Doing History, by Colin Richmond

Abstract

Colin Richmond is best known to historians of fifteenth-century England. Undergraduate at Leicester, graduate student of K.B. McFarlane at Oxford, he spent his entire teaching career at Keele, rising eventually to become a most unprofessorial professor; it is more natural to refer to him as Colin. Essentially a teacher, he has an impressive record of publications, distinguished above all by their particularity; most notably, his three-volume companion to the Paston Letters, teasing out the minutest details of the legal cases and personal interrelationships which are the framework for that intriguing but opaque collection. Much of his output has taken the form of essays, typically examining an incident or a person; one such, a study of an obscure Suffolk gentleman, John Hopton, extended to book length. A variant has been a number of spoof academic papers, typically delivered after dinner at conferences, collected as The Penket Papers (1986), one of which famously took in The Times. Microscopic in focus, none of these (even the spoof ones) have been trivial. Colin uses the specific to explore, allusively, fundamental questions about the responsibilities of the historian, of agency in individuals and social groups. That sense is tested against, indeed controlled by, his secondary interest in twentieth-century history, especially in the triangular German-Jewish-Polish relationship.