Festive Features
A collection of lectures and videos featuring festive themes; including lectures that put Christmas centre, talks that focus on the musical side of churches and videos focused on topics of tradition, folklore and art.
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Gregoriana Choir at Dorchester Abbey
Our Christmas gift to our supporters is here: a recording of our captivating event at Dorchester Abbey featuring Gregoriana Choir who specialise is Sacred Choral music.
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Christmas: Tradition, Truth and Total Baubles!
We are all haunted by the ghost of Christmas as-it-never-was…Nick Page ditches the festive fake news!
“If the story of Christmas tells us one thing, it’s that human beings are always inventing ‘ancient’ traditions…”. So says Nick Page, who rummages (on our behalf) through a sleigh-full of festiv...
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Christmas Ghosts
For centuries, the telling of ghost stories was an activity associated with the Twelve Days of Christmas - the period between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night (Epiphany), when households would feast through the long winter nights and entertain one another with chilling tales. The tradition survive...
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Christmas Past, Present, and Future: The Sounds of Christmas in our Churches
Join Churches Conservation Trust, and the Royal School of Church Music, to explore the nature of traditional and modern carols and their symbolism within our churches in a unique narrative combining words, live music, and participative song.
We are delighted to be welcoming Classic FM presenter,...
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Angels: a history
'In a 2016 poll, one in 10 Britons claimed to have experienced the presence of an angel, while one in three remain convinced that they have a guardian angel. These are huge numbers and mean that, on some counts, angels are doing better than God.’
In his latest book which launches on 3rd December...
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Espying Heaven: The High Anglican Aesthetic of Charles Eamer Kempe
Charles Eamer Kempe was an influential but controversial figure in the world of Victorian stained glass. His friendship and collaboration with the architect George Frederick Bodley helped to establish a distinctive High Anglican aesthetic that has yet to disappear entirely, but his life and legac...
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Angel Roofs of East Anglia
Join Dr Sarah Cassell as we explore the history of East Anglian Angel Roofs. We'll be visiting several CCT churches along the way.
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Ghosts of Music, Shades of Light: The use of the Parish Church
By taking us through a normal day in the life of an average parish church, we will explore how medieval churches were used on a daily basis and why they were therefore designed and built as they were – and then why they were modified as time went on (an aspect that frequently puzzled Pevsner) bec...
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The Box of Whistles: a short history of English church organs, 1500-1900
Pipe organs have been used in English parish churches for more than a thousand years. Early organs were often small and portable. Their use changed radically at the time of the Reformation. Later organs grew in size, becoming permanent features of church buildings with architectural casework and ...
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Traditions of Bell Ringing
There are hundreds of bells in churches looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust. In this talk, bell ringer David Bagley will describe how they are hung, how they are rung, and how they are used.
David Bagley has been an active church bell ringer since 1977 and has rung the bells at over ...
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Singing the Saints in Medieval England: Curious Case St Katherine of Alexandria
The art and architecture of medieval churches was inextricably linked with the rituals that inhabited them: the Christian liturgy. Every year on November 25th, churches and monasteries across the country resounded with plainchant and polyphony dedicated to the saint that England had come to claim...
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The English Organ Ep 1: The Long Beginning
As a title, The English Organ is unassuming. However, as we’ll discover, well-tailored restraint is one of the hallmarks of the English organ and its music. But there is nothing restrained about this set of films and recordings that sets out both to show and celebrate the arc and development of t...
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Bells, Smells, and Persecution: Glimpses into the Anglican Catholic Revival
Over the past 160 or so years, the Catholic Revival (embracing the Oxford Movement, Tractarians, Prayer-Book Catholics, Anglo-Papalists – or what most people call ‘Anglo Catholics’ or ‘High Church’) has gradually enriched the very ‘comprehensive school’ that is the Church of England. It has broug...
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Sitting within the Landscape
Building on a project that began as the search for access to public footpaths across the South Downs National Park, Amanda has been working with her husband Simon Davey on a book to celebrate the churches, chapels, ruins and places of worship across the area - looking at how these iconic building...
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The Devil: An Unauthorised Biography
Talk of the Devil has become distinctly unfashionable. Our sceptical age has pensioned off Satan, for centuries the face and name put to the abstract reality of evil. However, the creation of Popes, archbishops and priests will not so easily accept his fate, and Satan continues to serve as a meta...
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Touching History
Join us as we hear all about iconic church stories. Writer and broadcaster Peter Stanford, inveterate “church crawler” and author of ‘If These Stones Could Talk: A History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland’, published in paperback last year by Hodder, will share some favourite churches from ...
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Giotto and the End of the World
For the majority of Christians, Advent is a season of preparation for the birth of Christ – the lead up to Christmas. But theologically it also heralds the Second Coming, and it was traditional for sermons on the Four Sundays of Advent to be about the Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven a...
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Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain
This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands.
Britain's landscape is scarred with haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes. Peering through the cracks of history, we...
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Unholy Ghosts in Holy Places
In this talk, H.E. Bulstrode serves as your guide to a number of ecclesiastical locations that have fed into his ghostly and supernatural fiction, examining the folklore and artefacts, as well as the curious histories, attached to a number of our English parish churches.
H.E. Bulstrode grew up i...