Archie Duncan

Historian and professor of Scottish history at Glasgow University

Born: October 17, 1926;

Died: December 20, 2017

PROFESSOR Archie Duncan, who has died aged 91, was one of the foremost Scottish historians in the modern era.

He was one of the last of a generation of pioneers who established Scottish history as a subject of academic research in all its aspects. He was also a scholar ahead of his time, whose restless questioning of his own and others’ assumptions and practices made him one of the most intellectually interesting and complex medieval historians of the 20th century.

The chronological range of his specialist knowledge, stretching across the entire millennium of medieval history, is unlikely ever to be repeated. He achieved groundbreaking work in analysing charters, chronicles, and parliamentary records, translated Barbour’s celebrated Scots poetic narrative of Robert Bruce’s career (published as a Canongate Classic in 1997), and provided new insights into fundamental aspects of medieval Scottish kingship, government, law, and the economy.

Archibald Alexander McBeth Duncan was born in Pitlochry, although most of his childhood was spent in Edinburgh, where his father worked as a bookbinder. He was educated at George Heriot’s School, Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he became a tutor.

He was appointed in 1951 to a lectureship in history and palaeogra- phy at Queen’s University, Belfast, before joining the Scottish history department at the University of Edinburgh in 1953.

In that year he published the first significant work on the government of a medieval Scottish king based on a detailed study of 367 documents issued in the name of Robert Bruce. He continued work on this project for most of his career, culminating in his monumental Acts of Robert I, King of Scots, 1306-1329. Not only had he identified more than 200 further documents, but the volume included the equivalent of a monograph on Robert Bruce’s government and administration, transforming our understanding of the mechanisms and practices that underpinned the rule of the hero king.

As a lecturer in Queen’s University, Belfast, he had also established himself as a pioneer in Scottish social and economic history. Although his research gravitated towards the Middle Ages, he maintained an interest in all aspects of Scottish history.

In 1962, still only 35 years old, he was appointed Professor of Scottish History and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1979 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1985.

He retired in 1993, setting a record that is unlikely ever to be beaten as the longest serving holder of a chair in Scottish history. He played a leading role in the life of the University of Glasgow, and was elected Dean of the Faculty of Arts and, in 1978, Clerk of Senate. During his spell as a university administrator he established a new department (Scottish literature) and a new faculty (social science).

He was, above all, a scholar and teacher, and an inspiration for generations of historians. As a teacher he was committed to opening up Scottish history to anyone who would take a lively interest in it. As a scholar, he made a wealth of fundamental sources accessible for the first time. Much of this was at the hard core of the discipline. For more than 60 years he performed the forbidding task of publishing and analysing texts that could only be made intelligible through a deep understanding and complete command of the material.

One of his most remarkable books, however, was not a scholarly edition but what was intended as a textbook — albeit a textbook like no other. Scotland: the Making of the Kingdom, published in 1975, was a wide-ranging exploration of Scotland’s development as a kingdom and society up to the 1290s. Other history books written on this scale are based on a well populated field of research. However, there was no such body of work for him to draw on. For large parts of the book he had to start from the raw medieval sources themselves.

His restless intellect was his most inspiring quality, leading to a sometimes shocking capacity to question assumptions and undermine long cherished views of the past.

It was not unusual for students to repeat what they had read from one of his publications, only to be told by him that he had changed his mind. His unquenchable intellectual vitality was fuelled by a tendency to challenge cosy complacency and disrupt convention that some found difficult to deal with.

The result, however, is not only a legacy of fundamental scholarship that will be used by generations to come, but an innovative and open approach to history which is more in tune with the 21st century, leaving the study of medieval Scotland in a position to develop in ways he might not have foreseen, but would have encouraged and challenged in equal measure. Professor Duncan’s wife Ann predeceased him. He is survived by his children, Beatrice, Alastair and Ewen, and by six grandchildren.