Christopher Dyer

Abstract

Christopher Dyer’s father was a builder’s foreman and his mother a primary schoolteacher. He was born in 1944 near Stratford-upon-Avon, and was educated at King Edward VI school in that town (1955–62), and went on to gain a BA and PhD at Birmingham University. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the estates of the bishopric of Worcester between 680 and 1540, which was a useful training as it made him think about many of the developments in society in the whole medieval period. The research was especially stimulating as it was supervised by Rodney Hilton. As a schoolboy he began to take part in archaeological excavations, and at university was taught medieval archaeology by Philip Rahtz. He was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in 1967 at an unusually early age, and moved back to Birmingham in 1970 where he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor. He was taken briefly out of the routine of teaching and administration in 2000–01 when he gave the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford, and was appointed to a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, 2000–01. He was then emboldened to take on a new permanent post, and became Professor of Regional and Local History at the University of Leicester in 2001.