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The ROYS conference will be back for 2023, with a two day event hosted at the Leeds City Museum on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th June. Our Call for Papers is now live, and linked here.

This year in addition to our usual field of anything relating to Yorkshire’s past, we’re also looking for papers for a special ‘overlooked’ panel, linked to the Preservative Party’s current ‘Overlooked’ exhibition, which you can now see at the museum.

If you have any questions regarding the Conference or Call for Papers, you can email us at ridingsofyorkshire@gmail.com, follow us on twitter or instagram at @ROYSociety, or visit our website at www.ridingsofyorkshire.blogspot.com.

We’re all looking forward to what promises to be another great conference. Keep an eye out for further announcements about this year’s event soon.

If you can’t wait until June, don’t forget that you can also listen to our podcast by searching “ROYSCast” in your podcast provider, or access it directly here.

I have recently started a new role as Congress Officer for the International Medieval Congress. I had a great time attending and delivering a paper last year, so I’m excited to get stuck into this new role. Drawing medievalists from over 60 countries, with more than 2,000 individual papers as well as public concerts, performances, excursions, bookfairs and more, the International Medieval Congress (IMC) is Europe’s largest forum for sharing ideas in medieval studies.

You can read my interview about this role for the IMC website here.

I had a great time giving a paper at my first in-person International Medieval Congress last week. It was good to engage with the Medieval academic community after so long online.

My thanks go to the #IMC2022 team for managing to organise this event after two years of disruptions, they did a great job!

If you attended, and want to see my paper on the de Vescys, de Lacys and Scotland; then you can still find the recording on the IMC app for now! If you have any questions about the paper, or about medieval Yorkshire and Northumberland in general then please do get in touch at adamcookhistory@gmail.com

We’re delighted to announce that booking for the Ridings of Yorkshire Society conference on the 17th and 18th of June is now open, both to attend in-person and online. Both of these options are free of charge. In-person spaces are limited, so it’s worth getting in early if you’re hoping to join us at Blaydes House on the day. You can find the booking link here, or on the ROYS website at www.ridingsofyorkshire.blogspot.com.

The provisional programme is as follows, and timings will follow from ROYS at a later date:

Friday 17th June:

Welcome

Panel 1- Medieval Yorkshire:

Berenice Wilson: Emma de Port, the Percy’s, and St Julian the Harbinger

Sophie Whittle: Yorkshire as an innovator of language change: The extent of Scandinavian influence in late medieval Yorkshire texts

Key Note speaker – Leeds Museums and Galleries Community Engagement Team

Lunch

Key Note Speaker – Peter Halkon

Panel 2- Yorkshire in 20th Century

Dr Michael Reeve : ‘Specials’ and ‘night patrols’: Voluntary policing, public safety and working-class community in Hull during the First World War

Aleks Fagelman: We’re Here, We’re Queer and we won’t be forgotten: A discussion of reparations for the AIDS crisis, focused on the West Yorkshire Queer Stories archive

Paper 3 TBC

Panel 3- Yorkshire and the Archives

Dr Stefan Ramsden: The Merchant Marine at War: A Yorkshire Miner’s Perspective

Kevin Jones: Data on the Public Record: Mapping and Visualising Accessions to Repositories Information from Yorkshire Archives c.2007 – 2020

Sam Wright: The Humber Outport using the Lloyds Register Foundation Heritage and Education Centre Archives

Saturday 18th June:

Panel 4- Yorkshire in 18th & 19th Century

Aruni Samarakoon: Reading Mary Wollstonecraft through a lens of Socialist Feminist

Wayne Garlick: East Yorkshire Agriculture & Transport 1815-1850

Dr Joan K. F. Heggie, Women as capital lenders in nineteenth-century Yorkshire: Evidence from the Register of Deeds

Panel 5 – Yorkshire in 20th Century – Part 2!

Dr Ashley Borrett: Crime and Criminality in Hull and East Yorkshire during the interwar period

Joshua Daniels: The Blitz in Yorkshire: Once Forgotten, Now Remembered

Paper 3 TBC

Paper 4 TBC

Hull: Yorkshire’s Maritime City – Guided Tour lead by Sam Wright (Only available for in-person attendees)

Recently I was able to put my research skills to use helping with a small exhibition of materials relating to the Hull University Social Services Organisation, to honour its 60th Anniversary. The organisation, founded by Derek Forster in 1961, has carried out decades worth of good work helping people in Hull, and it was a real privillege to get to read about some of this. After initially beginning to assist in March 2020, COVID-19 put paid to the project for a while. However, the team involved began work on the research in earnest in 2021 to ensure that the project still happened in some form. Some new undergraduate volunteers joined the project in late 2022, and were able to make use of the research we had already done to deliver a small exhibition in the Student Union Building in February 2022. We were delighted to be able to see this much delayed projcet to fruition. A photograph of some of the materials found is displayed below.

It was particularly interesting to do archival work on a completely different period to that which I am used to, and to help a little bit with a project to recognise the good work of HUSSO.

Formed by a group of Hull PhD students, the Ridings of Yorkshire Society, or ROYS for short, is a new group dedicated to celebrating Yorkshire’s past and its researchers. We’re looking forward to getting started with our first conference on the 17th and 18th of June 2022. This week, we were delighted to release the Call for Papers for this conference, which you can see below.

You can follow ROYS on twitter and instagram @ROYSociety, or if you have any further questions either in general or about the Call for Papers, email us at ridingsofyorkshire@gmail.com

I was recently lucky enough to record an episode of Durham MEMSA’s Crossing Borders, Contesting Boundaries podcast series. In this episode I briefly discussed my research on medieval Pontefract and the de Lacy Barons who held the honour. If you want to listen to this episode, you can find it, along with other podcasts in the same series, here.