Richard Morris | |
|---|---|
 Richard Morris (writer and archaeologist) | |
| Born | Richard Morris 8 October 1947 |
| Occupation(s) | Archaeologist, Writer |
Richard Morris, OBE (born 8 October 1947) [1] is a British writer and archaeologist who explores landscape, the archaeology of churches and battlefields, and cultural and aviation history. He is a professor (emeritus) at the University of Huddersfield [2] and a visiting fellow of the Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds.
Morris was born in Birmingham and grew up in north Worcestershire, where his father was the first vicar of the motor industry parish of Longbridge. [3] He was educated at Denstone College in Staffordshire, Pembroke College, Oxford, and the University of York, where he studied composition. [4]
Morris aimed initially at a career in music but turned to archaeology in 1971 as a member of the team excavating under York Minster. [5] In 1975 he become the Churches Officer of the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), responsible for setting up archaeological advice networks for churches and cathedrals. [6] In 1988 he joined the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. He returned to the CBA as its director in 1991, there helping to launch the popular magazine British Archaeology. From 2003 to 2010 he was director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, then moved to Huddersfield to join the university’s Department of History. [7]
Morris has served as a Commissioner of English Heritage and as a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, [8] the National Coal Mining Museum for England, Bede’s World in Jarrow, the York Archaeological Trust, The Blackden Trust [9] and the Landscape Research Centre. [10]
Interests in religion, settlement and cultural history are reflected in books, essays and articles. Churches in the Landscape (1989) explores patterns of parish church distribution and asks why places of worship occupy the sites they do. Time’s Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination (2012), Yorkshire (2018) and Evensong (2021) are a trio of books in which events from his and his family’s lives are put in conversation with larger and longer narratives. Time’s Anvil was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize (then the Samuel Johnson Prize) and shortlisted for Current Archaeology’s Book of the Year Award. [11]
Morris has also written about the air war in the 20th century, including biographies of Guy Gibson VC DSO DFC (1994), Leonard Cheshire VC OM (2000), and Sir Barnes Wallis (2023).
While at Leeds, Morris worked with the archaeologist Glenn Foard to produce an archaeological resource assessment of English battlefields. The project, commissioned by English Heritage (now Historic England), led to a book, The Archaeology of English Battlefields (2012), principally by Foard, which characterises battlefields as archaeological sites and offers methodologies for their study. [12] With Robert Owen he co-authored Breaching the German the Dams (2008) which re-examined aspects of Operation Chastise. Research for the Gibson biography was aided by Colin Dobinson, who also provided the book’s appendices and contributed to several chapters. [13]
As a student, Morris collaborated with the author-to-be Anthony Holden in an opera based on Holden’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, performed at the Oxford Playhouse in 1969. [14] The Bellybag, a piece of music theatre for young people with a libretto by Alan Garner, followed. [15] After turning to archaeology, Morris continued to compose, principally for the Abbey Shakespeare Players who perform annually at St Dogmaels Abbey in Pembrokeshire. [16] He has written for the singer and director Linda Kitchen [17] , the York Shakespeare Project, [18] Hilary Elfick’s An Ordinary Storm [19] , and the west Wales Côr Aberteifi.
In 1992 Morris was awarded the Frend Medal of the Society of Antiquaries of London. [20] He was appointed OBE for services to archaeology in 2003.
| Title | Year | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cathedrals and Abbeys of England and Wales | 1979 | W W Norton & Co, Inc. | 0393012816 |
| The Church in British Archaeology | 1983 | Council for British Archaeology | 9780906780176 |
| Churches in the Landscape | 1989 | Phoenix | 0460860143 |
| Guy Gibson (with Colin Dobinson) | 1994 | Penguin | 0670828785 |
| Cheshire: The Biography of Leonard Cheshire VC OM | 2000 | Penguin | 9780670867356 |
| Breaching the German Dams (with Robert Owen) | 2008 | RAF Museum | |
| Time's Anvil: England, archaeology and the imagination | 2012 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | 1780222440 |
| The Archaeology of English Battlefields: Conflict in the Pre-industrial Landscape (with Glenn Foard) | 2012 | Council for British Archaeology | 9781902771885 |
| Yorkshire: A Lyrical History of England’s Greatest County | 2018 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | 9780297609438 |
| Evensong: Reflections on the Church in England | 2021 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | 9781474614238 |
| Dam Buster. Barnes Wallis: An Engineer’s Life | 2023 | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | 9781474623421 |
The Battle of Bosworth or Bosworth Field was the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York that extended across England in the latter half of the 15th century. Fought on 22 August 1485, the battle was won by an alliance of Lancastrians and disaffected Yorkists. Their leader Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, became the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty by his victory and subsequent marriage to a Yorkist princess. His opponent Richard III, the last king of the House of York, was killed during the battle, the last English monarch to die in combat. Historians consider Bosworth Field to mark the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, making it one of the defining moments of English history.
The Battle of Towton took place on 29 March 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, near Towton in North Yorkshire, and "has the dubious distinction of being probably the largest and bloodiest battle on English soil". Fought for ten hours between an estimated 50,000 soldiers in a snowstorm on Palm Sunday, the Yorkist army achieved a decisive victory over their Lancastrian opponents. As a result, Edward IV deposed the Lancastrian Henry VI and secured the English throne.
In the United Kingdom, a scheduled monument is a nationally important archaeological site or historic building, given protection against unauthorised change.
The Cathedral Church of Saint Martin, Leicester, commonly known as Leicester Cathedral, is a Church of England cathedral in Leicester, England and the seat of the Bishop of Leicester. The church was elevated to a collegiate church in 1922 and made a cathedral in 1927 following the establishment of a new Diocese of Leicester in 1926.
Hexham Abbey is a Grade I listed church dedicated to St Andrew, in the town of Hexham, Northumberland, in the North East of England. Originally built in AD 674, the Abbey was built up during the 12th century into its current form, with additions around the turn of the 20th century. Since the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537, the Abbey has been the parish church of Hexham. In 2014 the Abbey regained ownership of its former monastic buildings, which had been used as Hexham magistrates' court, and subsequently developed them into a permanent exhibition and visitor centre, telling the story of the Abbey's history.
Ridley Hall is a theological college located on the corner of Sidgwick Avenue and Ridley Hall Road in Cambridge, which trains men and women intending to take Holy Orders as deacon or priest of the Church of England, and members of the laity working with children and young people as lay pioneers and within a pastoral capacity such as lay chaplaincy.
The Council for British Archaeology (CBA) is an educational charity established in 1944 in the UK. It works to involve people in archaeology and to promote the appreciation and care of the historic environment for the benefit of present and future generations. It achieves this by promoting research, conservation and education, and by widening access to archaeology through effective communication and participation.
Richard Keith Robert Coles is an English writer, radio presenter and Church of England clergyman who was the vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire from 2011 to 2022. He first came to prominence as the multi-instrumentalist who partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band the Communards. They achieved three UK top ten hits, including the No. 1 record and best-selling single of 1986, a dance version of "Don't Leave Me This Way".
Liddington Castle, locally called Liddington Camp, is a late Bronze Age and early Iron Age univallate hillfort in Liddington parish in the English county of Wiltshire, and a scheduled monument.
Bradford Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of St Peter, is an Anglican cathedral in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, one of three co-equal cathedrals in the Diocese of Leeds alongside Ripon and Wakefield. Its site has been used for Christian worship since the 7th century, when missionaries based in Dewsbury evangelised the area. For many centuries it was the parish church of St Peter and achieved cathedral status in 1919. The cathedral is a Grade I listed building.
Battlefield archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which studies the material remains and topography of a battlefield to understand a conflict. Archaeological battlefields consist of skirmishes, sieges, camps, and training sites. The study of the relationships and contexts of the material by-products of war give an alternate account to the version recorded in a history book, poem, or witness account, which may be constructed though bias, or may present only a limited perspective of the events. Examination of these locations gives insight to what tactics were being used, weapon modifications, and battle formations. It is not considered distinct from Military archaeology or Recceology.
Leeds Minster, or the Minster and Parish Church of Saint Peter-at-Leeds is the minster church of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It stands on the site of the oldest church in the city and is of architectural and liturgical significance. A church is recorded on the site as early as the 7th century, although the present structure is a Gothic Revival one, designed by Robert Dennis Chantrell and completed in 1841. It is dedicated to Saint Peter and was the Parish Church of Leeds before receiving the honorific title of "Minster" in 2012. It has been designated a Grade I listed building by Historic England.
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Thirkleby High and Low with Osgodby is a civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. The constituents of the parish consist of the villages of Great Thirkleby, Little Thirkleby and the scattered hamlet of Osgodby. The similarly named medieval settlement of Thirkleby Manor is in the parish of Kirby Grindalythe, Ryedale district. The population of the civil parish taken at the 2011 Census was 266.
Registered battlefields in the UK are battlefields recognised as having specific historic or cultural significance. They are recognised as such by conservationist organisations for a variety of reasons, including protecting them from development that may threaten historic buildings, items, or topography. The history relating to them is often hard to unravel, as there is often little to see above ground and the historical record is often biased in favour of the victors. The UK has many historic battlefield sites, some of which have legal protection through heritage protection legislation whilst others are protected through landscape legislation. More recently, some archaeologists prefer the term "site of conflict" to "battlefield", because of the difficulty in defining the geographical extent of a site.
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Bent Rigg Radar Station,, was a radar site located at Bent Rigg, 0.6 miles (1 km) south of Ravenscar, North Yorkshire, England. Several radar stations had been located in the Ravenscar area from 1938, but a more permanent site was built at Bent Rigg in 1941, which was crewed by technicians and other staff from the Royal Air Force. Bent Rigg, and the wider location around Ravenscar, was deemed "attractive" for the siting of long-range finding equipment. It was originally part of the Coastal Defence/Chain Home Low (CD/CHL) system, designed to detect shipping. Later, it was upgraded with more powerful equipment as part of the Chain Home Extra Low (CHEL). The last recorded use of the station was in September 1944, and it is believed that the site closed soon afterwards.
Morris, Richard (2012) Time’s Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Morris, Richard (2021) Evensong. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Morris, R., Dobinson, C., and Frankland, N. (1995) Guy Gibson. Penguin.
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