The latest in the Society’s 2025 series of lectures was given on Friday 2 May by Professor Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton). Mark’s subject was ‘Remembering Rebellion in the Tudor South West’, a study of elite and popular retellings of a series of risings in Devon and Cornwall which took place between 1497 and 1554.
Video and audio recordings of Mark’s lecture are now available.
Mark’s focus was the memory and memorialisation of the most significant of these actions — an extensive and violent rising against Edward VI’s religious changes which broke out in 1549 — labelled the ‘commotion time’ by later generations and known today as the ‘Prayer Book Rebellion’. In the decades following the rebellion, the conduct of individuals and settlements in these events was used to demonstrate and assert personal and civic loyalty and piety, while depriving adversaries of these attributes.
As Mark also showed, the rebellions of the 1540s served as a temporal marker in popular memory, with ‘commotion time’ becoming a shared and commonly understood reference point to describe the recent past. More recently, they have gained new momentum, especially among Cornish political and cultural movements, as examples of historical resistance to central, state intrusion.
Our great thanks to Mark for his lecture and all who attended. Video and audio recordings of Mark’s talk — along with many recordings of previous RHS lectures — including those by Janina Ramirez, Tom Holland, Julia Laite and Corinne Fowler — are available in the Society’s Events Archive.
Forthcoming RHS talks and lectures
On Wednesday 21 May, the Society will be at the Cornwall Campus of the University of Exeter (Penryn, near Falmouth). The visit includes a public event at which Professor Catriona Pennell (Exeter) and Professor Lucy Noakes (Essex and President of the Royal Historical Society) will discuss ‘Cultural Memory and the Two World Wars in Britain’.
The event, which starts at 4.30pm, is open to all and will include an opportunity to meet with Lucy and fellow members of the RHS Council. All are very welcome to attend.
On Wednesday 2 July we host the Society’s 2025 Prothero Lecture which will be given by Peter Gatrell (Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester) on the subject of ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’. Further details of Peter’s lecture are available here and booking for the event, in person or online, is now available.
The Prothero Lecture will be followed by the Society’s annual summer party. The lecture and party are open to all and we look forward to welcoming to this event.