In a lecture delivered nearly fifty years ago I pilloried the dictum of a distinguished scholar, who had told us that ‘the archivist is not and ought not to be a historian’. ‘He need not,’ said I: ‘one has heard of cooks of rare genius who had no palate themselves; one has heard of librarians who never opened a book. But the view that any of the barriers which divide our little worlds is desirable in itself is a terrible notion.’ David Smith has trampled for thirty years and more on the boundaries which divide the work of archivist and historian. Of his work as archivist, Chris Webb speaks with authority. But we must dwell on it for a moment more; for it has informed all his scholarly work. Even outside the Borthwick Institute his life has been spent pillaging archives and creating new archives: the recesses of innumerable libraries and record offices have been ransacked for the documents of the bishops of Lincoln and others of his victims; and in English Episcopal Acta and The Acta of Hugh of Wells the records of innumerable English bishops of the late eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been brought together, listed, catalogued, indexed and edited with a precision which would have amazed their authors. His scholarly work is not only very impressive in quality and extent, but it is unerringly directed to help other students and scholars in the fields in which he works.

He started young: he sprang from Lincoln (where he was born on 20 July 1946), and after three years in Oxford and three in Nottingham he had by 1970 completed a complex Ph.D. on a notable bishop of Lincoln, Hugh of Wells (1209–35). In the same year he was first appointed to the Borthwick, and within three years had completed the first of his Guides, to the archive collections in the Borthwick Institute: the fruit of that power of hard work, that precision, that concentration which has borne such rich fruit in and out of the Borthwick ever since.