Professor Phillipp Schofield

Professor of Medieval History and Head of Department of History and Welsh History, Aberystwyth University

Phillipp Schofield studied for his first degree in ancient and medieval history at UCL in 1986 before completing his doctorate at the University of Oxford (Wadham) in 1992, where he was supervised by Miss Barbara Harvey. He also trained as a lawyer and worked (briefly) for a City law firm before returning to Oxford in 1993 where he held a research post at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine; he moved to the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1996 before taking up his post in Aberystwyth in 1998. He was Head of Department at Aberystwyth from 2002 until 2012, and again from 2018 to 2023. He held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2012 until 2016. He has recently completed a three-year term as President of the Economic History Society (EHS) (2022-2025).

As a historian of the medieval English economy, with particular reference to the medieval peasantry, Phillipp Schofield’s research focus is upon village society, economic exchange within it and, in particular, credit and debt. He is undertaking work related to a previous Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on the Great Famine in early fourteenth-century England. He is also presently engaged in writing up AHRC-funded research on litigation on manorial courts (AHRC AH/D502713/1, co-I) for a volume to be published by the Selden Society (co-authored with Chris Briggs). He has recently completed volumes for Manchester University Press on Peasants and Historians: the historiography of the medieval English peasantry and, with Professor Wendy Childs (Leeds) on The Reign of Edward II. Phillipp Schofield was co-editor of the journal Continuity and Change from 1999 until 2011 and also co-editor of the Economic History Review from 2011 to 2017.