Kenneth Fowler obituary

My good friend and instructor Kenneth Fowler, who has died aged 88, was an eminent historian of the hundred yrs war, and a main light-weight in the training of heritage more than much more than three a long time at Edinburgh University.

Ken’s dad and mom, Ronald and Ethel (nee McMahon), lived subsequent doorway to the huge grocer’s store they saved at Clayton-le-Woods in Lancashire, and despatched Ken and his older brother, David, later on a prosperous businessman, to the community main faculty, from wherever Ken went on to boarding school in Derbyshire.

He was taught record at Leeds University by John Le Patourel, who by then experienced fashioned a centre for medieval reports. It was beneath Le Patourel’s supervision that Ken concluded his thesis on Henry of Grosmont, lieutenant of Edward III throughout his wars in France. Numerous decades later, Grosmont shaped the subject matter of a single of a few key publications that Ken would produce.

In 1954, Ken met Ann von Zweigbergk, from Sweden, throughout a tour of Romanesque churches in Poitou, the historic area about Poitiers in western France. A long romance adopted, through which Ken was briefly arrested in Franco’s Spain for sharing a kiss with Ann in general public. They had been married in Stockholm in 1959 and moved to Edinburgh, while Ken experienced currently started off teaching at the college the year prior to.

As a trainer and colleague at Edinburgh, wherever he was manufactured professor in 1974, Ken was enthusiastic and convivial. All his ebullience and superior humour were termed on all through the grim 1980s, when he served as school dean.

Early retirement in 1988 restored his energies and brought his practical streak to the fore. Dwelling both in Edinburgh or in the dwelling he and Ann experienced purchased in the Borders, he identified time to complete a examine of mercenaries throughout the hundred a long time war, in in between a great deal wall-developing and tree-planting.

They used a lot of of these yrs functioning fortunately jointly – Ann as a qualified translator, Ken on his ebook – and her death in 2017 from Parkinson’s was a really hard blow. Archiving Ann’s everyday living grew to become one of his favorite routines in his remaining decades.

David also died in 2017. Ken is survived by his small children, Simon and Emma, and his grandchildren, Andrew, Graeme and Matilda.