Shire Hall Historic Courthouse Museum

Our four partner museums Dorset County Museum, Poole Museum Service, The Salisbury Museum and Wiltshire Museum have explored their collections and found objects that tell the untold stories of our region’s women and their past – from the unexpected to the ground-breaking and intriguing.

Iron Age Pots
From Wiltshire Museum

In the past it was socially expected that women, if not invisible, should certainly be in the background. Thankfully, a pioneering archaeologist and ‘trowel-blazing’ woman named Maud Cunnington took no notice of this.

Famous for her work on the prehistoric sites of Wiltshire, Maud led many important early excavations across the county. She was committed to bringing archaeology to a wide audience, opening up her excavations to visitors, writing popular books for children and giving public lectures.

Visit the museums to uncover the fascinating stories that lie behind the objects – and remember to ask about children’s activities. The objects will be displayed at each museum in turn until October 2020.

This object will be on display 18 January 2020 – 5 April 2020

The Dorset County Museum is currently closed, so the Wessex Women objects are being displayed at Shire Hall Historic Courthouse Museum, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1UY

For more information about this tour Telephone Phone: 01305 262735

‘For the Benefit of Example’

Steve Poole
Professor of History and Heritage
University of the West of England

Hanging people at the scene of their crime in South West England, 1730-1830

In the Georgian period, men and women sentenced to death by the West Country’s assize courts were usually executed either at the county gaol or on traditional hanging grounds sited on the peripheries of the region’s county towns. By the 1790s, most of these executions were carried out on purpose built scaffolds with trapdoor systems – a practice considered quicker, cleaner and more economically efficient than carting the condemned out of town for rough strangulation on a makeshift gallows. So how are we to understand the continuance of the much older practice of processing some convicts across miles of open country to relatively obscure rural parishes so that they could be despatched at the scene of their crime? Despite the enormous costs, the logistical difficulties, the security issues and the archaic nature of the execution apparatus, crime-scene hangings were still taking place in the region as late as 1830. This talk seeks answers in local geography and in the customary principle of exemplary justice.

Whispers and Cries: Listening for the Voices of the Dead in a Nineteenth-Century Courtroom.

This lecture traces the evolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth century British courtroom as it evolved from a plain open space into a complex theatre of justice. Along the way, it suggests that the changing architecture of the courtroom evidences the development of new relationships between defendants, judges, juries and witnesses. By building 3D models, and testing how, for example, the placing of judges bench, jury box and defendant’s dock effected the soundscape of the court it argues that defendants were increasingly disadvantaged by a new kind of trial. Along the way, it explores how we can better understand courts such Shire Hall, and the experience of the defendants tried there for their liberty and their lives.

Tickets are £6 per person.