Christopher Charles Dyer CBE FBA (born 1944) is Leverhulme Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History and director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, England.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. [1]
Educated at the University of Birmingham where he studied under Rodney Hilton, Dyer has taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Edinburgh, where he counted amongst his students the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown. He came to the University of Leicester in 2003.
Dyer is well known as an historian of everyday life. He examines the economic and social history of medieval life, with an emphasis on the English Midlands from the Saxon period through to the 16th century. He was invited to deliver the Ford Lectures in the University of Oxford in a lecture series entitled 'An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages'.
On 25 October 2013, Dyer presented his lecture 'Corby, Northamptonshire and Beyond: The History of Industry in the Countryside' [2] at The Marc Fitch Lectures.
Worcestershire is a ceremonial county in the West Midlands of England. It is bordered by Shropshire, Staffordshire, and the West Midlands county to the north, Warwickshire to the east, Gloucestershire to the south, and Herefordshire to the west. The city of Worcester is the largest settlement and the county town.
The Midlands is the central part of England, bordered by Wales, Northern England, Southern England and the North Sea. The Midlands were important in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries and are split into the West Midlands and East Midlands. The biggest city, Birmingham, is the second-largest in the United Kingdom. Other important cities include Coventry, Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton, and Worcester
Bromsgrove is a town in Worcestershire, England, about 16 miles (26 km) northeast of Worcester and 13 miles (21 km) southwest of Birmingham city centre. It had a population of 29,237 in 2001. Bromsgrove is the main town in the larger Bromsgrove District. In the Middle Ages, it was a small market town, primarily producing cloth through the early modern period. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became a major centre for nail making.
The area now known as Worcestershire has had human presence for over half a million years. Interrupted by two ice ages, Worcestershire has had continuous settlement since roughly 10,000 years ago. In the Iron Age, the area was dominated by a series of hill forts, and the beginnings of industrial activity including pottery and salt mining can be found. It seems to have been relatively unimportant during the Roman era, with the exception of the salt workings.
William George Hoskins was an English local historian who founded the first university department of English Local History. His great contribution to the study of history was in the field of landscape history.
Spalding Priory was a small Benedictine house in the town of Spalding, Lincolnshire, dedicated to St Mary the Virgin and St Nicholas.
Henry Royston Loyn, FBA, was a British historian specialising in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. His eminence in his field made him a natural candidate to run the Sylloge of the Coins of the British Isles, which he chaired from 1979 to 1993. He was Professor of Medieval History in the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and afterwards Professor of Medieval History at Westfield College in the University of London.
Maurice Warwick Beresford, was an English economic historian and archaeologist specialising in the medieval period. He was Professor of Economic History at the University of Leeds.
Irene Joan Thirsk, was a British economic and social historian, specialising in the history of agriculture. She was the leading British early modern agrarian historian of her era, as well as an important social and economic historian. Her work highlighted the regional differences in agricultural practices in England. She also had an interest in food history and local English history, in particular of Hadlow, Kent.
Urse d'Abetot was a Norman who followed King William I to England, and became Sheriff of Worcestershire and a royal official under him and Kings William II and Henry I. He was a native of Normandy and moved to England shortly after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, and was appointed sheriff in about 1069. Little is known of his family in Normandy, who were not prominent, but he probably got his name from the village Abetot. Although Urse's lord in Normandy was present at the Battle of Hastings, there is no evidence that Urse took part in the invasion of England in 1066.
Hemming's Cartulary is a manuscript cartulary, or collection of charters and other land records, collected by a monk named Hemming around the time of the Norman Conquest of England. The manuscript comprises two separate cartularies that were made at different times and later bound together; it is in the British Library as MS Cotton Tiberius A xiii. The first was composed at the end of the 10th or beginning of the 11th century. The second section was compiled by Hemming and was written around the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 12th century. The first section, traditionally titled the Liber Wigorniensis, is a collection of Anglo-Saxon charters and other land records, most of which are organized geographically. The second section, Hemming's Cartulary proper, combines charters and other land records with a narrative of deprivation of property owned by the church of Worcester.
The Oswaldslow was a hundred in the English county of Worcestershire, which was named in a supposed charter of 964 by King Edgar the Peaceful. It was actually a triple hundred, composed of three smaller hundreds. It was generally felt to be named after Bishop Oswald of Worcester, and created by the merging of Cuthburgelow, Winburgetreow and Wulfereslaw Hundreds.
Richard Barrie Dobson, was an English historian, who was a leading authority on the legend of Robin Hood as well as a scholar of ecclesiastical and Jewish history. He served as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge from 1988 to 1999.
Nicholas Peter Brooks, FBA was an English medieval historian.
Childhood in Medieval Scotland includes all aspects of childhood within the geographical area that became the Kingdom of Scotland, from the end of Roman power in Great Britain, until the Renaissance and Reformation in the sixteenth century.
Christopher Robert Cheney was a medieval historian, noted for his work on the medieval English church and the relations of the papacy with England, particularly in the age of Pope Innocent III.
David G. Hey was an English historian, and was an authority on surnames and the local history of Yorkshire. Hey was the president of the British Association for Local History, and was a published author of several books on local history and the derivation of surnames.
Worcester's early importance is partly due to its position on trade routes, but also because it was a centre of Church learning and wealth, due to the very large possessions of the See and Priory accumulated in the Anglo-Saxon period. After the reformation, Worcester continued as a centre of learning, with two early grammar schools with strong links to Oxford University.
Leslie Elizabeth Webster, is an English retired museum curator and art historian of Anglo-Saxon and Viking art. She worked from 1964 until 2007 at the British Museum, rising to Keeper, where she curated several major exhibitions, and published many works, on the Anglo-Saxons and Early Middle Ages.
James L. Bolton, FRHistS, published as J. L. Bolton but otherwise commonly known as Jim Bolton, is an English medieval economic historian. Between 1965 and 1994, he taught at Queen Mary College, where he remains a Professorial Research Fellow.