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Will Coleman is a cultural producer with the Cornish theatre company Golden Tree and for the last year or so he and a team of people, financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, have been researching the Plen an Gwari or ‘playing places’ of Cornwall. These are, effectively, Cornish amphitheatres but they were used very differently to the amphitheatres of Rome. Rather than the audience sitting around the side it was was more often than not milling around in the middle of the action - truly immersiveÌýtheatre. The key source of this information is a book held by the Bodleian in Oxford which is known as the Ordinalia, a series of three plays dating from the 14th century and written in Middle Cornish. In this book there are stage directions in Latin with diagrams which show how the space was used.Ìý

Professor Pamela King from the University of Glasgow told Making History that the Ordinal should not be confused with what we know as ‘mystery plays’ but they were based on the highly allegorical Legend of the Cross. Ìý It’s possible that these plays originated in a house of secular canons in Penryn called Glasney College. There are numerous place names in the Ordinalia around Penryn Glasney but there is no proof of this; indeed some argue that St Petroc’s in Bodmin is a likely source as it was more populous in the Middle Ages.

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Will Coleman has just produced a book on the
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre Cambridge University PressISBN 9780521366700
Useful Links:

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On Wednesday 12th August divers and marine archaeologists working with Historic Eng-land will dive on the wreck of a ship in the Thames estuary off Southend to try and bring up a gun carriage from the murky depths. The gun carriage is of interest to specialist naval historians but the wreck is of wider significance, a three-masted ship from Cromwell’s navy called the London. Built in 1654, the London blew-up with the loss of more than 300 lives in March 1665; an event that Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary:

...This morning is bought to me to the office the sad news of the London, in which Sir J Lawson's men were all bringing her from Chatham to the Hope, and thence he was to go to sea in her - but a little a-this-side of the buoy of the Nower, she suddenly blew up.'About 24 and a woman that were in the round house and coach saved; the rest, being 300, drowned - the ship breaking all into pieces - with 80 pieces of brass ordnance. She lies sunk, with her round house above water. Sir J Lawson hath a great loss in this, of so many good chosen men, and many relations among them.’
You can follow the dive on Twitter by using the hashtag #LondonWreck1665
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Helen Castor spoke with Dr Richard Blakemore to put the London and Cromwell’s navy into its wider context.
Useful Reading:
Cromwell's Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648-1660 - Bernard Capp
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