NOT 1952 as advertised I should say. In 1952 I was far too occupied with a first experience of unrequited love to spare a thought for East Anglian politics and society; indeed I had no idea where East Anglia was. The girl by the way was called Audrey Brewster and I have attempted to commemorate her and the dramatic summer of that year in a paper published in The London Philatelist of 1992–93 entitled ‘Audrey Brewster, Rosa Luxemburg and Me’. The year ought rightly to be 1956, when in my first term at the then University College of Leicester I came upon The Paston Letters and realised that I was destined to be an historian of the fifteenth century.

Realization of my destiny to be an historian tout court had come before 1956. On that score if no other I am able to echo Edward Gibbon: ‘I know by experience that from my earliest youth I aspired to the character of an historian.’ Unlike Gibbon, who tells us that his fourteen months at Magdalen College, Oxford, ‘proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life’, my short stay at that college was industrious and, because I was often in the company of K.B. McFarlane, inspirational. Add Bruce McFarlane to The Paston Letters and my fate was sealed: England in the fifteenth century it had to be.

The ‘character of an historian’: what did Gibbon mean? For the historical character standing before you, what history means is what painting meant for John Constable: it is both a moral undertaking and a way of ordering and transmitting perception. In Constable's case the subject was the English landscape, in mine it is the English past, most often the fifteenth-century English past. A love of East Anglia is something that intrepid explorer and vivid interpreter of a social, a peopled, landscape and this humdrum historian also share.