Bearers of the Cross

Hannah Agass, Learning and Access Officer, and Abi Turner, Curator Over the last 12 months the Museum has welcomed school and university groups, inviting students to study first hand some of the objects documented and interpreted by the Bearers of the Cross project. Alongside tours of our historic buildings, the oldest of which dates to... Read more »

Earlier this month various news organisations, websites and social media platforms were reporting an exciting discovery in rural Shropshire: an underground network of tunnels and caves, supposedly constructed in the Middle Ages by members of the Order of the Temple, better known as the Knights Templar. Many medievalists were sceptical about a direct association between this admittedly... Read more »

After a busy six months in the Bearers of the Cross project world, and ahead of this month’s final public lecture at the museum, this is the first in a series of quick blog posts to let you know about a few updates to the website. First of all, Rosie has written a wonderful series of essays... Read more »

In the first guest essay for the Bearers of the Cross project blog, Dr Andrew Buck (Queen Mary University of London) presents an overview of the history of the principality of Antioch. The principality was one of four ‘crusader states’ established in the Near East in the wake of the First Crusade, and was the source... Read more »

This summer Flora Raybould joined the Bearers of the Cross team for five weeks to take on the mammoth task of sorting, identifying and cataloguing the Cyprus coins from our crusader coin collection.  She approached the task with great enthusiasm and quickly got to grips with the extensive collection, making impressive progress and a significant... Read more »

Three objects in the Museum of the Order of St John‘s (MOSJ) collection have intrigued the project team since the start. They are three lion head handles or knockers, discovered in the ruins of the Muristan in Jerusalem, the site of the hospital used by the Order of St John from around AD 1080.  It is this... Read more »

It’s been a busy summer for the Bearers of the Cross project. On Friday 3 June William gave a keynote lecture at Histfest, the annual conference organised by and for postgraduate students at Lancaster University. Two weeks later William, Rosie and Abi were completing preparations for the project’s research workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medieval... Read more »

Henry Walter Fincham FSA (1860 – 1952) was central in shaping and developing the Museum of the Order of St John’s collection, in particular the excavated stone and associated records that form a significant part of the AHRC Bearers of the Cross project’s database.  Not only a keen photographer and antiquarian, but also an athlete... Read more »

We are now half way through getting the Museum of the Order of St John’s collection ready to go online. Photographs have been taken and edited, and we are now nearing the end of getting all our catalogue records up to scratch. Getting the records of the Museum’s medieval objects ready to go online has... Read more »

As we have been going through all the medieval objects at the Museum of the Order of St John we have been able to identify some wonderful things, but a small number of artefacts have us stumped! These are items that we cannot identify or find parallels for, so we are going to post a... Read more »