Event Details

Professor Nicholas Vincent FBA (UEA) will discuss his work as Director of the British Academy's Angevin Acta Project, for which he is collecting, editing and publishing all the surviving letters, charters and assizes of the Plantagenets, 1154-1199 – including Henry II, Henry the Young King, Richard I, John count of Mortain and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Oxford University Press is about to publish the largest corpus of charter materials (essentially the letters and title deeds) preserved for any twelfth-century king. The 4600 such instruments issued in the name of King Henry II not only outnumber those preserved for the kings of France and Germany combined but demonstrate the extent to which Henry II of England towered over his contemporaries and rivals. Ruler of the largest collection of lands assembled in the west since the fall of the empire of Charlemagne, Henry II was also a patron of literature and intellectuals. At the same time, he was notorious both as an unfaithful husband to his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and as the reputed author of the murder of Thomas Becket, his archbishop of Canterbury. What does our new collection of materials, many of them previously unknown or unpublished, tell us that we did not previously know? What do the charters reveal, both of the extent of Henry’s grip on power, in England, France and Ireland, and of his more personal relations, not only with Becket but with a wider circle of courtiers? The result of more than forty years of scholarly endeavour, the publication of this vast new resource is likely to alter for ever our image ofone of medieval Europe’s most fascinating kings.

Nicholas Vincent is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia and Fellow of the British Academy. He has published a dozen books and some hundred academic articles on various aspects of English and European history in the 12th and 13th centuries, having arrived at Norwich via Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Canterbury. He is currently finishing an edition of the charters of the Plantagenet kings and queens from Henry II to King John, and leads a major project researching the background to Magna Carta. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

For more information on the Angevin Acta Project, visit the British Academy website.