Something for Peter Linehan

The day I write this is, by various accidents, turning into a day for the dead, in which what I have before me is mainly writing stuff for the sake of people no longer with us. This happens sometimes, I suppose it can only happen more over time and eventually perhaps I will be the person being written for, so it behoves me to do my best. For a start, therefore, I only found out the other day that Neil Faulkner had died. I never met him but I saw a really good program he did with my then-colleague Roger White about the archæology of Romano-British Wroxeter, in which they just wandered around the site amiably but fiercely arguing about its interpretation; it was one of the best showcases of the academic endeavour and how we advance knowledge in its current Occidental paradigm that I’ve ever seen, and ever after that I thought of him as a good thing. The Guardian has an obituary for him that suggests at least one other person, and probably lots more, did too. But this post is not about him, but about someone whom I did meet and who was, in a way I don’t suppose he ever knew, part of my own academic story.

Peter Linehan’s website portrait

I won’t try and do a full run-down of Peter Linehan’s career, not least because there were plenty of write-ups of it when he died in 2020 – though somehow, I only just found that out when looking him up for something I’ve been writing elsewhere, on which more in due course. If you’ve never heard of the man, however, a few details might not go amiss. He studied medieval Iberian history, and the core of his work was on the Church politics of León and Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is why I rarely have the pleasure of citing him here. In the 1980s he became one of the few Anglophone scholars in the field whom Spaniards would cite on the back of that, but he did range more widely.¹ He was a particularly good source of archive war-stories, half of which he seemed to have poached from the late great Richard Fletcher, with whom he was a close contemporary, but with plenty of his own too; this made my experiences with the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, when I had them, less frustrating for having some sense that this kind of thing was part of a researcher’s formation, a kind of rite de passage through which we all went. But he was at his best, probably, in print, where he combined widespread erudition with a delicious but needle-sharp wit that could leave foolish conjectures or bad scholarship in general punctured on every side. It’s not that Linehan necessarily solved every historiographical problem he encountered, but he was really good at showing weaknesses in previous solutions, and did so with great enjoyment and enjoyability. What he wasn’t good at was doing this briefly, which is why his masterwork, a critical review of eight or nine particular areas of debate in the interpretation of historical sources for the Iberian Peninsula’s Middle Ages, entitled History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, weighs in at 748 pages, a big number even in this day of huge books and more so when it came out in 1993.² I assume that he was somehow involved with Oxford University Press at that point and managed to push it through whatever objections they may have had to it in that form, but I am glad he did, because every few pages there’s something that makes one pause and close one’s eyes in academic glee. I don’t have a copy to quote, alas, because it was expensive new and is probably more so now, but you can find this sort of thing in all his work.

The cover of the selfsame book

However, I don’t usually give space to obituaries these days unless the unfortunate deceased is someone whom I feel touches my own story in some way, and Peter Linehan, though as I say he possibly never knew, is indeed one of the people without whom I would not now be doing what I do. My first – and actually almost my only – encounter with him came during my M. Phil. at Cambridge, when I was trying to come up with a topic for my Short Essay and Professor Rosamond McKitterick was determinedly trying to steer me away from the Insular history which had up till that time more or less consumed my interest. Even then I was expressing an interest in frontier spaces and also charters, and so she pointed me at Catalonia, as a frontier space of the empire she herself knows best but one where, as she then said, “there’re thousands of charters that no-one’s using”. Trouble was, she didn’t know the area and its scholarship at all well, so she couldn’t approve my suggested topic; instead, she sent me to Peter Linehan.

The way to see Dr Linehan; the main gate of St John’s College, Cambridge, image byDicklyon – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wkimedia Commons

I remember that meeting as an archetypal Oxbridge experience. Having made my appointment – or, given the basket case I then was, quite possibly having had my appointment made for me by Rosamond, I don’t know any more – I turned up at Dr Linehan’s rooms in St John’s College and was offered a seat on a sofa at one end of them, while he sat at the other end of the room on a window seat, pretty much as far away from me as he could be, wreathed in sunlight. I remember it as a huge room, though we could hear each other perfectly well so my junior memory must have stretched it, and I could barely see him in the glare. Anyway, with some trepidation I explained what I thought my questions were and how I thought I might go about it – on the basis of almost no reading, I should say, because then there were really only two short pieces about early medieval Catalonia in English – and asked him, at the end, “So, I suppose my question is, do you think it’s viable?” And he said, “Yes, I think it should be, as long as you can read Catalan. Can you?” And I, with remarkable self-confidence for the tremorous but stroppy boy I then was, said, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” and went away with a reading list mainly consisting of Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals.³ And the way I usually tell this story is that I worked through most of two books by d’Abadal and found that with good Latin and good French, and sometimes with Joan Gili’s idiosyncratic grammar, I could mostly puzzle it out.⁴ When I finally put together the essay bibliography I realised that some of what I’d read had actually been Castilian, but by then it was too late…

But long before that, I’d sent a mail back to Dr Linehan saying, more or less, I’ve got through the first few things and I think it will be OK, and he mailed back his approval for the project which I proudly took to Rosamond, and the rest became history, because it was meeting this evidence and scholarship that gave me my eventual PhD project, and from there the whole rest of my career. There might have been other ways it could have gone, but the way it did briefly hung on that brief mail of approval from Peter Linehan. I guess I always expected to run into him at least one more time to say thanks; but the two times I did, he was taken up with people who knew him well and on whom I didn’t feel able to intrude. So I never did say that thanks, and now I find I missed my last chance some time ago. Therefore, this will have to do. I don’t really envisage a readership for this blog among the dead, but if he were able to look in still somehow, I hope it would give him cheer. Thanks, Dr Linehan, and my students still enjoy reading your stuff when I make them…

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1. His first book was Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 3rd Series 4 (Cambridge 1971); his last, of which I had not heard either, was idem, At the Edge of Reformation: Iberia before the Black Death (Oxford 2019). Between the two he penned, as well as, like, eight other books not counting his two Variorum volumes of reprinted papers, both from remarkably early in his career, idem, “León, ciudad regia, y sus obispos en los siglos X-XIII”, transl. F.-J. Hernández in José María Fernández Caton (ed.), El Reino de León en la alta Edad Media VI (León 1994), pp. 409–57, which I mention not because it set my world alight especially but because it was almost the first case I’d seen of one of ‘us’ being published in Spain, in Spanish by the Spanish, presumably because they thought the work was important. I thought then that that would be one sort of measure of making it, and wanted to do likewise, and I suppose I sort of have, except, of course, not in Spanish…

2. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford 1993), review (favourably of course) by none other than Richard Fletcher in English Historical Review Vol. 109 (Oxford 1994), pp. 660-662, on JSTOR here.

3. Those works would have been Ramon de Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans, Biografies catalans: sèrie històrica 1, 2nd edn (Barcelona 1965), and idem, Dels Visigots als Catalans, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, 2 vols, Estudis i Documents 13-14, 1st edn (Barcelona 1969). The English pieces were basically R. J. H. Collins, "Charles the Bald and Wifred the Hairy" in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (edd.), Charles the Bald: court and kingdom, 2nd edn. (Aldershot 1990), pp 169–188 and a couple of papers also by Collins about law and dispute settlement which included Catalonia alongside León that I’ve referenced many times before. I suppose there was also then, very new, Julia M. H. Smith, "’Fines Imperii’: the marches" in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 169–189, DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521362924.009, which covers Catalonia in amongst the other Carolingian frontiers, and does pretty well at it. But I’m not sure I knew that piece this early.

4. Joan Gili, Introductory Catalan Grammar, with a brief outline of the language and literature, a selection from Catalan writers, and a vocabulary, 2nd edn (Oxford 1952), which is a good place to start but really really needs an update. Someone actually gave me this, though, and I wish I could remember who. I suspect they too are beyond thanking, now… Eventually I also gave in and paid the then-considerable money for the bulky and unsigned Catalan Dictionary: English-Catalan/Catalan-English (London 1994; originally printed Barcelona 1993), which is as far as I know still the only one you can get and is OK.

Two Big Noises Sadly Quieted

The winter holiday always makes posting difficult, and, as darkly implied last post, I have to shunt my next planned post because of people whom I can’t ignore making their final departures from among us. One was an academic contact, the other, as sometimes happens on this blog, a musician I cared about (I suppose I still do; tenses are weird around the deceased). I thought for a few minutes about some way I could combine reflections on them, but to be honest, other than that neither of them minded causing a bit of trouble when they thought they were in the right, that both were 82 when they died, and that I imagine if they caught the same bus to the beyond they got on fine, it didn’t seem like a respectful way to salute either of them. So I’ll record them separately and hope that, if you’re here for historical content, you can hang on a moment.

Photo from Nik Turner’s final Facebook post, here borrowed from the The Isle of Thanet News, recording the death of a son of Margate

So, Nicholas Turner, known to one and all as Nik, saxophonist, flautist and hippy to the end, the so-called ‘Spirit of Hawkwind’ and the man after whose features that legendary band was legendarily named, was one of the musicians I’ve probably seen most often on a stage. I saw him with Hawkwind, in a couple of the ten-minute slots he and the main band were talking again in the 1990s, with his punk outfit Inner City Unit, under his own name, with his various post-Hawkwind revivals like Space Ritual, and with several combinations of the above. He was capable of stealing most shows, even when he himself was woefully under-rehearsed; he seemed to have played withb everyone in the rock world; and he was unfailingly cheerful and polite to anyone who’d come out to see him. His retirement plan seemed to be to record a new album every year until he no longer needed to, and I’m not going to say they were all fantastic, but he did write and record some of the most iconic space-rock ever and at least one of the very weirdest albums I ever heard, and if you’ve seen my music collection you’ll know that neither of those are minor honours.

I got into much of that weird music via an ancient listserv mailing list which closed, finally, earlier this year. Up till then, more or less all news about Hawkwind and its friends and relations had reached me by that list. Thus, five weeks or so ago when I had Nik’s Space Gypsy on the stereo, I suddenly thought, ‘Christ, if he’d died I wouldn’t know.’ And of course, as almost has to be true when one of those forebodings strikes you, he’d moved on to the next phase of his cosmic journey, as his closest are choosing to put it, eleven days before. I’m not sure how comfortable a life he’d led, but it does seem reasonable to say that he spent it doing pretty much what he wanted and that lots of people were always glad to see him, and I personally would settle for such an epitaph, no problem.

Professor Paul Hyams presiding over a brunch debate at Cornell University in 2005, photo from the Cornell Chronicle, linked through

Then a few days later I got a text message, itself not untraumatic as my phone was slowly ceasing to work and has now had to be replaced with something more like a phone as others recognise them, recording the second departure. It took me a little while to confirm that Professor Paul Hyams had in fact gone, as new phone or not I’m still not doing Facebook and, as with Nik, that seemed to be where the news broke, but eventually his erstwhile employer and in some sense also mine, Pembroke College Oxford, posted an obituary, and I had to believe it. Cornell, his more recent posting, followed up a few days later.

Cover of Paul Hyams’ Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca NY 2003)

I don’t think anyone would say anything against Paul’s scholarship; his work focused primarily on justice and dispute resolution in high medieval England and the things they revealed about that society, and his book Rancor and Reconciliation is probably still the go-to treatment of feud-like dispute settlement by violence and the attempts by government either to stop or to manage it for post-conquest England. He also wrote on the origins of the common law, a field in which from what I see from the outside agreement is basically impossible but where his contributions were well respected. However, that tendency to cause trouble I mentioned meant that opinion was probably more divided on him as personality; even I saw him launch quite aggressive questions into a seminar discussion, as if scholarship was a gladiatorial arena and the contest won by making everyone else feel awkward (some gentle examples at the Cornell article which provided the photo above give an impression). I have to say that I never found him anything other than sympathetic, witty and kind in actual conversation, however. There might be reasons for that, one being that my father also used to play social engagement like that sometimes and it’s remained a habit among some of my family, so that I was just used to deflecting it; but actually, I don’t remember ever having to do that with Paul myself. And I think that the softer and odder reason is that I first actually met him in the company of Another Damned Medievalist, who knew his wife and could thus threaten him with unspecified social sanction when he played up, as a consequence of which he ruefully didn’t bother when he was around her and a more human Hyams came out instead. And because I connected to that network somehow, I always got the human Hyams. I may have been quite lucky in that; but still, as both scholar and raconteur, wit and good company, I shall miss him. There were many good reasons to do so.

So there is the sad news of the end of 2022, perhaps not all of it but I hope so, and soon, very soon I hope, I can try to prevent the blog falling further behind than the three-and-a-bit year mark I’ve been holding this year. But for now, I hope you’ll forgive me saying goodbye to these two gents, both big noises in their fields whose sound we shan’t hear again.

In celebration of the life of Susan Reynolds

It has become all too frequent a thing, as I get older and those who have helped me along my career remain the same distance older than me, that I have to put aside whatever I had meant to post on a given blog day because news reaches me that somebody who deserves celebration or memorial has sadly died, and thus it is today. Susan Reynolds, whom I feel as if I’ve mentioned on this blog a hundred times, passed away on Thursday morning, with family and friends around her, I am told. (There don’t seem to be any obituaries up yet; I have to thank Fraser McNair and David Ganz for making sure I knew.) She was 92. I am very sad about this, because I enjoyed her work and indeed her company a lot and I know I’m not alone in this, but I’ve had a couple of goes at writing this as tidings of doom, and it just won’t write like that because everything I remember of her was basically uplifting and encouraging. So I blog not to mourn Susan but to celebrate her, and I hope that if you knew her you can do likewise.

This seems to be the only photo of Susan on the Internet, and is probably from the 1980s? And more immediately it’s from the IHR website, linked through

I suppose that for most people, or rather for people who didn’t have the privilege of hanging around the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London a while, Susan Reynolds is a name one knows primarily from her books, and especially Kingdoms and Communities in Medieval Europe and the almost-infamous Fiefs and Vassals.¹ There were actually more than that, including two Variorum collections of essays and her last actual monograph, completed in 2014 when she was a mere 85, plus a plethora of useful and incisive chapters and articles I could cite, but those two books especially kept her on reading lists across the English-speaking world within quite a short space of their publication and will continue to do so for a while yet.² That’s because there are few people who could deal as well as Susan did with all the difficulties of interpreting massed textual sources by people whose thoughtworlds were a millennium removed from our own and still extract some kind of synthesis about what they did and why, often over really quite a scale. So there’s all that, the kind of scholarly legacy we might all hope to leave but must know that few of us will, but if you know Susan’s name it’s because you know some or all of that already. What might not be so obvious, without having met her or talked to her, is quite how remarkable it was that any of that came to be, because Susan’s passage through the life academic was not by any means what would now pass for normal.

Now, I’m not going to recount her life here, partly because who am I to do that and so on, but mostly because she did it herself, in an interview for the IHR in 2008, and it’s online here. The sound file is gone from there, but happily, if ironically, the Internet Archive has preserved it where the IHR’s own archive pages have not, so there you can not just read it but hear it—and you don’t have a full impression of Susan unless you know how she talked. So I very much recommend giving that a listen. But, either in text or in sound, gather in the first fifteen minutes or so, in which she laid out her scholarly biography, because it’s sort of amazing, for at least these reasons:

1. she did not get a first at undergraduate, she had no MA, no Ph. D., and her only postgraduate qualification was a diploma in archive management;
2. she was never a professor; in fact I’m not sure she was ever promoted in any of her jobs; and
3. much of her substantial work was only begun, let alone published, after she retired at age 58 from what was only her second university post; even Kingdoms and Communities only came out three years before that.

It’s easy to say to all that, well, things were different then (and she repeatedly stressed those differences in the interview), but that makes it sound as her work also dates from some distant era, whereas actually, Fiefs and Vassals came out when I was an undergraduate; Kingdoms and Communities went into its second edition just as I finished being an undergraduate; and her last book came out when I was working in Birmingham. And this was a retiree, turning out work that overthrew or updated whole subfields in ways that young ambitious scholars would have suffered greatly to achieve. In her sixties into seventies, in other words, Susan Reynolds became a whole new big thing in the field. If anyone’s life demonstrates that it’s never too late, surely this is it.

Now of course, she was an ageing lady by then and, as that interview shows, deeply conscious of having once been brighter and faster and being able to remember more. I had a couple of conversations with her where she lamented this, while I wished I were half as sharp even then. She had a reputation among attendees of the IHR seminar as a fierce questioner, and certainly she would pin anyone down on matters of what the terms used in medieval sources really meant—one of her hobby-horses, definitely, though again, the interview is very good in explaining why it matters—but I don’t think I ever saw her kick downwards, beyond that injunction to think about words. The impression I formed was that she didn’t think it was fair to attack anyone her junior, and of course by the time I knew her there weren’t many people who weren’t… The two people I saw get the full force of her critique, in fact, were John Gillingham, in person, and Rees Davies in print, and it is to be noted that she singled both of them out, in that interview, for praise as brilliant scholars; so I think she just felt that they should have known better…³

Certainly, what I mainly remember Susan for is interest and kindness. Quite early on we bonded somewhat over being the only two people in England whom each other knew to have thought about what the people called Hispani in the legislation of the Carolingian rulers actually were, in terms of status; but I used to make a point of chatting with Susan whenever I was in the IHR and saw her, partly in the hope of some delicious bon mot that could be quoted later, I admit, which I was not the only one collecting, but also because it was always interesting to talk with her and because she was always happy to be interested.⁴

The Semantic Triangle, as conceptualised by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards and as used by Susan Reynolds, from Patricia Brenes’s In My Own Terms, linked through, where further explanation is provided

On one occasion, when she had a presentation to give in the near future in Vienna and was reckoning to use Powerpoint for the first time, in her eighties let’s remember, she asked if I could work through the software with her when I was next in London, to prevent her holding everything up and being “foolish”. I think it was me just because I was there while she was worrying about it, but we set a date anyway. By the time it came round, every other reason I’d had for being in town that day had collapsed. I went down anyway though, from Birmingham I think, because I just couldn’t face cancelling on Susan. I went straight to the IHR, found her in the tea-room, corralled an empty seminar room in which to do the computer demo, and spent ten minutes coaching her with the software and fifty fascinating minutes discussing the implications of the single diagram she’d painstakingly got onto the slide for her paper, which I have found again and which you see above. We got chucked out of the seminar room when someone actually needed it for a seminar, parted ways and I went straight back home on the train, and that was basically my day. I look back on it now as a day tremendously well-spent, and kind of an honour. The volume of essays that was dedicated to her clearly professes that it wasn’t just me who felt this way about her, either.⁵

So as I say, I tried to write this sadly, and obviously I am sad that she’s died, how could I not be? Apart from anything else, lockdown must have been tremendously hard for someone whose life was so arranged around the sociability of London academia and a regular routine of library visits, and I’m glad that at least by the time the time came people could be with her again. But I also don’t suppose she was actually finished, despite being 92; I imagine there were things she was still working on and indeed work of hers that must still be in press and will now follow her intellectual cortège, and we might wonder what else there would have been if she’d been given any more time. But despite all this, I cannot remember Susan Reynolds sadly. Tales of her will continue to delight me, her work will continue to anchor and inspire my own, and I hope I will always smile, even if sadly, to think of her. And I hope this all sort of explains why. I feel very fortunate to have known her.

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1. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford 1984; 2nd edn 1997); eadem, Fiefs and Vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford 1994).

2. What to select, where to start? Firstly the other two monographs, of course, Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford 1977) and eadem, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good (Chapel Hill NC 2014), both prefigured by useful shorter pieces. After that, a top five illustrative shorter pieces might be eadem, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?” in Journal of British Studies Vol. 24 (Chicago IL 1985), pp. 395–414; eadem, “The Historiography of the Medieval State” in Michael Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (London 1997), pp. 117–138; Susan Reynolds, “Empires: a problem of comparative history” in Historical Research Vol. 79 (Oxford 2006), pp. 151–165; eadem, “Early Medieval Law in India and Europe: A Plea for Comparisons” in The Medieval History Journal Vol. 16 (New York City 2013), pp. 1–20; and eadem, “Society: hierarchy and solidarity” in Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (edd.), The Cambridge World History, volume V: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE (Cambridge 2015), pp. 94–115.

3. I can’t remember what John had done to catch Susan’s ire, but I think it must have been at his IHR presentation of the paper which became John Gillingham, “Fontenoy and After: pursuing enemies to the death in France between the ninth and the eleventh centuries” in Paul Fouracre & David Ganz (edd.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester 2008), pp. 242-265, which was before I began blogging. In Davies’s case the problem was caused by Rees Davies, “The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?” in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 (Oxford 2003), pp. 280–300, to which cf. Susan Reynolds, “There were States in Medieval Europe: A Response to Rees Davies”, ibid. pp. 550–555. Davies’s piece was itself a critique of Reynolds, “Historiography of the Medieval State”, so it could be argued that he started it.

4. For which reason, in Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320–342, you will find on p. 321 n. 2 a citation of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 107-111, which until Cullen J. Chandler, “Between Court and Counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio grant, 778-897″ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 (Oxford 2002), pp. 19–44, to which I was responding in my piece, was the only work in English in what Carolingian or Catalan aprisio might in fact be. The thanks that Susan, among others, got on p. 320 was for exactly those kinds of conversations.

5. That volume being Pauline Stafford, Janet Nelson & Jane Martindale (edd.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester 2001).

Some words for Richard Sharpe

I seem to have spent quite a lot of last year not hearing about people dying. I guess the specifics of personal mortality were getting lost in the global version, and I also wasn’t looking at news very much, but still, there are those I would have expected to hear about somehow that I didn’t, and such a one was Richard Sharpe, Professor of Diplomatic at Oxford, who died suddenly of a heart attack all the way back in March 2020. I found out last week.

The late Professor Richard Sharpe, in life; the image is all over the web but I borrow it from the Cultures of Knowledge obituary linked through since, perhaps ironically, they mention no copyright.

I didn’t know Richard very well, but I did know him. We first met, as with about half my academic contacts really, when he was presenting at the Institute of Historical Research, in 2002, on intellectual contacts in very early medieval Northern Italy, when I was much too junior to say anything much to such an eminence. It would have been fine, I subsequently learned, not least because he was back there again in 2006 to present a paper about a putative daughter of King Harold II of England (he of Hastings fame), who of course survived her father into the reign of the man who defeated him.¹ That got a bit of a conversation going, as I recall, and then a few years after that I was in the same institution as him, in so far as Oxford is one institution, and considering whether or not to get him to lecture on the Celtic parts of the early medieval British syllabus. (I didn’t get him to, though I don’t now remember why.) Before I was gone from Oxford, we’d been thrown together by someone going on leave and thus making us supposedly the two most qualified people to run the Norman Conquest Special Subject that year. That’s where I really first had dealings with him. He was tremendously helpful and energetic and made me feel very much as if I were the person who knew what was going on, which compared to him could hardly have been further from the truth; but we got on fine and it ran OK. I think I ran into him twice after that, once at a paper in Cambridge and once again at the IHR, and thus (as it has transpired) ended our acquaintance. Still, his death has shocked me somewhat, not least because he was an active man in robust health bar one deaf ear, and everyone else seems to have been just as shocked when it happened, I imagine not least himself.

Thankfully, rather a lot of people who knew him better have been busy since he died recording stories about Richard that give a better impression of him than I have managed there. I might just quote some:

“As an undergraduate he acquired a firm grounding in the medieval Celtic languages and literatures to add to his Classics. But his first love was to history. Professor Simon Keynes remembers teaching him: ‘The depth of engagement with the primary source material for any given subject was phenomenal . . . I distinctly remember the appearance of his essays: the top five or ten lines comprising main text, and the rest of the page the numbered footnotes, perfectly judged to fit the page—but of course all hand-written rather than typed let alone word processed.’”

Thomas Charles-Edwards, ‘Tribute to Professor Richard Sharpe (1954-2020)’

“His first job, in 1981, was as assistant editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Oxford; he made himself a formidable Latinist by reading nothing but Latin for a year.”

Nigel Ramsay, ‘Richard Sharpe obituary’

“Used to the testing limitations of evidence from the ‘Dark Ages’, Richard was not reluctant to express his view that the study of English political history after the publication of Magna Carta was ‘mere journalism’.”

Hugh Doherty and James Willoughby, ‘Richard Sharpe’

“Politically, he was liberal, and was a member of Oxford Town Council between 1987 and 1995, where he was a strong supporter of the rights of Headington freeholders to erect giant fibreglass sharks on their roofs. He felt such a thing could only add to the gaiety of the Oxford skyline, and enjoyed the self-answering objection of another councillor: ‘But if we give this shark permission, then everyone will want one!’”²

Ibid.

“The volume and versatility of his research were nothing short of mystifying. Richard confessed that he himself found it difficult at times to keep track of the state of his many projects and side projects, which could range, in a single year (2016), from an article on the earliest Norman sheriffs, through early nineteenth-century printing of Irish poetry, to the composer Tommaso Giordani (‘accidents happen, as I sometimes pick something up along the way’, he wrote on his webpage in relation to that one).”

Roy Flechner, ‘Richard Sharpe, 17 February 1954 – 22 March 2020’

“He was already working on Hebridean history: his first book, Raasay: A Study in Island History was published in 1977, the year he graduated, followed by a second the following year, Raasay: A Study in Island History. Documents and Sources, People and Places (Raasay lies between Skye and the mainland). At the same time he was working on editions of the two earliest Lives of Brigit, a saint of peculiar interest—as a female counterpart to St Patrick, as the premier patron-saint of Leinster, and as someone widely culted in Britain as well as Ireland. He never published his editions but was generous in allowing others to use them.”

Ramsay, ‘Richard Sharpe obituary’, as above

That last strikes chords with me all the way back from those years in Oxford. I remember hearing, on two different occasions, someone (Hugh Doherty once, I think; can’t remember who the other was) say that they’d been to talk to Richard up in his office about some new problem they’d just stumbled on in a project, a saint’s life or manuscript they’d never heard of before or similar and were going to have to track down, and Richard going, “Oh yes! I wrote a piece about that years ago”, striding over to a cupboard and after a short search pulling out a neat stapled and paper-covered typescript on the exact topic, existence unknown to anyone but him. I should say, it’s not that Richard was shy about publishing; as Roy Flechner’s obituary that I’ve linked above says, his total of works even at the point of death was at least 212 separate items. But apparently he still wrote more than he could manage to publish… If there is a tiny crumb of compensation for him being dead it’s that we will now presumably have found out what else was in the cupboard; but it’s not how either he, I’m guessing, or I would have wanted that learning to be made available. I don’t know how many other people the world can make like this, or what the academy looks like if ever we run out.

Next post will be a final short one about (early) medieval remains in Rome as of some time ago; and after that I promise some actual academic content for once; but having finally got this news I didn’t want to let a kind colleague go unrecorded when he was so very important in understanding records.

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1. That paper eventually published as Richard Sharpe, “King Harold’s Daughter” in Haskins Society Journal Vol. 19 (Woodbridge 2008), pp. 1–27. No-one seems to have attempted a full bibliography of Richard’s work, for reasons which may be suggested by what follows, and I’m not up to the challenge; there was a lot…

2. I’m bravely assuming that most of these anecdotes can stand by themselves, but the Tale of the Headington Shark—in which I’d had no idea Richard had had any part—might need a link for the unfamiliar…

Missing Michael Matzke

While still not wanting to let this blog become an obituaries column, this is obviously not a good time in human history to ask people to stop dying. However, this is late news that only came to me when my partner opened up the current issue of the Numismatic Chronicle and found a review of Medieval European Coinage 12: Northern Italy, over whose text I myself toiled for a while in 2008-2009, and noted the fatal † by one of the author’s names.¹ And that’s how I found out that I had missed Michael Matzke, Kurator of the Münzkabinett at the Historisches Museum Basel and erstwhile Assistant Keeper at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, dying at the age of 54 last year.

Dr Michael Matzke, late Kurator of the Münzkabinett of the Historisches Museum Basel; the (German) article linked beneath provides links to many other notices of his passing

I could not say that I knew Michael well; he was out of the department at the Fitzwilliam before I got there, and our scholarships hardly crossed paths. There is, all the same, a certain closeness to someone you only get by editing them, trying to think far enough into their thoughts to make them sit more accurately on the page in your language that they’re currently obliged to use. Without my knowing that much about his life, he thus became very familiar to me as an intellect. Michael was, in any case, very much not a problem to edit, and always polite and helpful in the event of queries, and although due to reasons beyond either of our controls the volume didn’t come out until years after I’d left the Fitzwilliam, I’m glad to say that the last time I saw him was actually at a party celebrating its then-actually-imminent publication, at the XV International Numismatic Congress in Taormina, which of course I reported here.

Michael’s not in the picture, sadly, but here is the party, in the Courtyard of the Palazzo dei Duchi di Santo Stefano

The evening before that, I’d been able to introduce that same partner of mine to Michael, among other people, on an extremely crowded balcony four floors up, where one of the Congress receptions was being held. The considerable press of people would be unthinkable now, of course, even without the low parapets, but was getting close to it even then; as Michael observed in stagey discomfort, “this would never be allowed in Germany”. I shall never know now whether he was laughing at his own nation or not, but given what I knew of his humour, utterly deadpan and razor sharp, I shall always suspect it. I’m glad I got to laugh with him and I’m sorry I won’t any more.

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1. Andrea Saccocci, Michael Matzke and William Day Jr, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 12: Northern Italy (Cambridge 2016), reviewed by Monica Baldassarri in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 180 (London 2020), pp. 507-509. I should give more reference to Michael’s work but I wouldn’t really know where to start, other than the Bibliography of MEC 12! The links in the text will take you to more if you need to know, however.

Historians to remember

It is a distressing habit that seems to be developing on this blog where it is deaths that bring me out of a hiatus. Of course, there would be no such habit if there were no hiatuses, but the times are not good for that. Maybe that will get more explanation next post, whenever I can do that, but in the meantime, I shouldn’t go the whole holiday and post nothing, even if what must be posted is kind of awful. It is also delayed: this has been on my deck since February, when news of one significant death reached me and the person who’d told me then let me know about the five other major medievalists the reaper had claimed the previous month, and there were such among them that I knew I would have to write something next post instead of whatever I had planned. And finally, here we are.

My rules for giving someone an obituary on this blog are not very worked out. In general it is because, whether I knew them or not, their work has touched mine somehow or been the foundation of something I’ve done. In this, I persist in the blog’s basically self-serving purpose that it’s all about me somehow, I suppose, but to be fair, if I reported on deaths even of people I didn’t have much connection with, firstly it’d become a pretty grim blog and secondly I’d hardly be able to say much of use about them. Thus it is that I will not be saying more here about the late Jean-Marie Martin, leading expert on the society of the Italian area of Apulia on its journey from Byzantine through Lombard, Arab and Norman rules, or Jean Richard, eminent historian of the Crusades, than those notices, except to observe that apparently Richard, whose work I’ve put on many a reading list without myself giving it the attention it surely deserved, was only two weeks short of his hundredth birthday, and to provide links under their names to places where you can read more.¹

Giles Constable, photographed by Randall Hagadorn for Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study

Then come two about whom I have more to say, but still did not know. Firstly, Giles Constable, 91 at his death, and by that stage he had been Professor of Medieval History at Harvard and Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, serving between times as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection in Washington DC, despite having been born in London. His was so productive a career it would hard to sum it up, and sufficiently long that I currently work with a doctoral grand-pupil of his. Wikipedia currently singles out his work on the key Benedictine reform abbey of Cluny, which I wrote about here long ago, on its abbot Peter the Venerable, a major figure in European theology and religious and intellectual life, and on twelfth-century thought in general, and certainly when making reading lists on Cluny or the twelfth-century Renaissance, I have always made sure as recent a dose of Constable as I could find was in there. That’s mostly because of reading bits of his work as an undergraduate myself, and finding that it carefully and clearly opened window after window on my understanding of the world he described.² But what I still mainly cite him for is a short and brilliant article that did a similar thing for my understanding of the motivation of medieval monastic forgers, and sometimes for his work on monasteries’ claims to Church tithes, both of which are in that category of things which people still cite from decades ago because no-one has written a better thing on the subject.³ He seems to still have been working up to about 2016, at which point he’d have been 85 or so; may we all hope for so much…

Ronnie Ellenblum, from his Academia.edu page, which of course, does not record his death

Not active for as long, because only 68 when struck by a fatal heart attack, was Professor Ronnie Ellenblum. A more controversial figure, whom again I never met, every one of Ellenblum’s books seemed to upset a consensus, on how involved Frankish settlers were in the landscapes of the Holy Land where the Crusades brought some of them, on how much those Crusaders were willing to learn from their Muslim opponents in terms of fortifications and strategy (rather than the other way round), and more recently and noticeably, on the power of climate change to tip societies’ survivability over the edge.⁴ All of this, as you can probably tell, was born out of a deep acquaintance and close contact with the land in his native Israel. He also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which by itself put him beyond some people’s pales. I did not know about that issue when, as was recorded here, I read a short piece of his that was effectively the entire impetus of my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project, but that was, in a more direct way than usual, his fault; from my wrangling with that book chapter came all the conversations that brought the agenda for that project into being.⁵ If I had ever met him, I’d have thanked him for that, as well as being embarrassed about how little the project yet had to show for itself; now I will never be able to.

Cyril Mango at the American School at Athens

Then we reach the ones I did in fact know, at least a bit. The death whose news sparked off the exchange I reported above was that of the one I knew less well, Professor Cyril Mango. I met him twice, I think, at the Medieval History Seminar at All Soul’s College Oxford both times, and when I say met, I mean sat at a table while he talked, or while his wife Marlia Mundell Mango talked for him because, even then, he was very ill. Farflung Byzantinist colleagues would ask me if Cyril Mango was still alive when they were in contact with me for completely other reasons, so widely known was this, but the news was important because he truly was a ‘giant in the field‘, who had been responsible perhaps more than any other single scholar—and there really weren’t many in this competition when he began—for bringing the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire into a wider Anglophone awareness. This was not because he was a populariser, though I don’t think he had any shame about writing for a public, but because despite being extremely learned in his subject matter he remained able to communicate it to outsiders whilst still being recognised by insiders. The result was that, if someone in the UK owned one book not by John Julius Norwich about Byzantium, Mango was probably either the author or a contributor, but also that if one went on to study Byzantium, he was in all the experts’ references too.⁶ The field has been oddly quiet about his departure from it, perhaps because it had been expected for so long, and I’m sure there are people from his 92-year-long life who could give him a better write-up than I can—indeed, several already have—but for now I hope this does him at least some justice.

[The only pictures of Professor Michael Clanchy I can find which show him as I remember him are attached to things written by his daughter about his death, which was apparently preceded very narrowly by his wife’s, and they’re painful reading and I would feel bad stealing the pictures. The obituaries linked below have pictures of him in happier times.]

And then lastly, and for me saddest because I knew him best, there was Michael Clanchy. Since he worked mostly in the same kind of fields as Giles Constable, and especially on the intellectual ferment around the creation of the first university in Paris and one of that ferment’s principal products, the philosopher, theologian and leading candidate for history’s worst boyfriend Peter Abelard, you might wonder why I knew Michael Clanchy at all, and then be surprised at how many papers of his, including one (before the blog) which was both his inaugural and retirement lecture, I’d been to. But, investigating, you would quickly then discover that that lecture was given at the Institute of Historical Research in London, one of my academic homes, and although he really only tuned in the eleventh century in terms of his own work, he was a regular at the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, because he found everything interesting as far as I can see. Consequently, because kindness returns kindness, people used to go to his stuff as well, but this was also because he made it all so interesting. His biography of Abelard may still be the only work that manages to make the man interesting personally as well as significant intellectually, as well as at least halfway comprehensible to the non-expert, not least because as its title suggests it is about far more than just Abelard.⁷ But as far as I know, excellent though that book is, especially if accompanied by his revision of the Penguin translation of Abelard’s and Héloïse’s letters, it only had the one edition, unlike the one that most people had heard of Michael Clanchy for, From Memory to Written Record, which argued for a fundamental shift in the way people used and stored information over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and in which by the third edition, under pressure from those who knew England before the Conquest better than after (and better than he did), he was beginning to extend that thinking backwards into a new way of thinking about how writing was being used then that I’m not sure anyone has really picked up.⁸ And there’s an article of Michael’s from 1970, even, that still gets cited, another of those things that are just too good to replace.⁹ But it is his kindness for which he might deserve to be remembered best. I don’t know how many conversations I had with him in the IHR tea-room in which he not just professed but maintained an interest in what I did, even once or twice asking very junior me for advice on early medieval archives, none of which, since he could never teach me and our periods barely even met at the edges, he needed to do. I will of course remember him for his work, but I will also remember those conversations and be thankful for him. I can picture him trying bashfully to shrug off the praise, and of course, again, I shan’t ever get to deliver it, but also again, I hope this is something.

I need to rethink what I am doing with this blog, again, since the backlog and the available time obviously don’t work together. I will try and do some of that rethinking for the next post, but even if that doesn’t sound thrilling, at least it more or less must be more cheerful than this one. Thanks for still reading and I hope to write more soon.

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1. For Martin, the work for which he was famous beyond Apulia was probably his first book, which made that area well-known to a wider audience, J.-M. Martin, La Pouille du VI^e au XII^e siècle, Collection de l’École française de Rome 179 (Rome 1993), but I confess, it is one of those I know I ought to have read, and actually what I know him for most is his contribution to Pierre Bonnassie’s Festschrift, “Quelques réflexions sur l’évolution des droits banaux en Italie méridionale (XI^e-XIII^e siècle)” in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (l’Espagne, Italie et sud de France X^e-XIII^e s.). Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, Méridiennes 8 (Toulouse 1999), pp. 339–344. Richard is easily most famous for The Crusades, c. 1071–c. 1291, transl. Jean Birrell (Cambridge 1999), one of the only textbook histories of the Crusades that gets beyond the Fourth one.

2. Embarrassingly, I now can’t work out what work it was that I was then reading; I apparently didn’t make notes on it, and several of the obvious things came out too late. It could, just about, have been, G. Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha; The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ; The Orders of Society (Cambridge 1995), then very new, and may more likely have been idem, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities” in Robert L. Benson (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century(Cambridge MA 1982), pp. 37–67, but one could also mention Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1996) or idem, The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleventh-Hundredth Anniversary of its Foundation, Abhandlungen Vita Regularis: Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, 43 (Münster 2010), as only two. For me especially, there’s also the quite out-of-area Constable, “Frontiers in the Middle Ages” in O. Merisalo (ed.), Frontiers in the Middle Ages, Textes et études du Moyen Âge 35 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 3–28.

3. Constable, “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 39 (München 1983), pp. 1–41; idem, Monastic Tithes from their Origins to the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 2nd Series 10 (Cambridge 1964).

4. Respectively, Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge 2003); idem, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge 2007) and idem, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950–1072 (Cambridge 2012).

5. Ronnie Ellenblum, “Were there Borders and Borderlines in the Middle Ages? The Example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” in David Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002), pp. 105–118.

6. While it doesn’t cover his whole œuvre by any means, I guess one has to mention Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (New York City, NY, 1980), idem, Le développement urbain de Constantinople, IV^e-VII^e siècles, Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Collège de France, Monographies, 2, 2nd edn (Paris 2004) and idem (ed.), The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford 2002). Even that omits a number of critical source translations and a vital textual anthology of sources for Byzantine art, idem (ed.), The Art of Byzantine Empire (New York City NY 1972), and I could go on.

7. M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: a medieval life (Oxford 1999).

8. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 3rd edn (Chichester 2013); one should probably also mention his England and its Rulers, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Oxford 2006).

9. Clanchy, “Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law” in History Vol. 55 (London 1970), pp. 165–176.

Death of an Archaeologist

As too often, I owe apologies for a late post. I spent much of Sunday driving and since then it’s been busy. But the task is eased and, at the same time, made heavier, by being diverted from my plan to recount the fun bits of the last time I went to the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, what could have been a very long post, by some very unfortunate news, which was the death of the Scottish archaeologist Oliver O’Grady.

Oliver O’Grady on an archaeological dig in East Lomond, from an obituary in the Courier, linked through

My discovery of this was one of those terrible things Google can do to you with auto-suggestions. This summer I am reckoning, since we can’t go abroad, to embark on a Scots road-trip of Pictish theme, and consequently I was searching up a list of sites that included the erstwhile Pictish palace at Forteviot. It is quite hard to find out what there is to see at the site from the Internet, and so I put into Google the name of the man who had led the dig, Oliver O’Grady, and Google suggested “… archaeologist death”. And this turned out to be true and left me quite shocked and dismayed, mainly because he was only 39, but also because everyone else who knew him is clearly at least as shocked and dismayed; this has surprised everyone.

I think Dr O’Grady would himself have been surprised to know he’d get an obituary on my blog; we met only twice, and it was a long time ago. The first time was my second International Medieval Congress (not the same as the International Congress on Medieval Studies), at Leeds in 2006. At that point I had just finished my doctorate and was at last in temporarily secure work in the Fitzwilliam Museum, but despite being employed numismatically and doctorally qualified as a Catalanist charter geek, I had not (still have not) dropped my old interest in Pictland and so when I saw a Scotland session with a paper called ‘Assemblies in Medieval Scotland: landscape and the performance of memory’ I went along. Dr O’Grady, who at this point would have been 25 and presumably not yet Dr, was the first speaker, and the memory of him has just stuck with me, partly of course because like myself he was a long-haired bearded guy wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt, but unlike me he was actually showing it whereas I was hiding in conference garb. Still, obviously one of the black-clad brethren I’ve sometimes been thankful to be recognised by. I also remember him being quite nervous and rumbly and having been at the beginning of what turned out to be the long-running Forteviot project. We talked briefly afterwards but he was kind of carried off by his colleagues. Thereafter, his name came up here and there and it became clear he was doing big things (like discovering ‘the birth certificate of Scotland’). I know I ran into him again once more but I cannot work out from my notes and conference programmes where it was. So I can only say that I got a very good impression of the guy from that first paper and have always remembered him. I would have liked to talk to him about his sites and try out my plural Pictland idea on someone who’d got a better idea than most about what the centralisation of that kingdom looked like on the ground.

Given that I can say so little, therefore, and that from so long ago, I have to use words of others, borrowed from that article in The Courier that gave me the bad news:

“Falkland Stewardship Trust chairman Joe Fitzpatrick said there was ‘shock and disbelief’ around the centre following news that Oliver – a close collaborator and one of Scotland’s leading archaeologists – had died. ‘Oliver was a friend and colleague who impressed everyone who had the pleasure of working with him,’ said Mr Fitzpatrick. ‘He led the three archaeological excavations on East Lomond in 2014, 17 and 19 and his warmth, openness and encouragement were appreciated by all our excavation volunteers and staff. No one’s “theory” was dismissed and his patient explanations were educative and informative. He loved being able to engage and involve community members in archaeological discovery…”

And there’s more there, from more people, and I’m sure there is still more over the social web, but it’s obviously not much comfort for them, his family, the field or anyone really. I fear we lost another of the good ones.

In memory of Simon Bendall

I’m sorry as ever for a lapse in posting. Firstly I went on actual holiday, without a laptop—some day there will be pictures, because I did take a camera—and then as soon as I was back I had feverishly to read a 723-page thesis so as to be able to help examine it the following week in Barcelona, in whose airport indeed I now write this post. I had hoped to have written you something about Byzantine coinage by this time as well, and so, I suppose, I am about to do, but it’s not the thing I had hoped for and it must come first, as is unfortunately now common on this blog, because somebody died, and that somebody was Simon Bendall, Byzantine numismatist extraordinaire, whom I knew a little and so want to commemorate here. He died on 26 June after what was apparently a long illness, at the age of 82.

I’m not sure when I first heard of Simon Bendall; it’s possible that it was in citation as I read frantically to prepare for the interview that got me the job managing the coin collection at the Barber Institute. However, I heard from him very shortly after I got that job, because his ever-active networks had brought him the news of régime change and he wanted to ask me for some images for a book he was then working on, which became his Introduction to the Coinage of Trebizond, of which he later kindly gave me a copy.¹ That was an illustrative exchange for several reasons, which all help give a sense of the man, so I’ll tell them.

Firstly, I managed almost without effort to enlist him in checking over the Barber’s own initial catalogue of coins of that Byzantine splinter state, because he had once been going to catalogue them for us anyway and had been frustrated at never finding out what we actually had; as a result, to go online at some future point, there is a marked-up printout of the catalogue in the Curator’s work pile, I imagine, where I sadly had to leave it when I demitted. Secondly, yes, print-out, because Simon didn’t use e-mail, and barely used computers; the only practical way to send him a PDF was in print, and all the correspondence I had with him was actual letters, answered in longhand and in scrupulous detail in rather shorter time than I tend to manage with e-mail. Thirdly, that correspondence also got me several stories about one of my predecessors as Curator, the learned but sometimes difficult Michael Hendy, which I was later able to verify from the coin catalogue, because Simon, in his position at the coin dealer Baldwin’s, had been responsible for choosing and sending several important parts of the Byzantine collection while it was under Hendy’s care. Fourthly, it gave me vital ammunition to get the Barber to rethink its image pricing, based on full-size paintings and not really applicable to coins, that when I told him what we would have to charge him he gently pointed out that for that price he could buy an actual one of the relevant coins and photograph it himself for less money. From all this, I got the impression of a man who was a quantity, if you see what I mean.

Before long I was encountering this quantity in print, as well, because Simon was one of the people who had written about the concave fabric of later Byzantine coins, and one of the very few who had asked the important question: well, how did they do it?² And by then I was also aware that for the coinage of the last and longest-lasting dynasty of Byzantine emperors, the Palaeologans, the standard reference was by one Simon Bendall…³ And in fact, I now learn, a full bibliography of his work would have two-hundred-plus things in it, from two- or three-page notes in the little auction house periodicals we used to have to full-length monographs, because he just knew a lot, largely through his ongoing connections with those same auction houses as employee and then consultant expert. Numismatics is one of the last fields where you don’t have to be an academic to be a major contributor, and that is not least because of the demonstrable importance of the work of people like Simon.

I think I finally met Simon at the International Numismatic Congress in Taormina in 2015, and then again at a couple of meetings of the Royal Numismatic Society. Somewhere in there I must have been told the single event that got Simon onto the web other than his publications, which was the theft of his coin collection in February 2018, sadly not the only retired collector’s collection to get taken from their home that I can think of. Typically, he took it phlegmatically—I suppose he must already have been ill, because he said to me that at least it had saved him the pain of disposing of it. He had once hoped to give it to a museum, he explained, but since it had all been acquired in trade, no UK museum would now touch it; though the thieves had obviously deprived him of one of his life’s works, it did at least mean the collection had not had to be broken up and auctioned as would otherwise have happened. In another of those conversations, more cheerfully, I learnt that his childhood home (and therefore lifelong) football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, had sent him a card signed by all the squad after he’d passed some 50-year attendance marker I wish I could now remember. Anyway, as this all suggests, he was a fount of stories, and it’s a considerable sadness that he won’t be amassing and telling any more, quite apart from all the other horrors and misfortunes of mortality. He won’t be at the next RNS party I make it to, and people will miss him. So will Byzantine numismatics in general, indeed, and so probably will Wolverhampton Wanderers, and that’s not a bad combination of mourners to have. I hope he went and remains in peace; goodbye, Simon, it was good to have known you.

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1. Simon Bendall, An introduction to the coinage of the Empire of Trebizond (London 2015).

2. Simon Bendall and David Sellwood, “The Method of Striking Scyphate Coins Using Two Obverse Dies In the Light of an Early Thirteenth Century Hoard” in Numismatic Chronicle 7th Series Vol. 18 (London 1978), pp. 93–104, and Simon Bendall, “The Double Striking of Late Byzantine Scyphate Coins” in Celator Vol. 12 (Lancaster PA 1998), pp. 20–23.

3. S. Bendall and P. J. Donald, Later Palaeologan Coinage, 1282-1453 (London 1979).

Memories of Ruth Macrides

You are owed a post, dear readers, but as happens too often these days, this is not one I wanted to write. Over the Easter vacation news reached me of the unexpected death of Dr Ruth Macrides, of the Centre of Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, noted Byzantinist and my erstwhile colleague. I have dithered about writing, because there are many people already doing so who knew Ruth better than I did, but I worked with her, I shared seminar wine with her and I have written notices about people I knew far less well; I probably should. So, this is a few memories of Ruth.

Picture of Dr Ruth Macrides from her Birmingham staff page, now displaying a sad notice of her death

Pinning down when I first met Ruth is tricky for me. It would have been when I was teaching on the History side of Birmingham’s School of History and Cultures, whereas the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies sits organisationally within the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, so our points of crossing then were limited. But I knew her by the time I handed over the MA in Medieval History’s Research Skills module to her at the end of my contract, so I must have met her before that. In this respect, my memory is deficient, sorry Ruth. But she made a fresh impression upon me when, rescued from possible academic unemployment by the job as Interim Curator of Coins at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, I thus found myself gathered into the Centre. I don’t know if Ruth was in fact running the Centre at this point, but she was everywhere in its activity: she edited its journal, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, and she organised its seminar programme, which was (as indeed you heard here) studded with international speakers, including non-Byzantinists. The thing that most impressed me at the first meeting was that she had had termcards printed, not just A4 printouts but little green folded cards with the Centre’s logo on them. An affectation, you might think, but it was practices like this (and its Postgraduate Colloquium and periodic hosting of the Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, which latter Ruth was organising this year…) that meant that the Centre was instantiated and continued to have a group identity despite being organisationally subsumed into something else. With things like these Ruth was the Centre’s lungs; she kept it breathing, and I could point you at other interdisciplinary centres of yore which are no longer really visible or significant not least because no-one bothered to do things like those. So all power to Ruth’s memory for that.

Cover of the April 2019 issue of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, presumably the last one Ruth edited and displaying the logo of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, a coin of Emperor Leo III

My next most powerful memory of Ruth is of her laughing. As she was organising those seminars, she also had to take the speakers out to dinner. Not every one of those dinners could be a party, but I remember one seminar dinner in particular—though I don’t remember who the speaker was, or even if they actually came to dinner—in which Ruth and fellow American immigrée Professor Leslie Brubaker were exchanging anecdotes about the terrible British housing they had encountered with horror on their first arrivals on these shores. I have a very clear picture in my mind of Ruth drawing breath between laughs with her hand emphatically grasping Leslie’s arm, and I see that this is also Ruth as Leslie has remembered her on Birmingham’s tribute page. So Ruth energetically fronting the Centre and Ruth laughing with her colleagues are my two strongest memories of her, and that is just as it should be I think.

But Ruth also needs remembering as scholar, so I will add one more, though, because it makes a point she would not have. In fact, she wasn’t even present for it. A very long memory of this blog could however contain a seminar report on a paper by Kyle Sinclair, one of Ruth’s doctoral students who had on that occasion returned to present to one of the local postgraduate seminars. That was a good paper, but it was also the first time I had heard Ruth actually cited, for a paper entitled ‘The Historian in the History’, which turns out to be one of those super-useful things on how medieval authors’ own perspectives mess with our understanding of the history we rely on them for.¹ That is, obviously, a known factor of doing history and yet it’s really hard to find people explicitly writing about it and about how we might extract practice as historians from these instances. It’s why I still struggle to direct students for whom source critique is a new idea, because clear and transportable examples are few and far between.² I’m sure that, if you’re in the field, this is not the work for which the name Ruth Macrides is best known; in fact, she wrote so much of importance that I wouldn’t know where to start with that, especially as she specialised a few centuries later than I do at the other end of the Mediterranean from where I started. But that paper is one that all medieval historians could usefully read, and of course I had to hear about it from one of her students, because something I never heard Ruth do was boast about her work. Her own importance to her field was not something she thought worth mention, apparently. But I think it is and will continue to be evident in all the things people are now saying about her. She was important, she will be much missed, and so I wanted to make my own little contribution to her being remembered. Go in peace, Ruth, and may there be laughter where you have gone.

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1. Ruth Macrides, “The Historian in the History”, in Costas N. Constantinides, Nikolaos M. Panagiotakes, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Athanasios D. Angelou (edd.), Philellen: studies in honour of Robert Browning, Biblioteca dell’Istituto ellenico di studi bizantini e postbizantini di Venezia 17 (Venice 1996), pp. 205-224.

2. My other good example is Janet L. Nelson, “Public ‘Histories’ and Private History in the Work of Nithard” in Speculum Vol. 65 (Cambridge MA 1985) pp. 251-293, repr. in eadem, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London 1986), pp. 195-237, and I believe Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London 2004) does this work as well, but there really aren’t enough such pieces. I dream of some day writing one for charters…

In memoriam Ted Buttrey (1929-2018)

2017-2018 has been a rough transition, like 2010-2011’s second instalment but with the deaths closer to me this time. I would have liked the last post but one to be enough for one winter but the toll has continued to ring and ring hard. I already failed to mention Professor Peter Spufford, whom I didn’t know well but should have recorded here after he died on 18 November 2017; I can’t point to a good obituary just yet but there must be one coming, probably indeed in the upcoming Numismatic Chronicle. I likewise would have wished to say something about John Casey, whom I only met a couple of times but was fun both to read and to talk to. But I cannot fail to mention Professor Theodore Vern Buttrey, Junior, because he was one of my favourite people in Cambridge and while his death, on 9 January, was not unexpected as he’d been fighting prostate cancer, more or less in secrecy (I found out last October) for some time, and also he was eighty-nine, still his praises must be sung because he was a fantastic guy. Also, he would be terribly embarrassed by my saying as much on the web, and so if I’m to commit such a sin at all, I must do it so thoroughly that he would feel obliged to step up to the role of his own personality. So Ted, this is your stage.

“Seriously, you’re gonna do this?” Ted, I am gonna; I owe you no less.

I’m not sure Ted was ever off a stage, if he was where people could see him; he actually did act, indeed one of the first conversations we had where I realised what an strong character he was was when he came into the Department of Coins and Medals announcing that he had been selected as one of the extras for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which was then filming in Ely. He had thought it best to lie about his age so as not to risk crossing their insurance thresholds, and accordingly, apparently, his legs can be seen in one scene and his top half in another, amid a crowd of bearded Spanish grandees tutting in the background of Philip II’s court. I don’t know how many septuaganarians would do that; by the time I left the Department, however, I knew that Ted was one of them. He also quoted Shakespeare rather a lot, with great and stagey disappointment in the younger generation if it wasn’t recognised, but was as likely to throw out bits of Sophocles, on whom he wrote what is as far as I know his last book; with numismatists it’s always possible there’s another draft that someone is going to finish off, and while I don’t know of one he was always trying to get something else finished before it was too late, so I bet there’s at least one.¹ He will also probably still have shipments of numismatic sale catalogues, of which he had amassed the world’s largest collection at the Fitzwilliam, inbound, which is going to be a touch day for the crew who remain there when they arrive, emotionally as well as physically. I remember celebrating the 35,000th catalogue’s accession and the Department’s new mobile shelving with an afternoon of tea, cake, Latin acclamations and sung rounds, accompanied by one of my colleagues on “the Giant Wurlitzer”, a very small Casio keyboard that she discreetly played behind a bookshelf so as not to dispel the illusion. Ted had, of course, written all the words himself, including apologies from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Queen and the Chancellor of the University none of whom, sadly, were able to be present, and I hope I still have the Order of Ceremonies somewhere. Again, who else would do such a thing, and do it over mobile shelving and auction catalogues?

None but Ted! Here pictured with a fresh shipment and a very fake smile in the Grierson Room of the Department

But as the fact that a great numismatist’s last book would be on Classical drama should tell you, Ted was more than a numismatist, and indeed he sometimes described himself as a philologist first and foremost, and this was probably fair if you just take it etymologically (as of course such a person would), in as much he really loved words. It was from Ted I learnt to play Boggle, and while I got to the point where he didn’t often beat me, the real point of the game was not who won but the lengthy arguments over whether the particular combination of letters he’d found on the grid was in fact a real word or not; we haggled for long enough over ‘sawdusts’ that another then-member of the department subsequently got me a mug made with the word on it. To his delight, because my father had been (indeed, when I started there, still was) much of an age with him and had had an American wife, I knew quite a lot of Ted’s backdated Americana references, like Pogo, another huge sink of wordplay for the player with words, and could spar back at him with them. Lunches in the Department were made the more splendid for Ted appearing dramatically in the doorway with a Boggle set and proclaiming, “The hour cometh, and now is!” There was less Boggle after I left and still less after the mug-making colleague did, so I very much hope there’s someone willing to play wherever Ted’s spirit now roams.

Myself, Professor Ted Buttrey and Professor Vladimir Nastich in the McClean Room, Coins & Medals; my beard is more sensible now

What else should be said of Ted? There are many stories to tell, most of which maybe don’t belong here like when I made his life dramatically easier at a stroke by showing him the double-click; Ted had determinedly learnt computers as an early adopter and then carried on using that computer in retirement from 1991 to about 2003, with no-one to tell him about some of the major changes his post-2003 machine embodied. But one cannot speak of Ted as a whole without also including his role as a fraud-busting detective. Not only did he catch two coin thieves at the Department during his tenure as Keeper, one of whom he quite deliberately set up with an opportunity he couldn’t miss, but, much more famously, exposed a traffic in early Mexican and American gold bars which he held to be fakes, including pointing a finger at the traffickers; they then sued him for libel, but the suit was dismissed and since no legal verdict was reached against Ted’s accused either I’ll leave it there, but it made the papers.² Such was the man.

Cover of Buttrey and Hubbard, Guidebook of Mexican Coins

Obviously I have to mention his scholarship, as well, and it would be too seductively easy to pick out stuff like his work on Domitian’s rhinoceros, on spintriae (careful with that link, probably NSFW unless your work is Roman numismatics or history) or his three excellent and finely-written articles decrying attempts to put numbers on the production of ancient coins which I have praised here before, in general the quirky, funny or destructive (though always scholarly), if only because it would be so hard to pick a small number of the more important publications like the coins from the excavations at Sardis, with the late Ian Carradice the new standard catalogue of the coins of the Flavian emperors, or what is still the go-to book on Mexican coins though his first book of all…³ I mean, there is loads. The American Numismatic Society’s library catalogue contains 116 items under his name and they must be selling him short. Though, weirdly, as he told me once, he’d never actually found a coin in context himself, there were very few coins about which he didn’t know something; though I discovered later that it was not original to him, he was not wrong once to say, “I am a numismatist, and nothing numismatic is foreign to me.”⁴ And he will be missed for that, and for the work he might still have completed if he’d lived on further, but I don’t often cross with his actual fields of interest, and I personally will miss the Boggle, the elevated drama of his conversation, and the endless fund of stories he could tell—he had crossed the Atlantic by sea more than once, for example—and the fact that when next I go to the Fitzwilliam there will no-one with whom to “savage the reluctant scone” as I would have if Ted were still there. Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to applaud; the show must end for us all but few of us will deserve reviews as glowing as Ted’s should be.

(I live in hope of being able finally to deliver the new shape of the blog that I have now repeatedly promised. But seriously, people just need to stop dying…⁵)

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1. I actually can’t find any trace of the Sophocles book now that I look, so it may be that it is still in press and it actually will be his last book. I’m fairly sure he told me it had gone off to a press…

2. Of course, it’s a mark against the guy that he would say ‘who’ where he meant ‘whom’. In the words of Doc Owl from Pogo which Ted would sometimes quote, “Whom? Moom?”

3. T. V. Buttrey, “Domitian, the Rhinoceros, and the Date of Martial’s Liber De Spectaculis” in Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 97 (London 2007), pp. 101-112, online here; idem, “The Spintriae as a Historical Source” in The Numismatic Chronicle 7th Series Vol. 13 (London 1973), pp. 52-63; idem, “Calculating Ancient Coin Production: facts and fantasies”, ibid. Vol. 153 (1993), pp. 335–351; idem, “Calcuating Ancient Coin Production, II: why it cannot be done”, ibid. Vol. 154 (1994), pp. 341–352; S. E. Buttrey and T. V. Buttrey, “Calculating Ancient Coin Production, Again’ in American Journal of Numismatics Vol. 9 (Washington DC 1997), pp. 113–135; T. V. Buttrey, A. Johnston, K. M. Mackenzie & M. L. Bates, Greek, Roman and Islamic Coins from Sardis (Cambridge MA 1982); T. V. Buttrey and I. A. Carradice, The Roman Imperial Coinage, vol. 2 part 1 (revised edition): From AD 69 to AD 96 – Vespasian to Domitian (London 2007); T. V. Buttrey and Clyde Hubbard, Guidebook of Mexican Coins, 1822 to Date, 6th edn. ed. by Thomas Michael (Fort Collins CO 1992).

4. An earlier instance somewhere in P. J. Casey (him again) and Richard reece (edd.), Coins and the Archaeologist, 2nd edn (London 1988), but drat it, I haven’t written down where, sorry.

5. The 2010 post I mentioned was also weighed down by the death of many important musicians, at least important to me, and sadly this is no different. Not only have I taken this long to find out about the death of Walter Becker, bassist-and-more of Steely Dan, in September, but “Fast” Eddie Clarke, once of Motörhead of course, also didn’t make it through this killing winter. The classic line-up of Motörhead is now hopefully reunited, though if so Lemmy will have some serious retractions to make… Anyway, it needs to stop now please, this has just been too many figures of renown to lose in a month.