On 4 June, Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler took part in a panel discussion at the National Archives (TNA) in London. The panel, attended by members of the public, was held to commemorate the 800^th anniversary of the death of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, the celebrated warrior and statesman who governed England after the death of King John in 1216, seeing off French invasion. With the Marshal hailed upon his death as ‘the greatest knight in all the world’, the panel considered the theme of chivalry and its changing nature over the course of the thirteenth century.

The panel included Dr Thomas Asbridge (Queen Mary, University of London), an expert on the Marshal, and Professor Louise Wilkinson (Christ Church Canterbury), who discussed the role of women in chivalry, while Dr Ambler drew from her new book, The Song of Simon de Montfort: England’s First Revolution and the Death of Chivalry to explain how the conduct of warfare and politics was transformed, from the emergence of the concept of chivalry in the days of the Marshal to the overturning of chivalric values by the revolutionary leader Simon de Montfort almost fifty later.

The panel was chaired by Dr Paul Dryburgh, Principal Record Specialist at TNA, with the help of Dr Daniel Gosling, TNA’s Legal Records Specialist (Early Modern), who together also curated a display of key documents from the period.