Edmund Fryde

Edmund Bolesław Fryde, FBA (16 July 1923 – 17 November 1999) was a British historian of medieval England and the early Renaissance.

Early life and education Fryde was a son of Mieczysław (Matthew) Fryde, a prominent Polish-Jewish lawyer and economic historian, and Salomea Ludwika (Sarah Louise) Rosenzweig, both originally from Częstochowa. He grew up in Warsaw and came to the United Kingdom to study at Bradfield College in 1938. He took his undergraduate degree at Balliol College, University of Oxford (1942–4) and completed his doctoral thesis there in 1947.

Career Fryde was a Lecturer in Economic History, then a Professor at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1947 to 1990. Throughout his research career, he moved from the study of medieval economic history to intellectual history.

Personal life Fryde was married to Natalie Davies, his former student, from 1966 to 1981. He was a cousin of the novelist Uri Orlev.

Books The Wool Accounts of William de la Pole: A Study of Some Aspects of the English Wool Trade at the Start of the Hundred Years (1964) Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (1983) Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (1983) Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England c.1380–c.1525 (1996 (ed. with D. E. Greenway, S. Porter, and I. Roy) The Early Palaeologan Renaissance (1261–c.1360) (2000)