The School of
Historical Studies

Professor Christopher Dyer

Professor of Regional and Local History

• Centre for English Local History

Contact Details:

• Email: cd50@le.ac.uk
• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2765
• Office Location: Room 25, Marc Fitch House, Salisbury Road
• Semester 1 office hours: Thursday 17.00-18.00, Friday 16.00-17.00 or contact by email to arrange time.
• Web site: Centre for English Local History

Research Summary || Current Research Projects || Recent Publications || Teaching & Admin

Research Summary

Past and current research interests include: Economic and social history, especially of the medieval period, which includes rural and agricultural history, and the history of towns and commerce; Social history of regions, communities and families; Settlement and landscape history; Medieval archaeology and material culture; Vernacular architecture; Mentalities and popular culture; Special area of interest : the west midland region (Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire); has worked recently on the east midlands (Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire) and East Anglia, especially Suffolk.

Current Research Projects

Research for a monograph on 'John Heritage and his world', a study of commerce, agriculture and rural society in north-east Gloucestershire, north Oxfordshire, south Warwickshire, south-east Worcestershire, based on the account book of a Cotswold wool merchant, 1500-1520. Also to write up landscape history projects on Admington in Warwickshire, Hazleton in Gloucestershire (with David Aldred)), and Westcote in Warwickshire (with Sarah Wager).

Future projects

• Peasant agriculture in England, 1200-1540
• Editing essays arising from the conference on the 'Self Contained Village' held at Leicester in July, 2004
• Editing essays arising from the 'Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages' conference held at Birmingham in September 2003

Recent Publications

Books

1. Edited book: William Dugdale, Historian, 1605- 1686: His Life, His Writings and His County, with Dr Catherine Richardson (Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2009)

2. Edited book: Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages. A Exploration of Historical Themes, with Peter Coss and Chris Wickham  (Oxford University Press, Past and Present Supplement, 2, 2007)

3. Edited book: Landscape History after Hoskins, 3 vols. (Windgather Press, 2007)
   

4. Edited book: The Self-Contained Village? The Social History of Rural Communities  1250-1900
   (Hatfield, 2007)
   

5. An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages [the Ford Lectures for 2001] (Oxford, 2005)
   

6. (edited with Kate Giles), Town and Country in the Middle Ages. Contrasts, Contacts and Intercommunications, 1100-1500 (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph, 2005)
   

7. Making a Living in the Middle Ages. The People of Britain, 850-1520 (New Haven and London; the New Economic History of Britain, volume 1, 2002, Penguin paperback, 2003), x + 403 pp.

Articles and chapters

1. ‘Introduction. Rodney Hilton, medieval historian’,  and ‘The ineffectiveness of lordship in England, 1200-1400’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, ed. C. Dyer, P. Coss and C. Wickham (Oxford, 2007), pp. 10-17; 69-86.

2. ‘Economic history’, in A Century of Medieval Studies, ed. A Deyermond  (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), pp. 159-79.

3.  ‘The language of oppression. The vocabulary of rents and services in England,1000-1300’,  in Pour une anthropologie du prelevement seigneurial dans les campagnes de l’Occident medieval. Les mots, les temps, les lieux, ed. M. Bourin and P. Martinez Sopena (Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, 2007).

4. ‘Conflict in the landscape : the enclosure movement in England, 1220-1349’, Landscape History, 28 (2006), pp. 21-33.

5. ‘A Suffolk farmer in the fifteenth century’, Agricultural History Review, 55, pt 1 (2007)

6. 'Historiography of the land market in medieval England', and ' Segniorial profits on the land market in late medieval England', in Le marche de la terre au moyen age , ed.L. Feller (Rome, 2005)

7. 'Bishop Wulfstan and his estates', in St Wulfstan and his World , ed. J.S. Barrow and N.P. Brooks ( Aldershot 2005), pp. 137-45

8. 'The political life of the fifteenth-century English village', The Fifteenth Century, 4 (2004), pp. 135- 57

9. (with M. Ciaraldi, R.Cuttler and L. Dingwall), 'Medieval tanning and retting at Brewood, Staffordshire; archaeological excavations 1999-2000', Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions , 40 (2004), pp. 1-57

10. 'Alternative agriculture: goats in medieval England', in People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture. Essays for Joan Thirsk , ed. R. Hoyle (Agricultural History Review Supplement Series, 3, 2004), pp. 20-38

11. 'Birmingham in the middle ages', in Birmingham: Bibliography of a City , ed. C. Chinn (Birmingham, 2003), pp. 1-14

12. (with Phillipp Schofield), 'Estudios recientes sobre la historia agraria y rural medieval britanica', Historia Agraria , 31 (2003), pp. 13-33

13. 'The archaeology of medieval small towns', Medieval Archaeology , 47(2003), 85-114

14. 'Villages and non-villages in the medieval Cotswolds', Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society , 120 (2002), pp. 11-35

15. (with Jane Laughton), 'Seasonal patterns of trade in the later middle ages: buying and selling at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, 1400-1520', Nottingham Medieval Studies , 46 (2002), pp. 162-84

16. 'The urbanizing of Staffordshire: the first phases', Staffordshire Studies , 14 (2002), pp. 1-31

Teaching, Administration and Supervision

Present and Past PhD Students :

• Liz Allen
• Darren Miller
• Matt Tomkins
• Richard Goddard
• Helena Graham
• Paul Hargreaves
• John Hunt
• John Langdon
• Maria Moisa
• Miriam Muller
• Dong Wook Ko
• Jim Toomey
• Andrew Watkins
• Jei Yang
• Graham Smyth
• Ric Taylor

Please click here to see my area of expertise for PhD/MPhil supervision.

Administration

• Chair of the School Research Committee
• Member of the School Management Committee
• Director of the Centre for English Local History
• Course Director for MA in English Local History
  

Inaugral Lecture

In 2003 Christopher Dyer gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Regional and Local History, under the title 'Hidden from history: enquiries into past localities'. Professor Dyer began by thanking the vice-chancellor, Dr Peter Musgrave and colleagues in the Centre for Local History for welcoming him so warmly to the university and making his transfer so easy. One unique feature of the Centre is the existence of a very active 'Friends' organisation; the Friends make a great contribution to the success of the Centre by giving it a lively social dimension. As a local historian, he had jumped at the opportunity of coming to Leicester, to follow in the traditions of Hoskins, Finberg, Everitt and Charles Phythian-Adams. Leicester is well known all over the world as the place to study local history. When Marc Fitch, a businessman with a passion for local history, made his grant to the University, he was confident in the quality of the work being done in the Department.

Professor Dyer explained he had been influenced by the work of the Leicester approach to landscape long before he knew he would come to Leicester. He then went on to explain the approach of the Centre, the integration of different branches of history, which are too often treated as separate - landscape history, social history and cultural history. The rise of interest in social history has brought local history into prominence. Local history does not always enjoy a high reputation because of the volume of rather amateurish books and pamphlets published each year. We should not be offended by this but see it as proof of people's great interest in the subject. The widespread public interest in local history amounts to much more than the satisfaction of curiosity. A sense of belonging, a pride in place, is an important element in developing a civic consciousness. He has recently pointed out in lectures in such places as Cirencester and Chipping Campden that the places cannot really be described as 'wool towns', as most of the inhabitants' livelihood did not come from dealing in wool. Local historians should not feed people with the myths they want to hear, but make them aware of the complex, uncomfortable or contentious elements in their past.

Professor Dyer then moved to the second part of his lecture in which he gave an exposition of an imaginative and interdisciplinary approach to local history, describing many aspects of the past as hidden or at least obscure. Examples included the decision-making process involved in the creation of a nucleated village around the year 1000; exposing the myth of the comprehensive power of the lords; hidden local government; and the secret world of early farmers. Complimentary references were made to the work of Keith Snell and Harold Fox and criticisms were made of Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, who had just made disparaging remarks about universities which devoted themselves to the pursuit of knowledge.