Historical stories, conservation and collections updates and other stories from the Mary Rose
As a visitor to the Mary Rose Museum it would be hard not to notice the Cowdray Engraving that dominates the first gallery that you enter, staff and volunteers talk about it and you can even buy merchandise in our shop featuring its design!
But what’s...
A total of 65 of these 'ballock daggers' were found on the Mary Rose, suggesting that these unusually-shaped objects were a common tool among the crew, used both for working and fighting.
For Museum Week 2019, the theme for 15th May is 'Play', so what better way to celebrate than with our special finger puppets!
Myths and legends are a popular part of our society, and we cling to them even when all the evidence says they’re wrong. Yet still, people believe things like Vikings wearing helmets with horns on them, Bob Holness playing Saxophone on ‘Baker Street’, and the Mary Rose sinking on her...
Being a warship, the Mary Rose carried a lot of objects that were, shall we say, unpleasant. As well as the various ship-to-ship weapons, there were pikes, daggers and swords for stabbing, bills and halberds for slashing, longbows and handguns for long distance killing, and rather nasty antipersonnel weapons such...
You may have seen that we’ve revised our reconstruction of the Archer Royal, previously shown as a blond, blue-eyed European, to a gentleman of African descent. This hasn’t been done for political or social reasons, but as the result of detailed scientific study.
No ship’s manifest for the Mary Rose...
These were all hot topics as the Mary Rose Learning Department hosted a CPD day for primary science teachers. The event, run in collaboration with the Maths and Science Learning Centre at the University of Southampton, also featured speakers from the University of Chichester and Abingdon Science Partnership. The purpose...
An inventory of “stuff, tackle, apparel, ordnance, artillery and habiliments of War” made on 27th July 1514, lists the Mary Rose carrying, among all the rigging and weapons, a quantity of cookware, including a frying pan! We’ve no idea if it remained on board until 1545, or if it got...
The team at the Mary Rose are working with researchers from the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton and Traditional Boats of Ireland Project to learn more about the longbows recovered from Henry VIII's flagship, lost in the waters of the Solent off the Portsmouth coast.