Professor Michael Clanchy

Professor Michael Clanchy (D54) (1936-2021)

By Alastair Dunn, Ampleforth College’s Designated Safeguarding Lead

Photo Credit: Courtesy of www.ucl.ac.uk

Michael T Clanchy was one the world’s most distinguished medieval historians of the last half century, and his work on medieval England helped to reframe the understanding of the Norman and Angevin epochs. Born in Reading in 1936 into a family of Irish Catholic heritage, Michael was the son of Captain Henry Clanchy, RN. Writing on Twitter shortly after his death, Michael Clanchy’s daughter Kate notes that at the age of six weeks he accompanied his father as Naval Attaché to Stalin’s USSR, until the NaziSoviet Pact and looming war forced their departure in 1939. After attending prep school Michael arrived at Ampleforth in the late 1940s, boarding in St Dunstan’s, and his teachers included Basil (later Cardinal) Hume. Leaving Ampleforth in 1954, he matriculated as a Scholar at Merton College, Oxford in 1956, which was then one of the great nurseries for medievalists. During his undergraduate years he met his future wife, Joan Milne, a scholar and JCR president at St Hugh’s, and later an eminent Headteacher.

Gaining a second class degree, Clanchy did not have funding to pursue postgraduate research at Oxford, and returned to his home city of Reading, where he combined school-teaching with a studying for a PhD at the university. Reading was a great powerhouse of Medieval studies, due to the presences of Sir Frank and Doris Stenton, and later that of Sir James Holt. Clanchy’s early research followed in the traditions of English administrative history, pioneered in the previous century by Bishop William Stubbs and T. F. Tout. His publications established him as a skilled researcher on the reign of Henry III, which helped to bring him to his first university position, at Glasgow, the home city of Joan, where he rose through the ranks to be Reader. It was during his tenure at Glasgow University that Michael Clanchy wrote the work that will forever define his reputation. From Memory to Written Record (Edward Arnold, 1979) bears a dedication to his former Merton tutor R. H. C. Davis, but in many respects this work broke dramatically with the past, and was an outrider for the integration of post-modern concepts of text and authorship into the English administrative historical. Clanchy was as much interested in the materiality of the vellum account rolls, the ink and the instruments as with what they reveal of the growth of royal bureaucracy and administrative practice. With chapter headings including ‘Memory and Myth’, ‘The Literate Mentality’ and ‘Hearing and Seeing’, Clanchy’s debt to anthropology, and to continental historiographical threads, was clear, and acknowledged. More than forty years since its publication, From Memory to Written Record remains a fresh and arresting read. The quality of his prose is clear from the line ‘In Domesday Book lords and serfs, animals and ploughs, mills and streams, all stand in arrested motion like clockwork automata when the mechanism fails.’

Several books followed including England and its Rulers, 1066-1266 (1983) the success of which is attested by its reissue in three successive editions, with an extension to cover the reign of Edward I. In 1985 the appointment of his wife Joan from the headship of St George’s, Edinburgh, to that of North London Collegiate School, necessitated a relocation to London at a time of cuts of Humanities budgets across the higher education sector. In spite of the academic acclaim attaching to his work, Michael Clanchy’s teaching at University College, London was not a fully tenured basis, and his research was undertaken without the enabling structure of awardbody funding. Notwithstanding these challenges, among his continuing output he produced another ground-breaking work Abelard, a Medieval Life (Blackwell, 1997), about which he later spoke on Radio Four’s In Our Time. In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. On 29 November 2016 he returned to Oxford to speak to a graduate seminar on Peter Abelard’s Ethics.

After a highly successful career in educational leadership, Joan Clanchy died on 15 January 2021, Michael outliving her by only fourteen days.

Michael T Clanchy in 1968