Prof Nigel Saul
I retired in the summer of 2015 after playing an extensive part in the 800th anniversary celebrations that year to mark the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede, which is just over a mile from the University. I was a member of the Magna Carta 800 national organising committee for the celebrations and co-chairman of the education sub-committee. Magna Carta pretty nearly took over my life for my last five years in the University.
I am probably most well known in the historical world, however, for my work on an earlier monarch, John’s descendant King Richard II, who came to the throne in 1377 and was deposed by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV, in 1399. I wrote the big biography of Richard in the Yale English Monarchs series, which was published in 1997 and has been reissued many times since. The book remains, for better or for worse, the standard biography of the king. Eight years later, I wrote a second study, The Three Richards (Hambledon and London, 2005), which looked, in a vague nod towards nominal eugenics, at all three Richards, considering whether the formidable reputation of the first Richard, the Lionheart, placed his successors of the same name under a heavy burden of emulation.
A sideline interest of mine has always been the study of English medieval church monuments, particularly those of the mail-clad knights in armour shown on their high tombs at prayer, sometimes alongside their wives. In 2009, at the end of two years of sabbatical leave, I published a big book on the subject, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages. History and Representation (Oxford UP), which sought to look at these monuments from an historian’s point of view, asking what they tell us about those they commemorate, their aspirations and preoccupations, and examining the choices which they made in the type of monument they commissioned. I’d earlier written a more specialist study of the tombs and brasses of the baronial de Cobham family in Cobham church in Kent, the largest and grandest surviving series of brasses in England and also one of the best documented. The later study to some extent grew out of that (Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England. The Cobham Family and their Monuments, 1300-1500 (Oxford, 2001). I have published quite a number of articles on church monuments in the years since, in the Church Monuments Journal and the Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society.
At the moment I am working on an edition for the Lincoln Record Society of the list of some 400 proprietors, who in 1388, in the middle of Richard II’s reign, took the oath to support the five Appellant lords, the leaders of the baronial opposition to the king. This is an altogether remarkable list, far longer than any preserved for any other county in the National Archives, and it affords a unique opportunity both to reconstruct how the oath-takings were organised from the internal organisation of the list and to peer down beyond the knightly class into the ranks of the lesser landed proprietors. I will be publishing the list itself, along with some supporting documents, prefacing both with an Introduction tracing the history of oath-takings as a means of securing allegiance to authority, and rounding off the volume with biographies of all the 400-or-so oath-takers. This project should take me until 2025.
