R. H. C. Davis
He was a leading exponent of strict documentary analysis and interpretation, was keenly interested in architecture and art in history, and was successful at communicating to the public and as a teacher.The Lindup grandparents came from Worthing, Sussex, but in Davis's younger childhood owned a country house at Bampton, Oxfordshire which he and his brothers liked to visit.Davis, as secretary of the small archaeology group and effectively its leader, organised bicycle trips round the Yorkshire abbeys in the school holidays with about six others.On 3 June 1939, three months before British declaration of World War II, Davis was provisionally registered as a conscientious objector to military service.He must have known what Nazi Germany was like, because he (and friend Ken Bowen) had just come back from a Quaker-organised hitch-hiking holiday in the Rhine valley, involving renovation and landscaping work with a joint British-German team of students.He was sent in March 1941 to Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope to reinforce the FAU detachment in Greece, but this had been captured by the Nazis before he could join, so his unit was sent to Syria to work at the Hadfield-Spears Mobile Hospital, an Anglo-French entity attached to the Free French Forces.A stay of a month in Cairo allowed Davis to view the city's mosques (with Michael Rowntree) and produce a book on the subject (see list of works below).As the mobile hospital moved through Syria and Lebanon and then along the desert to Tunisia, and eventually to Italy and southern France, Davis visited (and wrote up in his copious notebooks) such places as Baalbek, Byblos, Damascus, Krak des Chevaliers, Beaufort, Leptis Magna and El Djem.Davis re-entered Balliol College in 1945 and achieved a first class degree in Modern History, followed in 1947 by the MA allowed him by his seniority and war service.In 1948 Davis accepted the offer from Sir John Neale (perhaps advised by Galbraith) of an assistant lectureship at University College London (UCL).Davis booked Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park for a weekend just before the start of the academic year so that history freshers and other students and staff could get to know one another.In 1956 Merton College, Oxford elected Davis a fellow and tutor in modern history,[3] with the support of Vivian Galbraith, and he held that post for 14 years.In 1968 Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, volume 3 came out – edited by H. A. Cronne and Davis (these brought together by Vivian Galbraith), a major work of scholarship on King Stephen's reign.Davis variously published a number of points contradicting Round's views, suggesting a loyal son's rejoinder to the scholar who had wounded his father.It is said of him that "he was a man of great moral seriousness, and didn't always bother to hide his contempt for those he thought impelled by self-interest, cowardice or just mental laziness" (Barrow, page 391).In this general period, Davis produced papers on the beginnings of municipal liberties in Oxford (1968, Oxoniensia, xxxiii), Coventry in Stephen's reign (1971, English Historical Review, lxxxvi, 533-47).Davis had planned a volume of collected papers, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, but it remained incomplete on his death and had to be published with some omissions and errors.It includes his last word on an academic controversy over the role of Geoffrey de Mandeville in King Stephen's reign, on which a number of papers and counter-papers had been written.