Date: 15thof April 2026
Time: 20:00
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Dr Angela McShane, Hon Reader in History, University of Warwick

Partying like it’s 1679 in Stony Stratford, Or Mable Graves’s Very Bad Day. In 1679, the landlady of The Cock in Stony Stratford was visited by agents of the powerful local magnate, Sir Richard Temple of Stowe. They were investigating a seditious pop song that had created a local and national sensation – and libelled their master. Did she know anything about it? Trouble was … Mabel did know … a lot. Come and hear the story of that sensational song, the era’s huge pop song trade in general, and find out what happened next for Mabel and her family.

Date: 20th of May 2026
Time: 20:00
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Prof Jenny Benham, Medieval History, School of History, Archaeology & Religion, Cardiff University

Spies were a common feature of political, diplomatic and courtly life in the period of early medieval Europe. In this article, Jenny Benham explores some interesting contemporary representations of spies, in both literature and art. These stories and images reveal key features of the culture and practices surrounding these so-called ‘little birds’ who listened to and passed on important secret information.

Date:15th of Ocotober 2025
Time: 20:00 (19:35 for AGM)
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Martyn Whittock, Independent Researcher and Author

For a thousand years, Norse sagas (written in 13th-century Iceland) claimed that Vikings migrated from Greenland to reach a land to the West called ‘Vinland.’  It was, and is, a claim that stimulates the imagination and controversy, for it insists that Vikings influenced lands very far from Scandinavia. In this talk – based on my book American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America – I explore the evidence for this in the literary sources and archaeology (most notably on Newfoundland); claims regarding runestones ‘discovered’ in the USA; and  the way this idea of ‘Vinland Vikings’ has fed into the cultural DNA of North America and especially the USA.  In recent times that has led to their co-option by the US far-right as seen in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally at Charlottesville (2017) and on January 6th at the US Capitol. This talk will explore both the evidence for Norse settlement in North America and why it became (and remains) so important in the ‘deep story’ of contested US identities.