David Bruce Crouch, (born 31 October 1953) is a British historian and academic. From 2000 until his retirement in 2018, he was
Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...
of
Medieval History at the
University of Hull
The University of Hull is a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was founded in 1927 as University College Hull. The main university campus is located in Hull and is home to the Hu ...
.
Academia
He graduated in history from the former
University College, Cardiff, in 1975, and pursued a career in secondary school teaching in
Mountain Ash, South Wales till 1983. While serving as a schoolteacher he completed a doctorate on the Anglo-Norman twin aristocrats,
Waleran of Meulan and
Robert of Leicester, subsequently published by Cambridge University Press. From 1984, he occupied research posts in the University of London until moving to a teaching position in North Riding College, later
University College, Scarborough in 1990. In 2000, he transferred to the Department of History in the University of Hull as professor of medieval history. He has occupied visiting professorships in Poitiers and Milwaukee. From 2013, he held a
Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship and in 2015 he was a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...
, Princeton.
Since retirement he has devoted his energies to the ongoing
Victoria Counties of England series on Yorkshire East Riding, publishing a two volume study of
Howdenshire wapentake and the reconstruction of a medieval Howdenshire gentry cartulary, constructing an edition from 17th-century antiquaries transcripts.
Corpus of work
Professor Crouch's main focus is on the social and political history of the period from 1000 to 1300, primarily in England and
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
, with a particular emphasis on comparative studies of social structures between the various realms of Britain and continental France. His fullest statement on his theory that it was the formulation of nobility as a self-conscious aristocratic quality demanding social deference is to be found in his 2005 work ''The Birth of Nobility''. His idea is that once nobility was a quality that could be acquired and demonstrated by conduct and lifestyle as much as by birth, a cascade effect was triggered which produced a hierarchy of social classes organised by relative degrees of nobility. He sees this as happening in the generations on either side of the year 1200.
From the beginning of his career he has also published on the medieval history of South East Wales and the diocese of
Llandaff.
In political history he has written influential biographies on
King Stephen and
William Marshal. He was a member of the academic team which edited and translated into English the contemporary medieval biography of Marshal
His books on the aristocracy of England and France in the
High Middle Ages
The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the periodization, period of European history between and ; it was preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended according to historiographical convention ...
, have been characterised by his incorporation of English social history into the mainstream of continental scholarship.
['The Pragmatic Origins of British Social History,' in, ''Die Deutung der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft in der Moderne'', ed. N. Fryde, P. Monnet, O.G. Oexle and L. Zygner (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 123-145]
Honours
In 1986, Crouch was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
In 2014, he was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy
Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:
# Fellows – scholars resident in t ...
(FBA), the United Kingdom's
national academy
A national academy is an organizational body, usually operating with state financial support and approval, that co-ordinates scholarly research activities and standards for academic disciplines, and serves as a public policy advisors, research ...
for the humanities and social sciences.
Books
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* 2nd edition 2002.
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Cambridge History of Britain series)
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References
External links
Biographyat the
University of Hull
The University of Hull is a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was founded in 1927 as University College Hull. The main university campus is located in Hull and is home to the Hu ...
home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crouch, David
1953 births
Living people
Academics of the University of Hull
Alumni of Cardiff University
British medievalists
Contributors to the Victoria County History
Fellows of the British Academy
Fellows of the Royal Historical Society
Historians of monarchy and royalty