St Albans Research Articles

Charters of St Albans (Anglo-Saxon Charters XII) * Charters of Bath and Wells (Anglo-Saxon Charters XIII)

Charters of St Albans (Anglo-Saxon Charters XII) * Charters of Bath and Wells (Anglo-Saxon Charters XIII)

Assessing the extent of transport social exclusion among the elderly

“Social exclusion” is a concept that has become increasingly prominent in the UK and elsewhere in the last ten years. Social exclusion occurs as a result of a series of problems that prevent people from being able to participate in activities that are considered normal in their society. Some of these problems are related to issues of accessibility. This paper outlines work carried out in the context of the AUNT-SUE (Accessibility and User Needs in Transport in Sustainable Urban Environments) project to develop and model an appropriate set of accessibility benchmarks for older people. Results confirmed that the travel patterns of older people are very different from those of the average person in the UK and that it was necessary to tailor accessibility benchmarks to the characteristics of this group. A set of benchmarks was developed based on ability to undertake different types of activity. These benchmarks are currently being incorporated into AMELIA, a GIS-based tool for assessing the effect of different policy actions on accessibility. Issues that have arisen include how to model the myriad micro-level circumstances that affect the mobility of older people. Some initial analysis has shown that these details can make a substantial difference to the assessment of the accessibility of a destination. Examples are drawn from St Albans in Hertfordshire, UK.

‘Quality isn’t free’

Working in his parents’ pub in Ireland as a teenager was good grounding for Tom Cahill’s future career in mental health nursing. He trained in St Albans, landed a ward manager post soon after qualifying and has since held a range of management posts, striving in each to improve standards of care for patients. He is now chief executive of hertfordshire partnership NHS foundation trust

The fifth earl of Clanricarde and the founding of the Confederate Catholic government, 1641–3

Ulick Burke, fifth earl of Clanricarde, presents a compelling character. His connections crossed the sectarian boundaries as well as the national borders of the Stuart kingdoms. He was the half brother of the earl of Essex, a prominent English noble, and later a general for the parliamentary cause. In fact, Clanricarde was one of very few of Charles I’s subjects who had gained footing in more than one of the Stuart kingdoms. He had significant landholdings in both England and Ireland, inheriting not only the Clanricarde and St Albans earldoms from his father, Richard Burke, but also following in the fourth earl’s footsteps as an important figure in the court of Charles I. The foundation was laid for many of his achievements by the fourth earl’s unwavering commitment to establishing himself as an English noble. However, the fifth earl eclipsed his father’s success at court when appointed an English Privy Counsellor in 1641.

Samuel Alderman Lomas (1838–1901) the man with two gravestones, his brother MuscotAtkin Lomas (1840–1907) and their lives in Victorian asylums

Samuel Alderman Lomas died in the Hertfordshire County Asylum, Hill End, St Albans in 1901. He was buried in the asylum cemetery where two gravestones bear his name. This paper traces his life history and that of his brother Muscot Atkin Lomas. Both were classed as idiots in Victorian society and spent most of their lives -- from childhood until death -- in asylums.

The St Albans Psalter: A book for Christina of Markyate

The St Albans Psalter: A book for Christina of Markyate

Holding Still: The Private Life of an Air Raid

Holding Still: The Private Life of an Air Raid

A Human Rights Based Approach to Social and Emotional Wellbeing

From July 2004 Tom Calma has been the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission. This role was created in 1992 to provide an ongoing monitoring agency for the human rights of Indigenous Australians and involves, inter alia, producing the Social Justice Report, an annual account to the Federal parliament on the status of enjoyment and exercise of human rights by Indigenous Australians. Commissioner Calma gave the opening oration to the 2006 Creating Futures conference and returned to open the conference in 2008 on 22 September in St Albans Anglican Church, located in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, 60 kilometres from Cairns. This is the text of that speech.

Recovering Public Memory: Politics, Aesthetics and Contempt

It's the weekend – leisure time. It's the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the 'total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production' in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily 'treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.' But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of 'political economy': 'the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the 'perfected denial of man'.' (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the 'perfected denial' of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.

King Stephen, the English church, and a female mystic: Christina of Markyate's Vita as a neglected source for the council of Winchester (August 1139) and its aftermath

One of the central reasons for the disintegration of royal authority (sometimes called ‘the Anarchy’) during the reign of King Stephen of England is generally thought to have been his troubled relationship with the English church. The king was summoned to appear before the legate in England, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (who was also Stephen's brother), at a church council called for Winchester on 29 August 1139, in order to show cause for his conduct in arresting several prominent bishops and in confiscating their property. Several major chroniclers discuss the events leading up to and occurring at the council of Winchester, especially William of Malmesbury in his Historia novella and the anonymous Gesta Stephani. The versions of events contained in these sources are not entirely consistent. The present paper examines yet another recounting of the events of the council, seldom appreciated by historians of twelfth-century England, presented in the Vita of Christina of Markyate (c.1096/98–c.1155/66), composed by an anonymous monk of St Albans between 1140 and 1146. Christina was close to the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who was probably the patron of the Vita and who quite likely attended the Winchester council and apparently became involved in its aftermath. These events are recorded in some detail in the Vita, presenting us with a vivid recounting of the council and the immediate consequences thereof. The narrative of the Vita contains a somewhat different picture of the personalities and occurrences surrounding the Winchester council than we encounter in the chronicles. The current essay compares the Vita to the standard accounts. We argue that the Vita may be the earliest and possibly most reliable source for the events of the council. Moreover, if we privilege the report of the Vita, the council becomes an especially significant moment in the breakdown of relations between Stephen and the English church.

The incongruities of the St Albans Psalter

The twelfth-century English illuminated manuscript now in Hildesheim was in the seventeenth century at Lampringe, a monastery of the English congregation. The earliest art historians who studied the manuscript ascribed its origins to St Albans, but recently it is often asserted to have been designed or adapted for the use of Christina of Markyate. This paper discusses the various names given to the manuscript and questions the validity of assigning a role in its production to Christina. Roger the hermit, Christina's protector, was associated in some way with the manuscript before her and his importance as a religious figure is reassessed. The manuscript comprises four elements: a calendar, a biblical picture-cycle, a vernacular saint's life in verse, and a psalter. The presence of the Chanson d'Alexis in the manuscript is puzzling, but Abbot Richard of St Albans, Roger's monastic superior, who dedicated a chapel in his monastery to Alexis is the person most likely to have been responsible for this. How the four items might have come together is discussed, but the nature of the evidence ought to make it clear that this problem is insoluble.

AMELIA: A tool to make transport policies more socially inclusive

Transport policy should take into account the needs of those who are socially excluded. To facilitate this, a software tool, AMELIA, is being developed. After a description of AMELIA and how it is used, the paper continues with a discussion about the analysis of the increase in the number of elderly people who can reach the centre of St Albans in Hertfordshire in Great Britain as the result of the implementation of four policy actions, including the cost implications. The paper is concluded with discussion about the potential role of AMELIA as a tool for policy analysis.

AMELIA: making streets more accessible for people with mobility difficulties

Streets can be made more liveable by ensuring that they are accessible to everyone. This requires the identification of ways to overcome the barriers to access for those who are socially excluded. In order to address these issues, a software tool, AMELIA (A Methodology for Enhancing Life by Increasing Accessibility), is being developed to test the extent to which transport policies can increase social inclusion. This is part of a research project being carried out as part of a large programme looking at ‘Accessibility and User Needs in Transport in a Sustainable Urban Environment’. AMELIA will be used to investigate how many more people are able to reach various opportunities, including shops, medical and welfare centres, employment and leisure facilities. It will be used to establish how many people meet accessibility benchmarks defined elsewhere in the project with and without the policy intervention. Micro-level data based upon street audits have been collected for the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, including details such as steps, slopes, access to individual buildings, and obstructions on the pavement. In this paper, the effect of removing barriers to movement on the street is discussed because, by doing so, streets can be made more liveable.

Robert McLaren Todd

Robert McLaren Todd’s life and work can be divided into four main parts: education and medicine, the Church, music and his other interests, and of course his family. Education and...

Will Ct Coronary Angiography Revolutionise Emergency Department Chest Pain Evaluation?

Correspondence to: Anne-Maree Kelly, MD, MClinEd, FACEM Sunshine Hospital, Joseph Epstein Centre for Emergency Medicine Research, Furlong Road, St Albans 3021, Australia Email: Anne-Maree.Kelly@wh.org.au Assessment and investigation of patients presenting to emergency departments (ED) with chest pain is an increasing challenge world-wide. In the US, nontraumatic chest pain contributes to approximately 4.6 million ED visits, an average of 22.7 visits per 1000 people. Extrapolating this to developed and developing countries gives a frightening estimation of the magnitude of the problem.

A prospective study of patients with chronic back pain randomised to group exercise, physiotherapy or osteopathy

Objective To investigate the difference in outcome between patients treated with group exercise, physiotherapy or osteopathy. Design Prospective study of patients referred at random to one of three treatments, with follow-up 6 weeks after discharge and after 12 months. Setting National Health Service physiotherapy department at St Albans City Hospital, part of the West Hertfordshire Musculoskeletal Therapy Service. Participants Two hundred and thirty-nine patients aged 18–65 years recruited from referrals to the physiotherapy department with chronic low back pain. Interventions Eligible patients were randomised to group exercises led by a physiotherapist, one-to-one predominantly manipulative physiotherapy, or osteopathy. Main outcomes Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), EuroQol-5D, shuttle walking test and patients’ subjective responses to pain and treatment. Results All three treatments indicated comparable reductions in mean (95% confidence intervals) ODI at 6-week follow-up: group exercise, −4.5 (−0.9 to −8.0); physiotherapy, −4.1 (−1.4 to −6.9); and osteopathy, −5.0 (−1.6 to −8.4). Attendance rates were significantly lower among the group exercise patients. One-to-one therapies provided evidence of greater patient satisfaction. Conclusion The study supports the use of a variety of approaches for the treatment of chronic low back pain. Particular attention needs to be given to the problems of attracting enough participants for group sessions, as these can be difficult to schedule in ways that are convenient for different participants.

Verlamio(n), Verulamium and St Albans: A Tale of Three Cities?

The sites of the Late Iron Age 'oppidum' and Roman 'municipium' of Verulamium and that of St Albans Abbey, on higher ground across the river Ver to the east, have been the subject of much antiquarian and archaeological research. Linking them is the enigmatic figure of the elusive Alban, apparently tried in Verulamium and done to death in its environs under the Severans, or, if you prefer another version of the record, the Tetrarchy. Offa of Mercia, according to Matthew Paris, found the saint's bones and a belief in the precise location of the place of his martyrdom, burial, commemorative shrine, or perhaps all three appears to be responsible for the positioning of his Late Saxon monastery, which dominated and controlled its dependency of St Albans, until dissolution by a less sympathetic monarch in 1539. In the eighteenth century, Stukeley mapped the walls and ditches of 'Verolanium Antiquum', as well as the enclosed fields it now contained, while investigators within the Abbey church opened the lead coffin of Humphrey of Gloucester and tasted the liquids within. Victorian and Edwardian scholars dug in the Roman city, discovering the theatre and examining the area of St Michael's, which now appears to contain the early Roman nucleus. Their contemporaries, searching for the sequence of buildings within the Abbey, recorded the church, both above and below ground, and explored the extensive monastic

Michael Alexander McDonald

Michael grew up in Hertfordshire and attended St Albans School. At Westminster he pursued his love of rowing and was captain of boats. In the Royal Air Force (1955-8) he...

Delayed cord clamping and haemoglobin levels in infancy: a randomised controlled trial in term babies

This study was carried out to assess whether delaying umbilical cord clamping is effective in improving the haematological status of term infants living in a malaria-endemic area, and whether this is associated with complications in infants and mothers. We randomly assigned women delivering term babies in Mpongwe Mission Hospital, Zambia, to delayed cord clamping (DCC, n = 46) or immediate cord clamping (controls, n = 45) and followed their infants on a bi-monthly basis until the age of 6 months. We compared the haemoglobin (Hb) change from cord values and the proportion of anaemic infants. Secondary outcomes related to infant and maternal safety. Throughout the observation period infant Hb levels in both groups declined, but more rapidly in controls than in the DCC group [difference in Hb change from baseline at 4 months 1.1 g/dl, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.2; 2.1]. By 6 months, this difference had disappeared (0.0 g/dl, 95% CI -0.9; 0.8). The odds ratio for iron deficiency anaemia in the DCC group at 4 months was 0.3 (95% CI 0.1; 1.0), but no differences were found between the groups at 6 months. No adverse events were seen in infants and mothers. Our findings indicate that DCC could help improve the haematological status of term infants living in a malaria-endemic region at 4 months of age. However, the beneficial haematological effect disappeared by 6 months. This simple, free and safe delivery procedure might offer a strategy to reduce early infant anaemia risk, when other interventions are not yet feasible.

Case report: Vaginal delivery after surgical treatment for stress incontinence using transobturator tape: a case report

A 36-year-old woman presented at the one-stop urodynamic clinic with a 12-month history of urinary stress incontinence. She had no other urinary symptoms or history of urinary tract infection. She had a 17-month-old daughter delivered by spontaneous vaginal delivery. Stress incontinence occurred soon after her first delivery. She was single and had no plans for a second child. On clinical examination, the woman was found to have a normal abdomen and pelvis. Urodynamic assessment showed moderate urodynamic stress incontinence, with a stable normal capacity bladder and no voiding dysfunction. This woman was offered a transobturator tape (TOT) (Advantage Mid-Urethral Sling; Boston Scientific, St Albans, UK) as a surgical option for treatment, with preoperative physiotherapy. The operative details, together with risks and complications, were described, and a handout leaflet was given describing the operation. The woman decided to opt for conservative treatment initially while she thought matters were over. She was referred to the continence care clinic where she was examined and assessed for bladder re-education and pelvic floor muscle strength and tone. She was given a pelvic floor educator and instruction on pelvic floor exercises and fluid intake. Four months later, she requested surgery, and a TOT procedure was performed. Her last menstrual period was noted to be 2 weeks before. The urinary pregnancy test performed on admission was negative. A TOT (Boston Scientific) was inserted under general anaesthesia using a 1–2 cm midurethral incision in the anterior vaginal wall and an incision on each upper thigh over the obturator fossa, on a line levelling the clitoris. The polypropylene tape was placed loosely to form a suburethral hammock. The woman was returned from theatre without a urethral catheter. She voided normally, with residual volumes of less than 100 ml, noted on bladder scanning. She was discharged home on the second postoperative day. Two weeks later, the woman telephoned the hospital seeking advice after having a positive home pregnancy test and was given an appointment for the one-stop urodynamic clinic. An ultrasound scan showed a gestational sac of 5 weeks. Comprehensive counselling was provided by the urogynaecologist and the consultant anaesthetist involved with her case. She decided to continue with the unplanned pregnancy. Repeat ultrasound scan 4 weeks later confirmed a viable intrauterine pregnancy of 9 weeks of gestation. The woman’s GP was contacted and she was referred for antenatal booking at her local hospital, with written information to the obstetrician concerning her recent surgery. The woman’s antenatal progress was entirely uneventful. Serial urinalysis was negative for protein and bacterial culture. There was no stress incontinence antenatally. There was good communication between the obstetric unit and the one-stop urodynamic clinic during the antenatal period. There was a detailed discussion about the mode of delivery, and the woman decided that she would prefer vaginal delivery if possible. Spontaneous vaginal delivery occurred at 39 weeks of gestation. She was in labour in hospital for 75 minutes, with 10 minutes in the second stage. The baby weighed 3018 g and was normal. The woman required two sutures to the perineum for a first-degree tear. She was seen at 4 weeks postnatal in the one-stop urodynamic clinic. She had resumed normal voiding immediately after delivery and reported no stress incontinence on any occasion. Vaginal examination revealed that the tape was well placed, as previously, with no tightening or erosion.