Prestigious Edwards Lecture in Medieval History takes place in person
Published: 1 March 2022
With Professor Bruce Campbell, on Thursday 17 March 2022
The Edwards Lecture 2022
Thursday 17 March 2022 at 5.30pm
Professor Bruce Campbell, FBA, MRIA, Professor Emeritus, Queens University, Belfast
‘Out of the Ashes: Reconstructing the Economic Fortunes of the Lordship of Ireland following the 1922 Destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland’
In 1920 Goddard Henry Orpen published the final volume of his seminal work, Ireland under the Normans, 1169-1333, in which he argued that ‘due credit has not been given to the English Crown and of its ministers in Ireland for creating the comparative peace and order and the manifest progress and prosperity that Ireland enjoyed, during the thirteenth century’. Two years later, during the Irish civil war, the Public Record Office of Ireland was utterly destroyed along with the bulk of the extant records of that English administration. This lecture explores how historians of medieval Ireland have recovered from that unmitigated disaster and draws upon the wealth of information that did not perish in 1922 to challenge Orpen’s benign verdict on the first 160 years of English rule in Ireland.
Professor Campbell is one of the foremost economic historians of later medieval Britain and Ireland, specializing in human-environment interactions during the 14th century as well as in trends in agricultural output and productivity from the 13th to 19th centuries. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Among his extensive publications, his monographs include English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 2000); The Medieval Antecedents of English Agricultural Progress (Ashgate, 2007); Field Systems and Farming Systems in Late Medieval England (Ashgate, 2008); Land and People in Late Medieval England (Ashgate, 2007); and The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
In person event AND online to register please go to https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/287701441757
First published: 1 March 2022
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