April 2025

This weekend, the University of Northampton hosted the spring Council meeting of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS). Delegates from across the UK gathered at Sunley Hotel for two days of discussion and planning.

This is the first time that the meeting has been held in the midlands, with meetings in recent years having been held in Glasgow, Newcastle and York. Prof Matthew McCormack from Northampton is currently President of BSECS, and he was pleased to bring the Society to the university. He added, ‘Northampton is a fine eighteenth-century town, with many notable buildings and one of the century’s largest market squares, so it was great to welcome eighteenth-century scholars to the the town and show them around.’

BSECS promotes the study of the global long eighteenth century, across all disciplines – including History, Literature, Art, Music, Theatre, Philosophy and Languages, among others. Every year it holds a large international conference in January and a postgraduate conference in the summer, and it offers a range of awards to support access for postgraduates and early career researchers in particular. It publishes the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and reviews of events and media at Criticks.

Northampton will again welcome a national organisation to campus on 11 June, when the Institute for Historical Research comes to campus. We will host a special session of the ‘British History in the Long Eighteenth Century’ seminar, when Prof John Coffey from the University of Leicester will give a talk about the Wilberforce diaries. Attendance is free and is in person or online. The seminar is at 3pm in SN111 and it will be preceded at 1pm by a walking tour of the town, meeting at the train station.

All Saints Church, Northampton. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday I gave a talk in possibly the most interesting venue of my career. The Brunel Museum in the east end of London got in touch because they had some buckles in their collection, which belonged to Marc Isambard Brunel (father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel). Northampton Museum had helped to identify the buckles, and the… Continue Reading →

If you have been to a library in Northamptonshire recently, you may have seen some pop-up museum displays! These were created as part of the project ‘Emotions, Gender and Material Culture: Historical Perspectives on Museum Collections’ at the University of Northampton, which was funded by the university. The project brought together historians, librarians, museum curators… Continue Reading →

As a follow up to my post about medieval horoscopes, here’s another fun exercise I did with students – this time second years taking my module Medieval Chivalry and its Afterlives. South Dakota parhelion. Photo Credit: Rick Bohn / USFWS We discussed how kings and nobles often took advice from astrologers about when to wage… Continue Reading →

Matthew McCormack from History at UON has published a book on Georgian shoes. Shoes and the Georgian Man is published by Bloomsbury. It is a full-colour book with around 80 illustrations, including images of many of the shoes that Matthew studied during his research. The book is available in paperback, hardback and ebook formats via… Continue Reading →

Pisces and Diagram for Friday (left) and Libra and Taurus (right) in an Astronomical Miscellany, shortly after 1464, German. Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XII 8 (83.MO.137), fols. 56v-57 As an (elder) Millennial, my generation loves a horoscope – while the generation that followed us, Gen Z, are markedly more sceptical about astrology. Most of my… Continue Reading →

Students on the steps at the British Museum Last week as part of our Welcome Week activities at the University of Northampton, we ran a free trip to the British Museum. A lot of our new students joined us, along with a few returning students who fancied a day out in London! Given this involved… Continue Reading →

[No spoilers!] I’m a big fan of the Alien film series. I have been hooked every since watching Alien 3 in the cinema as a teenager, and the original 1979 film is one of my all-time favourites. So I was excited to see Alien: Romulus, which is currently on general release. After several disappointing sequels… Continue Reading →

The Northampton branch of the Historical Association is run by the University of Northampton, and this year we are joining forces with the Leicester branch to provide a combined programme. The joint talks will be online but we are also keen to hear from local schools who would like to host an event. All talks… Continue Reading →

Matthew McCormack from History has co-edited a new book on new approaches to teaching the subject. Co-edited with Ruth Larsen (Derby) and Alice Marples (British Library), Innovations in Teaching History: Eighteenth-Century Studies in Higher Education is now out with University of London Press. The book contains seven chapters, which provide case studies for how to… Continue Reading →

We’re very excited to be hosting TWO workshops on the theme of politicised nostalgias this July! My initial call for papers generated so much interest that, in addition to our in person conference on 5 July, a week later we have an online workshop. The in person workshop is open to speakers only, as it’s… Continue Reading →

Yesterday I gave a talk in possibly the most interesting venue of my career.

The Brunel Museum in the east end of London got in touch because they had some buckles in their collection, which belonged to Marc Isambard Brunel (father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel). Northampton Museum had helped to identify the buckles, and the curator at the Brunel Museum had read my work on shoe buckles.

Staff and volunteers at the museum were also interested in the history of boots. Marc Brunel was famously horrified at the state of soldiers’ footwear when their returned from the Peninsular War, so resolved to invent a better process for their manufacture. He devised a machine that was so simple it could be operated by unskilled workers, and he employed disabled veterans in his factory in Battersea. They produced thousands of boots for British soldiers in the latter years of the Napoleonic Wars.

The museum therefore invited me to talk about my research on boots and shoes. They said in advance that the talk would be held in the tunnel shaft – which sounded intriguing – and that it might be chilly. But that did not prepare me for what I saw when I arrived.

The tunnel shaft at The Brunel Museum (author’s photograph)

The tunnel shaft is huge! In its day it had ornate wall coverings and a staircase, but it is now bare concrete, giving it a very industrial feel. It apparently gets cold the winter but it was pleasant on a warm March day. The acoustics are also interesting – it is very reverberant, like a church. It varies depending on where you stand and, just like the whispering gallery at St Paul’s, at a certain point your voice can be heard everywhere.

Originally the shaft served the Thames Tunnel, which was an engineering marvel when it opened in 1843, being the world’s first tunnel under a navigable river. Nowadays the tunnel is used by the London Overground, and every few minutes you can hear the trains of the Windrush Line under your feet. You can also hear the pump draining river water from the tunnel.

It is a wonderful space and the Brunel Museum uses it for lectures, concerts, performances and functions. It is also well worth visiting in its own right, as are the super museum displays in the Engine House next door. If you are in Rotherhithe, be sure to pay a visit.

Matthew McCormack

Regular readers of the blog will know that I am currently travelling around the country visiting museums as part of my project ‘Shoes and the Georgian Man’, funded by the Society for Antiquaries. I am studying surviving examples of shoes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to explore the social significance of footwear in this period, focusing in particular on ideas about masculinity and the body.

I have long been interested in military shoes, and indeed I got into the study of material culture while researching my book on the Georgian militia, which included a chapter on uniforms. The challenge here is that so few of them survive. Whereas millions of shoes were produced for the armed forces, those worn by common soldiers and sailors were invariably worn until they wore out, and were then discarded. To study military footwear, you rely on objects that have survived for unusual reasons.

This is why I was so keen to go to Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent. This trip had been over a year in the planning, and had been long postponed, partly because of the pandemic but also because the items that I wanted to view were on public display, so could not be removed from the cases until the site had closed for the season. In order to facilitate my visit, two curators very kindly gave up their time to retrieve the objects and supervise their handling.

Image used here courtesy of the Historic Dockyard Chatham

I was keen to visit this museum because they hold items retrieved from the wreck of HMS Invincible. This ship of the line sank in the Solent in 1758, was rediscovered in 1979 and subsequently excavated. These excavations turned up a huge quantity of articles from the mid-eighteenth century, which give an unprecedented insight into everyday life on board ship. Happily for me, the haul included many shoes.

The items I examined ranged from small fragments of leather and accessories like metal buckles, to complete shoes. You might expect leather items that had been under the sea for over two centuries to be in poor condition, and some were indeed heavily decayed. But others were in remarkably good condition, and looked little different to the shoes I have seen from the period that had been carefully stored. This is partly a fluke of the conditions in which they were buried, but is also of course a credit to the archaeologists, conservators and curators who have preserved them.

One of the best preserved shoes also happened to be of the greatest interest to me. It is a men’s shoe that would be about a size 4 today. It is straight lasted so could be worn on either foot – as were virtually all shoes from the period – but evidence of wear suggests it was consistently worn on the right. It would have been fastened by a buckle, which is now missing but its piercings are still visible on the two straps.

The construction is sturdy rather than fine, and this is utilitarian rather than fashionable footwear. It is therefore likely that it was worn by a rating, an ordinary sailor.

Image used here courtesy of Historic Dockyard Chatham

By eighteenth-century standards, the shoe looks comfortable and practical. It is squared at the toe (so would probably have been fine on either foot), and is fairly broad with a low heel. The leather uppers seem fairly supple, and the sole is relatively thin, so they would have been pleasant to wear and would not have impeded movement.

The usual image of Jolly Jack Tar is that he went barefoot. When performing tasks like climbing the rigging, bare feet would have been safer for the job as they can grip better, but sailors did in fact wear shoes on board ship and when going ashore. Material objects like shoes can therefore give us an insight into the everyday lives and experiences of sailors in the eighteenth century.

Matthew McCormack