C. A. J. Armstrong

Charles Arthur John Armstrong (25 June 1909 – 9 August 1994) was a leading post-war English historian, known for his studies of the First Battle of St Albans and the medieval Duchy of Burgundy.

Early life and discovery of the Mancini MS Educated at Harrow School, he became one of a district group of English historians from Oxford University, along with K. B. McFarlane and E.F. Jacob. On leaving Oxford, he worked briefly for the Diplomatic Service He presented a description of this in The Times the same year, and then proceeded to translate and transcribe the manuscript. Since described as 'a model of precise scholarship,'

Career He joined Hertford College as a Tutor in Modern History the following year, and taught there for the next thirty years, eventually being elected a Fellow of the college. His career was not without incident: 'intolerant of cant or hypocrisy,' wrote Saul, he would prefer to leave the college's High Table and dine with the undergraduates if he disapproved of the dinner company forced upon him.

Personal life Armstrong married to another scholar, She was Emerita Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, who herself wrote upon sixteenth-century France. He died on 9 August 1994 at the age of eighty-five.

Selected bibliography

The Usurpation of Richard the Third: Dominicus Mancinus ad Angelum Catonem de Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium Libellus, Oxford University Press, 1936. 'Some examples of the distribution and the speed of news in England at the time of Wars of the Roses,' in Hunt, R.W., Pantin, W.A., Southern, R.W. (eds.), Studies in medieval history presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, Oxford, 1948. ‘Politics and the Battle of St. Albans, 1455’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1960. England, France and Burgundy in the fifteenth century, London, 1983. 'Some examples of the distribution and speed of news in England at the time of the Wars of the Roses,' Medieval History, 1991. 'Les ducs de Bourgogne, interprètes de la pensée politique du XVe siècle,' Annales de Bourgogne, 1995.