numbers of scribes involved in compiling the book and how it was structured. The project promises to deliver new insight into the motivation of William to undertake such an epic survey when his new kingdom was under threat from European enemies.

350 years ago, Dutch naval vessels sailed up the Thames Estuary and into the River Medway in an audacious smash and grab raid in which English ships were destroyed, damaged or captured. The raid鈥檚 been described as the English Pearl Harbour and it came when the English and Dutch were trying to negotiate a peace during the Second Anglo Dutch War. The Dutch and the English were at loggerheads over trade and navigation rights and the Medway Raid was possibly the turning point in the fortunes of both nations.

Dutch citizen and resident of Kent Marja Kingma who works at the British Library takes us to the scene of the action and Tom talks to Dutch naval historian Dr Gijs Rommelse.

In election week, Making History鈥檚 Iszi Lawrence joins Dr Paul Seaward and his team at the History of Parliament Trust to find out more about the history of our constituencies and how voting was carried out in years gone by.