On Thursday 14 December, Cllr Stallard, Chairman of Hampshire County Council, and Marie Jeffery of Hampshire Library Service, joined our trustees for a ceremony to unveil the Information Board and mark the gift of the statue to Hampshire County Council. The Board, dedicated to Andy Stoller and Suzanne Bartlet, ex-Chairman of Hampshire County Council, was unveiled by Tony Stoller and Cllr Stallard.
Pearson already has a very good case study on Licoricia: https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/GCSE/History/2016/Teaching-and-learning-materials/gcse-history-licoricia-of-winchester-case-study.pdf
Please click this link for our KS3 lessons on Licoricia which challenge prejudice, and promote diversity, shining a new light on British medieval history. https://history.hias.hants.gov.uk/course/view.php?id=103
THE LICORICIA OF WINCHESTER APPEAL
October 2023 newsletter
Highlights of the last nine months:
Information Board. We have been working with Hampshire County Council and Hampshire Cultural Trust for some time to erect an information board by the statue, and this was finally achieved in September. The board briefly and simply covers Licoricia’s history, Winchester’s medieval Jewish history, and our messages, and will increase our impact on visitors. A QR code provides more information.
Book: Our fascinating book (Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England) is selling very well and we may have to reprint in a year or so. Sales at the end of September were over 1000 copies. It is wonderful to have sold around half of our stock in the first year. The book is sold at all Winchester’s major tourist sites as well as being available through Amazon. If you haven’t purchased one it is worth the read!
Lessons for children. We haveagreed with Hampshire County Council that our five ground-breaking Key Stage 3 lessons developed with HIAS (the Council’s educational Inspectorate and Advisory Service) will be available shortly for free download nationwide from their site (they are already available from our website http://www.licoricia.org). These lessons are a unique way to explore issues of prejudice, diversity, and female agency within the context of medieval England. HIAS can be contacted on 01962 874802 or via history.centre@hants.gov.uk.
We have also started work with HIAS on primary school lessons, aimed at children of 11 years of age. These lessons will introduce the middle ages (which students will study later at secondary school) through the Plantagenets’ Angevin Empire and Henry III – institutions, politics and religion – and weave into them an understanding of the lives of the Jews of the time. We hope that these lessons will be a unique way to help pupils cross over from the Anglo-Saxons into the world studied at secondary level.
Statue: In early 2023 agreement was reached with Hampshire County Council for us to donate the statue to them. They have undertaken to maintain it.
We were very touched recently to find that a bunch of red roses had been left by Licoricia, a sign of hope in difficult times.
Leaflets. We have given away over 10,000 leaflets in Winchester since the statue was unveiled. When this is added to the 35,000 hits on our website, and the impact of the talks and podcasts on Licoricia, our impact continues to be considerable.
Partnerships. We are engaged with the Holocaust Educational Trust and Winchester University on a project regarding the teaching of prejudice in schools.
Talks and podcasts. The Historical Association held a series of highly successful talks online about medieval Jews, to UK history teachers, in association with the Jewish Historical Society of England. The Historical Association also included Licoricia in their One Big History Department blog. There have been numerous podcasts made, by Hampshire HistoryBites, Apple, History Extra, Footnoting History, the Campaign against Antisemitism, BBC History Extra, the Jewish Historical Society of England and Medieval Jewish Studies.
The trustees have continued to give talks to groups such as synagogues and local history societies.
King Charles III Coronation Celebration Service at Winchester Cathedral. Rather wonderfully, a banner of Licoricia was present at the altar of Winchester Cathedral during the thanksgiving service for His Majesty King Charles III’s coronation.
Future plans. There is no doubt that our impact would be increased by video resources, for example a talking head accessible by QR code from the Information Board, and short clips that could be shown to teachers of our lesssons as a teaser to students. We intend to investigate these options and raise funds for them as necessary.
We will also be publicising our lessons further now that they are available free, with a view to making them part of mainstream history teaching in the UK. They also are valuable as part of migration, diversity and female achievement studies, as well as in teaching the origins of anti-Semitic prejudice in this country. We hope that they will be utilised by charities involved in teaching children. Amongst the Jewish Community, many do not realise the antiquity or importance of Licoricia’s medieval history, and we hope to provide these lessons to synagogues and Jewish schools.
We have not given up the possibility of further research into Winchester’s medieval Jewish community. Our initial enquiries have not proved fruitful but we will continue to investigate this area.
In summary, we have made exciting progress and that there remains a lot of good work to do. Thank you for your continued support.
We were very touched to find a bunch of red roses by Licoricia last week.
Licoricia’s Information Board was installed by her statue last week.
We are delighted to announce that the Information Board is ready for installation, and will in be erected by Licoricia’s statue at ARC in late September.
Artwork by Buttercross Creative, Winchester
This roundtable event organised by the Parkes Institute of the University of Southampton will bring together key members of the Licoricia project, experts in medieval Anglo-Jewry, heritage studies and school educators to reflect on the key aims and successes of the Licoricia project, explroring the potential of such commemoration to consider the roots of prejudice and discrimination, using this to promote tolerance, diversity, and female empowerment. The discussion will be chaired by Miri Rubin (Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London) and will involve five speakers:
Please register to attend: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/licoricia-of-winchester-heritage-memory-of-medieval-anglo-jewry-tickets-617018628327
Getting Here: Parking in Winchester is extremely limited so we would advise you to plan your travel accordingly, making the most of public transport links. https://www.arcwinchester.org.uk/your-visit for directions on how to reach The Arc using public transport.
Justine Ball works for Hampshire County Council as the County Inspector for History and Religious Education, providing professional support for primary History and RE across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. She has a degree in Theology and MA in Religious Studies, as well as having completed Woolf Institute courses on ‘Bridging the Great Divide’ and ‘Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe.’ Justine is one of the joint Vice Chairs of the Association of RE Inspectors, Advisors and Consultants (AREIAC), a joint Vice Chair of the London and South East Branch of AREIAC, and the South East RE Hub leader for England.
Maggie Carver is Deputy Chair of Ofcom and Chairs its Content Board and Election Committee, having recently spent 16 months as its Interim Chair. She is also Chair of the charity, the Licoricia of Winchester Appeal. Maggie’s working life began in investment banking followed by a number of roles in the media industry. She was involved in the setting up of ITV franchise, Meridian Broadcasting, and was Chief Executive of Channel 4 Racing producer and outside broadcaster, ThreeonFour. Until its sale in December 2017, she owned and ran with her husband, a retail and online business specialising in the sale of goods for the elderly and disabled. Additionally, over the last 30 years she has gained extensive experience as a non-executive director on the boards of twenty companies, public, private and not-for-profit. These include Chairing news and programme provider ITN, the British Board of Film Classification, leading horseracing industry body, the RCA, and multiplex operator, SDN, as well as the boards of Channel 5 Television, RDF Media plc, Satellite Information Services, the Eden Project and British Waterways. Maggie and her husband William have lived in Winchester for over 20 years and for the whole of that time they have been involved in local Jewish education projects and interfaith work. Ten years ago they initiated the Mitzvah Day project and just over five years ago, the Licoricia of Winchester project.
Toni Griffiths is a Visiting Fellow at The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. She completed her PhD, ‘The Journey of Memory: Forgetting and Remembering England’s Medieval Jews’, in 2018 at the University of Winchester. Toni is also Senior Outreach Officer at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Sarah Herrity works for the Hampshire Inspection and Advisory Service (HIAS) which provides consultancy and inspection services to schools in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Sarah is the HIAS teaching and learning advisor for history and has additional roles concerning quality assurance, safeguarding and provision for Early Career Teachers. Sarah has written teaching materials on Licoricia of Winchester including the published Key Stage 4 GCSE case study for the Pearson Migration unit, the Pearson KS3 Topic of the Month on Licoricia due to be published shortly, and the HIAS resourced enquiries into the historical significance of Licoricia and what her life reveals about the treatment of the medieval Jewish minority in England. The Licoricia of Winchester Appeal charity commissioned the resources which are available from the Hampshire History Curriculum Centre.
Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, and President of the Jewish Historical Society of England since 2020. She has written books and articles that explore the religious cultures of Europe between 1100 and 1600, with particular attention to community relations, relations between Jews and Christians, the participation of women, and ideas about the body and emotions.
Katherine Weikert is a senior lecturer in early medieval history, and Deputy Head of the School of History and Archaeology at the University of Winchester. Her research specialties are in gender and authority in the central middle ages, particularly in regards to place and material culture. Her monograph Gender, Authority and Space in the Anglo-Norman World, 900-1200, was shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
The Walking Tour is led by Toni Griffiths exploring Winchester’s Jewish history and ending with the Licoricia statue.
Find out more about the fascinating history of the Jewish community by joining us for the Winchester Medieval Jewish Trail. Winchester has an important Jewish past. The earliest record of Jews in the city date to the mid-1100s, making it one of the earliest, largest, and most successful Jewish settlements in England. The medieval Jewish settlement was based around Jewry Street, and while it thrived for a period, the 13th century would see the community facing heavy fines, imprisonment, and execution before their eventual expulsion in 1290. Although fascinating, until recently, the story was little known.
The visit of King Charles was remembered at Winchester Cathedral on Friday at a Service celebrating the Coronation. A banner with King Charles in front of Licoricia’s statue was carried up to the altar. Pictured is the banner and the Very Reverend Catherine Ogle, Dean of Winchester Cathedral.
Licoricia of Winchester 