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Stephen Baxter joined the Department in 2004 and was promoted as a Reader in Medieval History in 2009. He graduated in 1991 with a double first in Modern History from Wadham College, Oxford; worked for six years in the City of London, initially for a firm of strategic management consultants and then for an investment bank; and then returned to Oxford, where he undertook his doctoral research at Christ Church (1997−2001) before taking up a three-year research fellowship at Magdalen College (2001−2004).

• Society, government, law and politics in Anglo-Saxon England
• Domesday Book and the Norman Conquest of England
• Lords and peasants in early Medieval Europe

Stephen Baxter’s research is concerned with government, law, society and politics in late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England. His recently published monograph, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines how one noble family negotiated the vicissitudes of English politics between the 990s and the 1070s, and explores how noblemen gained and exercised power as agents of royal government and through land tenure, lordship and patronage. His articles explore how some of the key central sources for this period − Domesday Book, charters and chronicles − illuminate these themes; and he is currently directing two major research projects, The Prosopography of England Saxon England (PASE), and Profile of a Doomed Elite: The Structure of the English Nobility in 1066.

Undergraduate

• 4AAH1001 The Making of Britain 400-1400
• 4AAH0001 Historical Skills, Sources & Approaches
• 6AAH3003/4 The Norman Conquest of Britain

Postgraduate

• 7AAH1013 The Foundations & Records of English Royal: Government in the Twelfth & Thirteenth Centuries
• 7AAH1002 Materials & Methods

Stephen Baxter would welcome PhD students with an interest in:

• Society and politics in late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England
• Lordship and the ‘Feudal Revolution’
• The English nobility, c. 900−1200
• Anglo-Saxon charters
• Domesday Book
• English law and legislation to 1215
• Historical writing and historiography in Britain, c. 900-1200

Dr Stephen Baxter co-convenes the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR).