Christopher Dyer


Christopher Charles Dyer is a Leverhulme Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History and a former director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, England.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

Background

Educated at the University of Birmingham where he studied under Rodney Hilton, Dyer has taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Edinburgh, where he counted amongst his students the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown. He came to the University of Leicester in 2001.

Work

Dyer is known as an historian of everyday life. His work examines the economic and social history of medieval life, with an emphasis on the English Midlands from the Saxon period through to the 16th century. He delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford for 2000–01, titled "An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages".
On 25 October 2013, Dyer presented his lecture "Corby, Northamptonshire and Beyond: The History of Industry in the Countryside" at The Marc Fitch Lectures.

Selected publications

  • Making a Living in the Middle Ages: the People of Britain, 850–1520 ; London, 2003 ; New Haven, 2003, 403 pp.ISBN 0-300-09060-9
  • Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 297 pp.ISBN 0 521 25127 3 hardback, ISBN 0 521 27215 7 paperback.
  • Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: the Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 427 pp.
  • "The urbanizing of Staffordshire: the first phases", Staffordshire Studies, 14, pp. 1–31
  • , "Seasonal patterns of trade in the later Middle Ages: buying and selling at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, 1400–1520", Nottingham Medieval Studies, 46, pp. 162–84.
  • "Villages and non-villages in the medieval Cotswolds", Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 120, pp. 11–35.
  • , "Estudios recientes sobre la historia agraria y rural medieval britanica", Historia Agraria, 31, pp. 13–33.
  • "Birmingham in the Middle Ages", in Birmingham: Bibliography of a City, ed. Carl Chinn, pp. 1–14.
  • "Alternative agriculture: goats in medieval England", in People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture: Essays for Joan Thirsk, ed. R. W. Hoyle, pp. 20–38.
  • , "Medieval tanning and retting at Brewood, Staffordshire: archaeological excavations 1999–2000", Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions, 40, pp. 1–57.
  • "The political life of the fifteenth-century English village", The Fifteenth Century, 4, pp. 135–57.
  • An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages .
  • "Bishop Wulfstan and his estates", in St Wulfstan and his World, ed. Julia Barrow and Nicholas Brooks, pp. 137–45.
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