Current Research

History of Parliament Research

I have written the constituency surveys and the great majority of the biographies for Bedford, Bedfordshire, Bishop’s Lynn, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Chippenham, Chipping Wycombe, Colchester, Cricklade, Dunwich, Essex, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, Great Yarmouth, Hertfordshire, Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, Ipswich, Maldon, Malmesbury, Norfolk, Norwich, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Worcester and Worcestershire, all of which I am now in the process of revising in preparation for  publication.

Research and Publications

My own research interests lie in late medieval and early modern East Anglia, particularly the gentry of that region. My principal publication is:

- The Townshends and their World: Gentry, Land and Law in Norfolk, c.1450-1551 (Oxford, 1992)

Other published work:

- ‘Henry Inglose: A Hard Man to Please’ (with Colin Richmond), in The Fifteenth Century X, Parliament, Personalities and Power: Papers Presented to Linda S. Clark, ed. Hannes Kleineke (2011), 39-52,

- ‘A disputed election to Richard III’s parliament’ (with Hannes Kleineke), The Ricardian, xix (2009), 32-49,

- ‘Anthony Woodville, Norwich and the Crisis of 1469’, in Margaret Aston and Rosemary Horrox, eds., Much Heaving and Shoving: Late-Medieval Gentry and their Concerns; Essays for Colin Richmond (2005), 62-66,

- ‘Richard Baynard, Speaker of the Commons of December, 1421’, History Today, liv, pt. 10 (Oct. 2004), 62,

- ‘Beware of grazing on foul mornings : a gentleman’s husbandry notes’ (with Colin Richmond), Norfolk Archaeology, xliii (2000), 500-3,

- ‘The “Diary” of a late fifteenth-century lawyer’, in Sharon D. Michalove and A. Compton Reeves, eds., Estrangement, Enterprise and Education in Fifteenth Century England (1998), 27-45,

- ‘Skayman’s Book, 1516–1518’ (with Paul Rutledge), in Farming and Gardening in Late Medieval Norfolk, Norfolk Record Society, lvi. (1997), 95-155,

- Samples of Chancery Pleadings and Suits: 1627, 1685, 1735 and 1785 (with H. Horwitz), List and Index Society, cclvii (1995),

- ‘Mid-Tudor Trespass: A Break-In at Norwich, 1549’, EHR, cviii (1993), 387-98,

- ‘The “Library” of a Late-Fifteenth-Century Lawyer’, The Library, 6th ser. xiii (1991), 338-346,

- ‘A social gulf? The upper and lesser gentry of later medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History, xvii (1991), 255-62,

- ‘A “best betrustyd frende”?: a late medieval lawyer and his clients’, The Journal of Legal History, xi. (1990), 183-90,

- ‘The Walsingham Conspiracy of 1537’, Historical Research, lxiii (1990), 29-43,

- ‘A local dispute and the politics of 1483: Roger Townshend, Earl Rivers and the duke of Gloucester’, The Ricardian, viii (1989), 305-7,

- ‘Green, John’ and ‘Heydon, Henry’, biographies in Oxford DNB.