Biography
I began my teaching career long, long, ago as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and as the lecturer in Local History at PACE. Teaching has always informed and improved my scholarship, because students invariably ask the direct and simple questions which cut to the heart of the subject, and because academic writing benefits from making complex subjects accessible to non-specialists. A lifelong fascination has been the effects of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century on English society, which in 2019 was my subject when delivering the Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford and the subsequent monograph. Important spin offs from that research have been the impact of the pandemic on women’s agency and on the institution of serfdom: the latter is the subject of two books, the latest published in 2025. My career has been indecisive and non-linear: for twenty years I was a head teacher, latterly as High Master of St Paul’s School, London, and I am currently the Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.