Email: d.tankard@chi.ac.uk

BA (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa)
MA (London) PhD (London)

I hold a part-time position as a senior lecturer at the University of Chichester and currently teach three undergraduate modules.

I am also employed part-time as a social historian at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (www.wealddown.co.uk), one of the leading museums of historic buildings and rural life in the UK. I came to the Museum in 2005 on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Reading to research and write the economic and social history of ten of the Museum’s exhibit houses ranging in date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries (completed in 2008). I now work closely with the Museum’s Interpretation Department, (amongst other things) leading the furnishing projects on exhibit houses which in 2011 included an early seventeenth-century cottage (Poplar Cottage) and an early-nineteenth century toll house. My work at the Museum informs my first-year module, History, Heritage and Interpretation.

My PhD (University of London) was on Attitudes to death in England, c.1480 to 1560 and focused on the changes to beliefs and practices associated with death and dying brought about by the early English reformation. I published a number of pieces on this subject between 2003 and 2008 and it provides the basis for my third-year module on The Cultural History of Death. However, since taking up my post at the Museum I have worked on rural social history from circa 1300 to 1900, including housing, households, material culture and social structure. My current research focuses on the social, economic and material lives of the rural poor in seventeenth-century Sussex.

Poplar Cottage

Undergraduate Teaching

History, Heritage & Interpretation (level 1)
Renaissance & Reformation Europe (level 1)
The Cultural History of Death (level 3)

Postgraduate Supervision

I would be interested in supervising students working on aspects of the cultural history of death (c.1300-1900) or rural history (c.1300-1900), particularly that of Sussex.

Publications

Books

(With A Miles and W White), Burial at the site of the parish church of St Benet Sherehog before and after the Great Fire: Excavations at 1 Poultry, City of London (MoLAS, 2008).

Houses of the Weald and Downland: people and houses of south-east England, c.1300-1900 (forthcoming with Carnegie Publishing Ltd, 2012).

Research Articles and Essays

‘The reformation of the deathbed in mid sixteenth-century England’, Mortality, 8, no.3 (2003), 251-267.

‘Protestantism, the Johnson family and the 1551 Sweat in London’, The London Journal, 29, no.2 (2004), 1-16.

‘Defining death in early Tudor England’, Cultural & Social History, 3, no. 1 (2006), 1-20.

‘The Johnson family and the Reformation, 1542-52’, Historical Research, 80 (2007), 469-490.

‘Reformation in the parishes: St Mary le Bow and its associated parishes’ in M Byrne and G R Bush (eds), St Mary le Bow: A History (Barnsley, 2007), 119-152.

‘Graffham and Woolavington potters, tilemakers and brickmakers, c.1590-1740’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 146 (2008), 175-188.

‘The Weald & Downland Open Air Museum 1970 to 2010’, The Local Historian 40, no. 4 (2010), 281-291.

‘The regulation of cottage building in seventeenth-century Sussex’, The Agricultural History Review 59 no. 1 (2011), 18-35.

‘“A pair of grass-green woollen stockings”: the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century Sussex’, forthcoming in Textile History 43, no. 1 (2012).

‘Form and function in the late medieval rural house’ in K Giles & M Svart Kristiansen (eds), Houses – shaping dwellings, identities and homes. European housing culture from the Viking age to the Renaissance, forthcoming with Jutland Archaeological Society, 2012.

Short articles

‘Hangleton Cottage and its medieval village’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Spring 2006).

‘Boarhunt hall house and its origins’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2006).

‘Bayleaf – a Wealden hall house from Chiddingstone, Kent’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Spring 2007).

‘Poplar Cottage – a wasteland cottage from Washington, West Sussex’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2007).

‘Graffham potters’, Past Matters, no. 5 (2007).

‘Pendean – a yeoman’s house from West Lavington, West Sussex’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Spring 2008).

‘The house from Walderton, West Sussex’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2008)

‘Tindalls Cottage – a husbandman’s cottage from Ticehurst, East Sussex’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Spring 2009)

‘The Beeding tollhouse’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2009).

‘Gonville Cottage’, Past Matters, no. 7 (2009).

‘Gonville Cottage – a mid nineteenth-century shepherd’s cottage’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Spring 2010).

‘Whittaker’s Cottages and their occupants’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2010)

‘“In so strange a place”: representing the medieval past at UK heritage sites’, Proceedings of the 2009 Conference & Annual Meeting of the Association of Living History, Farm & Agricultural Museums vol. 32 (2010), 61-67.

‘Interpreting Poplar Cottage’, Weald & Downland Open Air Museum (Autumn 2011)

Edited Primary sources

(With R W Hoyle and S Neal), ‘Heard before the King: Registers of Petitions to James I, 1603-16’, List and Index Society, Special Series, vols. 38 and 39 (2006).

Editorial Positions

Editorial board member for Sussex Archaeological Collections

Recent conference papers

‘The material lives of husbandmen, 1600-1750’, Economic History Society Conference, University of Nottingham, March 2008.

‘A ghost in the house? The representation and consumption of the material past at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum’, Material Worlds Conference, University of Leicester, December 2008.

‘Home and work at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum’, Histories of the Home Subject Specialist Network, Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester, March 2009.

‘“In so strange a place”: representing the medieval past at UK heritage sites’, Association of Living History, Farm & Agricultural Museums Conference & Annual Meeting 2009, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US, June 2009.

‘Domestic culture in the south east: evidence from the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum’, Medieval Domestic Cultures Conference, University of Oxford, September 2010.

‘Theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding the late medieval rural house’, Houses – shaping dwellings, identities and homes. European housing culture from the Viking Age to the Renaissance Conference, Aarhus University, Denmark, December 2010.