Women are often left out of recorded history, but their lives lie hidden in records, from where Joan Dils pieced together the lives of five Newbury women in Tudor times.

Where can you visit a private library within a church? Or see rare examples of the macabre funerary art which swept Europe after the Black Death? Or find graffiti recalling the incarceration of Levellers in 1649? Catherine Sampson reveals all.

At the Newbury Branch January 2020 meeting Ellie Thorne of the Berkshire Record Office outlined the history of the Plenty company, an innovative and successful engineering firm founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lifeboats, steam engines, boilers, pumps, diesel engines and even a delivery van were produced at Plenty's Eagle Ironworks in the heart of Newbury.

Whilst the physicians and surgeons of Georgian times were technically regulated by their professional bodies, standards of training and practice were unenforceable. Itinerant “doctors” moved from town to town, dispensing miracle cures for all diseases

Around 1820 the Prince Regent, about to become George IV, decided that Windsor Castle should be rebuilt as a royal residence. The contract for the work was awarded to Robert Tebbott. The original estimate of £120,000 soared to £1.2 million.