Director

Professor John Hudson

John Hudson joined the University of St Andrews School of History at the beginning of October 1988. His research then concentrated on law and land-holding in twelfth-century England, and this subject has remained central to much of his subsequent work, leading up to his recent volume of The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 871-1216 (2012).  Some of his legal history work plays with the applicability to mediaeval situations of ideas from modern legal theory; this work is furthered by his visiting association with the University of Michigan Law School, where he enjoys the title of William W. Cook Global Law Professor.

John has two other main areas of research interest.  One is mediaeval historical writing, mostly in England – as in his two-volume edition of the History of the Church of Abingdon, an important twelfth-century monastic text – but also more widely, as in his contribution on ‘Local Histories’ in the Oxford History of Historical Writing.  The other is nineteenth-century writing on the Middle Ages, and in particular the work of the greatest of legal historians, F. W. Maitland.

He has taught a wide range of courses both in and outside his main research areas.  In particular he has presented a series of Honours modules about aristocratic culture, the latest mutation of which is called Courtroom Dramas: Law and Literature in Twelfth Century France.