James Campbell

James Campbell (26 January 1935 – 31 May 2016) was a British historian, specialising in the medieval period and the Anglo-Saxons. He was a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, from 1957 until his retirement in 2002, and Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2002.

Early life and education Campbell was born on 26 January 1935 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England. His birth father, John Henry Mogg was a teacher and his mother Barbara Hilda Brown was also a teacher and member of the Communist Party. After a period in foster care he was adopted by his maternal grandparents in 1938. He studied at Lowestoft Grammar School, where he found an interest in history. He took early entry to Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of 17 and graduated with a first in 1955, sharing the History Faculty's Gibbs Prize with Keith Thomas in 1954. He studied under Vivian Hunter Galbraith and May McKisack, and was influenced by Karl Leyser and K.B. McFarlane. In 1957, at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He held additional college appointments, including Fellow Librarian (1977–2002) and senior tutor (1989–1993), and also served as the University of Oxford's Senior Proctor for the 1973/74 academic year. He delivered the Raleigh Lecture on History on "The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View" at the British Academy in 1991, the Creighton Lecture on "European economic development in the eleventh century: an English case-study" at King's College, London in 1995 and the Ford Lectures on "The Origins of the English State" in the 1995/96 academic year. He remained at Worcester College until his retirement in 2002. Along with Sonia Chadwick Hawkes and David Brown, in 1979 he founded the series Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History. He was also interested in agriculture in Britain and Ireland from the 13th to 19th centuries.

Campbell had been elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA) in 1971

Personal life In the 1980s, Campbell moved out of college accommodation and settled in Witney, a village near Oxford. At the age of 71, he married Dr Bӓrbel Brodt on 7 October 2006. They did not have any children, and he was devastated by her death in October 2015. Campbell died at his home on 31 May 2016.

Selected works