Blue guardian margaret english patch11/9/2022 ![]() After graduating, she trained as an archivist at University College London (1950-51) and worked briefly at the Middlesex County Record Office before settling in as an assistant on the Victoria County History (VCH), which was engaged in creating an encyclopedic history of each county of England. Her path to distinction was not wholly conventional. She attended Howell’s school, Denbigh, and took a degree in history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Susan was born in London, the daughter of a solicitor, Hugh Reynolds, and his wife, Maisie (nee Morten). ![]() Susan connected a new justification for compulsory purchase with a new theory of the state. She also highlighted a 17th-century development by showing that the Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius developed a new theory that justified the idea: social contract theory, the idea that “the people” convey power to their rulers, the same theory that is generally assumed nowadays to legitimate the power of governments. Susan demonstrated that the idea itself is very old, and goes back to the Roman empire. “Eminent domain” is the right of governments to confiscate property in the public interest. Susan’s final book was a contribution to the history of political thought as well as of law, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good (2010). Susan Reynolds’ Fiefs and Vassals, published in 1994. The book was also an essay on the comparative history of law, across the boundaries that tended to separate historians of English and of continental law. Anglophone historians had previously paid no attention to this remarkable hybrid legal system. She also showed how the legal system of the Roman empire took root in universities and came to incorporate feudal laws. Largely as a consequence of this work, the word “feudalism”, or the “F-word”, as it came to be called by historians, began to lose currency among British medievalists. Few books have been more intensely discussed by professional medieval historians. Then came Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994), in which she attacked most previous general interpretations of the middle ages. As a result of her book and how it changed understanding of the period, she was elected to the British Academy in 1993. She studied England, France, Germany and Italy together. She also broke down the barrier that had tended to separate British from “continental” history in the syllabuses of British universities. Sir Isaiah Berlin once proposed that great history was the kind that found connections between different layers of life. Susan Reynolds was medieval tutor at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 1964 until her retirement in 1986 Susan explained how society at the time was based on a wide range of communities: parishes, guilds, urban groups and regional assemblies, as well as kingdoms, the feudal character of which she was already tending to dismiss. ![]() In her book Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (1984) she presented medieval society as structured above all by these “horizontal” groups of people. Susan’s key contributions came in the second half of her life, in her 50s, by which time a highly original interpretation of medieval history had crystallised in her mind. As her ideas filter down from academia into school curriculums, the “feudal chain” formula is likely to lose its place. As a consequence of her work, a generation of university history students has already dropped “feudal” from their vocabulary. ![]() In a series of books, Susan knocked down this portrayal, showing that medieval life is better understood by the “horizontal” social bonds between people of the same status. She believed the typical description taught in primary schools – a vertical diagram descending from king to barons to knights to peasants – was misleading. Susan Reynolds, who has died aged 92, was an academic who changed the way historians think about the middle ages. ![]()
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