History

I did my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at University College London, and  submitted a doctoral thesis on warfare in medieval Cheshire, supervised by the late Professor Sir Rees Davies. Whilst at UCL I also worked as an assistant editor, first with the late Dr John Morris and then with the late Professor John McN Dodgson on the Phillimore Domesday project. I held a temporary lectureship at Queen Mary College, University of London and taught in a secondary school in Chippenham (Wiltshire) for six years before being appointed as a lecturer in local history in the department of adult education at Keele University in 1984. I was assimilated by the department of history in  the early 1990s. Whilst at Keele I have taught as a visiting lecturer at Liverpool University on the M.A. in archive administration, and now hold an honorary research fellowship there, and have held two Fulbright visiting professorships, at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1990-91 and at Wesminster College Missouri in 2000-01.

• The gentry. The character and formation of the medieval English gentry, especially their cultural identities and attitudes to family and lineage.
• Medieval warfare. The battle of Shrewsbury, 1403 is a current book project which reflects interests in the social context of war.
• Chronicles. An edition of the chronicle of the Cistercian abbey at Croxden, Staffordshire.
• Water. The cultural history of water across a long chronology from prehistory to the modern world, including ritual landscapes and practices.

Undergraduate

I teach courses in English and European history in the period 500-1500. These include first-year courses on early-medieval Europe 950-1250, and second-year courses on Castle and Cloister (shared with Dr Kate Cushing) and English Radicals and Writers, 1350-1425 (also shared with Dr Kate Cushing). I offer topics on the Princes in the Tower for the first-year core module, and History by Numbers and the Armenian genocide for the second-year core module, Sources and Debates. I teach one of two special subjects, one on  the reign of Edward II and the other on the cultural history of water.

Postgraduate 

I am currently supervising an AHRC doctoral studentship on 'The Lords of the North-Sea World,' a study of early-medieval lordship, and have recently supervised an AHRC collaborative doctoral studentship with Lichfield cathedral on ‘The Lands of St Chad.'  I have masters' students working on the Isle of Man in the early middle ages, noblewomen in the early fourteenth century, toll-road collectors in the nineteenth century, and the introduction of computing into the NHS.

I teach palaeography and diplomatic  for masters' students.