Professor of Medieval History, School of History, University of East Anglia
I joined the School of History in 1995 after completing undergraduate and postgraduate work in London. Between leaving school and becoming an academic historian, I was a bank clerk, a buyer of cardboard boxes and plastic bottles, a labourer, and a housing liaison officer for Camden Council.
My research is primarily focused on the twelfth century, concentrating on issues surrounding kingship and the exercise of royal power. My main publications have been in this area, though, like all medievalists, this focus does not provide the only outlet for my research interests. I have published on subjects as diverse as Anglo-Saxon paganism, twelfth-century administrative records, fourteenth-century landholding, and on the preservation of sepulchral monuments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have recently published a major new biography of King John (Pan Macmillan and Basic Books 2015) which was listed as one of the Financial Times's Books of the Year for 2015, and I am directing a Leverhulme-funded International Research Network on the Lands of the Angevins.
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