Who do you think they are?

Ian was welcomed as a return speaker, following his talk “Grievous Bodley Harm? The strange affair of Exeter's medieval manuscripts” in June 2023. The talk discussed the role of Sir Thomas Bodley in the history of Exeter Cathedral Library and showed around 30 of the manuscripts involved. That talk was linked to the exhibition at the RAMM of Gatekeepers to Heaven: religion, knowledge and power in medieval Exeter, which brought back to Exeter, for the first time in four centuries, six of the manuscripts removed from Exeter in 1602. ELHS members were able to visit the exhibition in August 2023.

For this talk, Ian explained the origins of the Exeter Civic Society in 1961 and its Blue Plaque scheme. Exeter's foremost historian W.G. Hoskins was somewhat horrified at Exeter's plans for its Golden Heart Project which included redevelopment of the Higher Market. He set about forming the Exeter Civic Society to promote higher standards for the city's buildings and redevelopment. A plaque commissioned by the Devon History Society commemorating Hoskins can be seen at 26-28 St David's Hill noted as “Historian of Devon, Exeter, and the English Landscape 1908-1992”. Hoskins was also the man behind the preservation of ‘The House that Moved’.

Ian began by showing images of public inscriptions that had occurred before the Blue Plaque scheme and which can be found in the Exeter Civic Society publication Discovering Exeter 10: Public Inscriptions (1999) by Den Perrin. The first example he gave (and quoting from that book) was “a wall inscription on the Cathedral approximately 3m above ground level on the west elevation of South Tower.” The words are in Latin transcribed as ‘The first Adam so weighed down mankind, God help him, That He who came to seek mankind was Himself made man.’ It also says “These words were probably incised before 1310 as the wall was hidden behind the Cloisters from then until 1819. The lettering was re-cut in the 1920s, partially disguising its medieval character.”