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Today we bring you an item held at Worcester Cathedral Library, which has been carefully digitised by the Digitisation team at Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service. This is a medieval medical text book compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first part contains three Latin translations of Arabic medical texts. They were translated by Gerard...

Today we bring you the second instalment of the Treasures from Worcestershire’s Past, which is an Ale-Tasters Oath from the Worcester City archive collection. “The Ale-Tasters Oath You shall be good and true to our Sovereign Lord King George and to his Heires and Successors Kings and Queens of Great Britain and to the Mayor...

Today we bring you a guest blog post from Joe Hawkins, Head of Landscape at Hagley, in which he appeals for help from our readers in aiding their restoration programme through the sharing of their images of the Park: George Lyttelton’s eighteenth century park at Hagley was in its day, considered amongst the greatest of...

Following on from the success of our Explore Your Archive feature, which ran throughout last week; today we are introducing a new feature: Treasures from Worcestershire’s Past. For the next year we will be featuring a treasure from across the Archive and Archaeology Service each week – that’s a total of 52 treasures to demonstrate what...

The Manorial Documents Register Project has just entered its second month.  At this stage, the focus is on developing definitive lists of the hundreds of manors in Worcestershire and Herefordshire.  This is not as straightforward as it might seem.  Not every place that has or used to have the word ‘manor’ in the title actually...

Tithe maps are a fantastic resource for people doing local history. Maps are always fascinating as they draw you in and are so visual. In this case the tithe maps are often the first details maps for certain places and goes alongside details for each field, making them especially valuable, and very popular with our...

Continuing our ‘Introducing…’ feature to show you the wide variety of work undertaken by our service, today we bring you a piece from our Digitisation Team: If you were to start a tour at the very top of the Hive, just beneath the golden parapets, and descend one level, then another, and another, and then just one...

For approximately 25 years from 1909 Berrow’s Worcester Journal produced a pictorial supplement to accompany the weekly newspaper. Photos in the newspapers themselves were quite rare at this time because of the reproduction difficulties and the supplements enabled Berrows to produce relatively good quality images to accompany the news.  These photographs record local people and...

Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service holds archives that can shed light on national and international events.  This letter was written on board RMS Titanic by Frank Millett, an American painter, sculpter and writer and sent to Alfred Parsons, a painter and illustrator, who lived in Broadway, Worcestershire. In the letter Millett describes the ship.. ‘As...

As we continue to celebrate the Explore Your Archive campaign week we bring you today’s treasure from the Archive Service, which is what we believe may be the oldest surviving document from Worcestershire.  It is part of the archives of the Lechmere family of Hanley Castle and has been dated to about 1100.’ The document is a legal deed...