author
Reginald Lane Poole
1857–1939
A careful Oxford historian of the Middle Ages, he spent much of his career working with archives, official records, and the machinery of government behind medieval life. His books range from church history and learning to the twelfth-century Exchequer, showing a scholar drawn to how institutions actually worked.
1 Audiobook
Sebastian Bach
by Reginald Lane Poole
About the author
Born in London on 29 March 1857, Reginald Lane Poole studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to become one of the notable British medieval historians of his generation. He taught at Oxford, served as lecturer in diplomatics, and later became Keeper of the University Archives. In 1904 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Poole's scholarship centered on medieval government, church history, records, and historical method. He is especially associated with work on documents and institutions, and he delivered the Ford Lectures in 1912 on The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century. Among the books linked with his name are Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning, Wycliffe and Movements for Reform, and studies of seals, papal documents, and chronology.
He died on 28 October 1939. Today he is remembered as a patient, exact scholar whose writing helped readers see the Middle Ages not as legend, but as a world preserved in charters, archives, and ideas.