David Bates (historian)

David Bates (born 30 April 1945) is a British historian of Britain and France during the period from the tenth century to the thirteenth century. He has written many books and articles during his career.

Books

The most important of his books are:

• Normandy before 1066 (London and New York, 1982)
• A Bibliography of Domesday Book (Woodbridge, 1986)
• William the Conqueror (1989)
• Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I, 1066–1087 (Oxford, 1998)
• The Normans and Empire (Oxford, 2013)
• William the Conqueror (London and New Haven, 2016)

The two most recent of these books seek to create an analytical framework for the expansion of the Normans in Western Europe and to propose a radical revision of the life of William the Conqueror. The first of them was published by Oxford University Press and the second by Yale University Press in the English Monarchs series. Normandy before 1066, when published in 1982, was a significant reinterpretation of Normandy's early history. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum contains the texts of all of William the Conqueror's charters, including many unknown or scarcely known ones. All of these four books are based on extensive researches in the archives and libraries in France and Normandy that have uncovered a lot of new or inadequately known material and on a determination to place the history of the Normans and the lands they occupied and settled within a European and a modern interpretative context.

Education and career

• King Edward VI Grammar School, Nuneaton (1955–63)
• University of Exeter (BA, 1966, and PhD, 1970)
• Archivist at the Imperial War Museum in London (1969–71)
• Fellow of the University of Wales, University College, Cardiff (now the University of Cardiff) (1971–73). He remained there as lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, and professor until 1994.
• Edwards Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow (1994–2003)
• Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London (2003–08)
• Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia (2008–10). He is now professorial fellow there.
• Visiting professor at the University of Caen Normandie (2009–12) as holder of a 'Chaire d'Excellence' funded by the then Région de la Basse-Normandie.
• The University of Caen Normandie awarded him an honorary doctorate (Docteur Honoris Causa) in 2000.

He is now an honorary fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, a Life Member of Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge, and a vice-president of the Dugdale Society.^[1]

He has also held many visiting posts and fellowships. These include:

• A Huntington Library Fellowship at the Henry E. Huntington Library, Pasadena, California (November–December 1984)
• A Visiting Professorship at the Ecole Nationale des Chartes in Paris (April–May 1999)
• A British Academy Marc Fitch Research Readership (September 2001 – September 2003)
• A Visiting Fellow Commonership at Trinity College, Cambridge (October 2002 – March 2003)
• Directeur d'Etudes Invité at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris (May 2003)
• A Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship (2013–2015)

He has given many prestigious public lectures. These include :

• The Stenton Lecture at the University of Reading (1999)
• The R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture (2002) at the Battle Conference
• The Henry Loyn Memorial Lecture (2006) at Cardiff University
• The James W. Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford (2010), a series of lectures on which The Normans and Empire is based.

Professional contribution

In addition to his publications, he has taken on many responsibilities for the welfare of the study of history and for the arts and humanities in general during his career. At Cardiff he was head of History and Welsh History, at Glasgow, head of the Departments of Medieval History and history and of the School of History and Archaeology. As director of the Institute of Historical Research, he held one of the most important posts in the UK historical profession.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Centenary Fellow of the Historical Association, a member of the Academy of Europe, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He has been involved in many national projects and international collaborations and has been a vice-president of the Royal Historical Society. He is a dedicated lecturer to Historical Association branches. While the majority of his international collaborations have been aimed to enhance exchanges between British and French scholars, he has also been involved in projects with Japanese, Israeli, Russian, American, and Italian scholars. As the founding editor of the Longmans/Pearson Medieval World series from 1987 to 2001, he encouraged publications by other scholars. He was the director of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies from 2010 to 2013.

He has a notable record of editing volumes based on conference proceedings that have again contributed to the general well-being of the discipline. In addition to the three volumes of Anglo-Norman Studies based on the three Battle Conferences he directed, these include:

• (with Anne Curry) England and Normandy in the Middle Ages (1994)
• (with Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton) Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow (2006)
• (with Robert Liddiard) East Anglia and its North Sea World in the Middle Ages (2013)
• (with Pierre Bauduin) 911–2011: Penser les mondes normands médiévaux: Actes du colloque international de Caen et Cerisy (29 septembre-2 octobre 2011) (2016)

References

• BATES, Prof. David Richard, Who's Who 2017, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2016 ISBN 9781472913609

External links

• Works by or about David Bates in libraries (WorldCat catalog)