Elaine Drage, Bishop Leofric and Exeter Cathedral Chapter (1050-1972): A Reassessment of the Manuscript Evidence, Oxford 1978 - another superb, highly cited, piece of work. ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid...

Some brilliant doctoral theses never get published yet remain fundamental. Peter Richards' 1980 work, supervised by Catherine Hills, on 'Byzantine Bronze Vessels in Britain & Europe' is one. I wondered what became of him and have now found an obituary. www.theguardian.com/theguardian/...

The back of the Kingston Brooch. A seventh-century composite disc brooch, probably made in Faversham (Kent), now @liverpoolmuseums.bsky.social. Photo: www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/kin...

An ominous message on @findsorguk.bsky.social: 'The new PAS website launches on 28th July....' Please may it be better and not worse!

Here's her report on those excavations... And Is this Vera Evison digging at West Stow? Beer in a tea cup? www.stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk/Chronicle/19...

My own contact with this collection began in 1947 when, as a volunteer... I... [helped] unpack the Anglo-Saxon objects when they returned to London after war-time evacuation.' Wish I'd met Vera Evison! I love her work: careful, scholarly, yet courageous enough to draw inferences that matter.

In 2001, the grave of Li Chui, a Tang noblewoman who had died in 736 CE was excavated in Xi’an. 'For the first time, it was possible to reconstruct the opulent jewellery...of a Tang period noblewoman... This is the first time that these results are presented to a wider English-speaking public.'

'... denial, deflection, concealment & aggressive responses to challenge...' The response so many families have from public bodies when things go wrong.

The 'Hillsborough Law' was one of the recommendations of the East Kent #maternity report - in response to the culture of cover-up that Bill Kirkup's team found there. Good to see another of the #readingthesignals recs enacted. And proper support for families at inquests will be transformative.

An imaginative reconstruction of one of the halls excavated at Sutton Courtenay in the Thames valley, on display in the brilliant @oxonmuseumservice.bsky.social Woodstock Museum. It's early medieval collections are small but very mighty!

... and, obv., quite revealing of its author too! saxonship.org/product/books/

Martin Carver's The Sutton Hoo Story is easily the best current book on #suttonhoo. On mound 17: 'an evocation of every young man's dream: to ride out well-equipped & self-sufficient on a favourite mount, on a sunny morning, free of relatives, ...free of responsibility & ready for adventure.'

A statement from @rthonwesstreeting.bsky.social posted on the other place: 'the culture of cover up must be ended'. 'The ambition must be to ensure that women don't need to look forward to childbirth in fear or look back on it with trauma'. Hear, hear.

I hope that we will hear responses from core national bodies including @thercog.bsky.social, @rcm.org.uk & @newsnmc.bsky.social which do not use this as a moment to ask for more resources but start by owning the part they have played in how we have got here.

This 👇 is stark - that such a serious incident wasn't classed as a serious incident. (I feel this keenly, esp. as I learnt only yesterday more about how it was my daughter's death ended up classfied not as Neonatal Death/ Severe harm but Unexpected Admission to NICU, No Harm Done.)

Interesting that the Ockenden report's recommendations implicitly support Patient Safety Incident Response Framework despite how critical the report itself is, at least of the way its being implemented.

The Ockenden report on Nottingham has now been published here: www.ockendenmaternityreview.org.uk/wp-content/u...

.... if you want some proper red-herrings there's this! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I'd always been sceptical about the Odin connections - until I finally read the 'Eye for Odin' article. (Such a model of collaboration between academia and living history.) I'm still not sure that's relevant here but it does seem likely in terms of Sutton Hoo. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Wet. Dry. Write up. (!)

... and here's a more zoomed in image, in case you can't quite make it out!

From the window in the priests' room above the porch of St Mary's Uffington you can see the White Horse! My photo from a magical @ballioloxford.bsky.social bike ride last Sunday.

O to be on route to Bardsey now!

And the Rhynie book is here: books.socantscot.org/digital-book... [but why do publishers post such atrocious quality cover images!]

Dobat's article, The king and his cult: the axe-hammer from Sutton Hoo and its implications for the concept of sacral leadership in early medieval Europe in @antiquity.ac.uk is here: doi:10.1017/S0003598X00094485

A student email reminds me of these remarkable twins: the axe hammer from Sutton Hoo (c. 78cm long) and Rhynie man carrying his over his shoulder. Were these for sacrificial killing of cattle? The new book on Rhynie by @northernpicts.bsky.social has an evocative image of Andres Dobat's idea.

There are *so* many die stamps now recorded by @findsorguk.bsky.social but this one is special. Found near Milton Keynes but it looks like it had come some distance. Any thoughts or parallels? finds.org.uk/database/art...

A die stamp, potentially for making foils akin to those on the Sutton Hoo helmet has been found in Kent. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... The @findsorguk.bsky.social record is here: finds.org.uk/database/art...

Rehabilitating Wilfrid! New from Peter Darby in @ihr.bsky.social Historical Research. 'The 2 Wilfridian petitions provide evidence that a sophisticated & learned community, inc skilled administrators... was fostered by Wilfrid [which]... endured across at least 3 decades...' doi.org/10.1093/hisr...

You might enjoy this by @nicolaz.bsky.social - who's in this thread somewhere...