Mark Ormrod
Historian who wrote an acclaimed biography of Edward III, one of England’s greatest war leaders
MARK ORMROD, who has died of cancer aged 62, was professor of medieval history at the University of York and best known for his 700-page biography, Edward III (2011), a compelling study of one of England’s most successful war leaders.
Filled with extraordinary detail of a reign that lasted half a century, Ormrod’s account built up a portrait of a king who came to the throne at the age of 14 in unpropitious circumstances, his father, Edward II, having been deposed and murdered by his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover Roger Mortimer.
Yet he overcame his inheritance to rule through active involvement at the heart of events, through a powerful sense of the responsibilities of kingship, an ability to articulate aims that English nobles were prepared to support, and a remarkable capacity to heal the wounds on the body politic that his parents had inflicted.
Edward’s wars with Scotland and France were costly, yet victories such as Crécy and Poitiers meant that he was able to carry his people with him, even after the arrival of the Black Death.
Though personal records were scanty, Ormrod somehow managed to humanise the king, showing him dressed as a pheasant for a fancy dress party and fighting incognito on the streets of Calais to repel a French attempt to recapture the town.
He also conveyed the extraordinary hold of the code of chivalry in public affairs. In 1356 the guest of honour at the feast to celebrate England’s triumph at the Battle of Poitiers was the captured French king, Jean II.
Edward’s ambition to add the throne of France to his crown proved vain, of course, and Ormrod demonstrated that it was in developments in English law – from the emergence of the justices of the peace to the statutory definition of treason – that proved to be of more lasting significance.
From 2012 to 2015 Ormrod headed a team of researchers which established a major new research database on immigration in England in the late medieval period when, they estimated, some 70,000 people, one person in every hundred, was a foreign national.
As in modern times, people who made their way to England in the Middle Ages ranged from settlers to traders and travellers, from asylum seekers and refugees to professionals and unskilled migrant workers. The research revealed how such people integrated – and sometimes clashed – with the indigenous population, and gave fascinating insights into how different communities used language, dress and behaviour as symbols of their identity.
It also found that, notwithstanding the rhetoric of hostility, moderation often prevailed, and questions of economic usefulness often determined the degree to which the indigenous population tolerated incomers or not.
William Mark Ormrod was born in Neath, Wales, on November 1 1957 to David and Margaret Ormrod, and educated at Neath boys’ grammar school, where he was head boy. He then read History at King’s College, London, and went on to take a Dphil at Worcester College, Oxford, on Edward III’S administration between 1346 and 1356.
After lectureships at the University of Sheffield, Queen’s University,
Belfast, and Cambridge, he moved to York University where he appointed professor of medieval history in 1995. He also became director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, head of the Department of History (2001 and 2003-07) and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2009-17).
In 2013, after the body of Richard III was found under a car park in Leicester he lent his support to a campaign to have the king’s remains returned to Yorkshire. Richard, he said, “regarded Yorkshire as his political and family home. The available evidence suggests that he wanted to be buried not in the Midlands or the South, but at York Minster.
“In Richard’s own time, royal remains were often exhumed and moved significant distances for more dignified reburial. Richard’s own preferences, and good historical precedent, therefore dictate that England’s last Yorkist king should be interred in the fittingly magnificent surroundings of York Minster.”
His work on migration contributed to changes in the national curriculum and led to the creation of the Runnymede Trust’s Our Migration Story, which won the Guardian Award for Research Impact in 2019.
Ormrod was a kind and generous supervisor to more than 40 PHD students and research assistants, and in July a festschrift, Monarchy, State and Political Culture, was presented to him by former students and colleagues, some of whom have also endowed a Mark Ormrod Prize to be awarded annually to the best PHD on a medieval topic. Ormrod’s penultimate book, Women and Parliament in Later Medieval England, published earlier this year, showed that medieval women were active supplicants to the Crown in Parliament and that there were a number of issues, particularly dower and rape, on which they consistently pressed for changes in the law.
His last book, Winner and Waster and its Contexts – Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-century England, will be published early next year.
In 2006 Mark Ormrod entered a civil partnership with Richard Dobson, who survives him.
. Mark Ormrod, born November 1 1957, died August 2 2020