I was devastated, late on October 9th, to hear of the passing of Chris Wickham. I had known Chris for 32 or 33 years, having first met him at a day conference on early medieval Italy at Birmingham in the early '90s.(1) I don't remember which year it was but it was certainly before '95, because I knew him well enough by then to send him a copy of Early Medieval Cemeteries. We'd not been much in contact, directly, for a while (too long a while), largely down to me losing my marbles and not having written very much; we tended to be in touch about work. Chris' later writing was also mostly about periods later than those I work on so I hadn't really engaged with it. I saw him briefly at the IMC in 2025, and we had exchanged news and best wishes via Helen, my partner. I had heard that he was ill but also that people weren't supposed to know, so although I wanted to send him a message saying I was thinking of him and wishing him well I didn't know how, and after all, I thought, people get better these days. So I didn't. I never cried over the death of a historian before but I have really been in bits over Chris' passing. Consequently, it's taken me a while to be able to put this together. It's probably too long - it could easily have been longer - and cack-handed but it is at least sincere.
Chris was enormously supportive of me. When, at the end of the '90s, I was turned down a second time for promotion to Senior Lecturer, in spite of having a record that would have got me a readership in most places, Chris (and Pauline Stafford and a couple of my female professorial colleagues) wrote to the Master of Birkbeck to protest and got the decision reversed. Apparently Chris wrote such extravagantly nice things about me that the Master phoned another early medievalist to ask if this was true, or at least if he was serious. I know that he said similarly positive things in other references (not just for me), and I still have a lovely card he sent me when 'Movers and Shakers' came out, and an email from when my reply to Walter Goffart appeared. I like to think that one of the nicest of the four very positive readers reports for Worlds of Arthur was by Chris (if it wasn't it was someone doing a good impression of his style - but don't disabuse me if you know it wasn't!). Chris was also one of the referees that helped me get the Leverhulme fellowship in 2009 for 'The Transformations of the Year 600'. Obviously, the book/s for that project still haven't come out - if they ever will (see 'losing my marbles' above) - and I have a real sense of having let him down and not having lived up to the faith he had in me, early on.
Chris' compliments about my work meant so much to me not simply because I looked up to his work but also because we didn't agree about lots of things. As he said to me in an email, 'I usually don't care if I disagree with people if it's stimulating'. I like to think that I have the same attitude, though I expect that in my case the phrase 'if it's stimulating' would have to do a lot more heavy lifting. I liked the questions he asked, and he seemed to be one of the few historians who was interested in the same things that I was. I sometimes think he was supportive of me because there weren't many of my generation of UK early medievalists doing the same sort of social history. And we shared some of the same blind spots. I joked with him that I was the only person to read Early Medieval Italy who hadn’t noticed that there wasn’t anything in it about the church, let alone the papacy! In the drafts of my own Fates of the Late Antique State, the chapter on the church is the only one that still - after all these years - contains nothing except section headings!
There are some historians I look up to (Michael Kulikowski for one) with whom it matters to me whether they agree with my take. What mattered to me about Chris' opinion of my work, by contrast (see above for how we had different takes on lots of things) was whether he thought it I had an interesting or forceful argument to make. He was, as I said in the acknowledgements to Warfare and Society..., a merciless scourge of my woolly thinking. I really wanted him to read my 'Transformations of the Year 600' books, not least for their engagement with and critique of The Framing of the Early Middle Ages - a book that so many of us have found so important, even if we disagree. Such was the extent that this mattered to me that, when I learned of his death, my immediate reaction was to say to myself 'well there's no point finishing this now'. But now it has inspired me to get on and finish The Fates of the Late Antique State, for his sake if no one else's.
There are two things that I would say that made Chris especially remarkable. One is that he could switch, within the same overarching set of questions and paradigms, between the detailed local and regional (see, especially, his work on Italy) and large scale syntheses like Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Donkey and the Boat. The other thing, and this really is the one that makes a big impression on me, is how important he was in the historiography of other countries. For a British historian who was employed entirely in the UK to be seen as such an important figure in Italian historiography in Italy is something for which I simply cannot think of a comparison. And it wasn't just Italy. Laurent Feller has written an obituary for the Ecole Française de Rome which lays stress on Chris engagement with French historians. As if that were not enough, in 2020 a book on Social Inequality in Early Medieval Europe contained essays by scholars from across Europe in Chris' honour. It is difficult to find any other historian (I cannot think of one, certainly in the early medieval sphere) with that sort of international standing. I can't imagine there will be another one for some time.
But Chris Wickham was not just a brilliant historian. I mentioned earlier how supportive he was of me, and this was typical. He was someone who genuinely wanted to help other scholars, students, the field in general. He was also very unassuming. He did not stand on his status. Typically, once Helen and I went to dinner at Kalamazoo with Chris and some Durham postgraduates, to whom Chris introduced himself simply as Chris. Only later did they find out that that had been Chris Wickham. A friend of mine was once a bit nervous about going to dinner with Chris, only to find that he spent the evening mostly talking about cats.
I mentioned earlier that debate and discussion mattered most to Chris - you can see this too in his responses to critiques of, for example, Framing. As such, I think that the nature of historical discourse really mattered to him - forthright discussion, sure, but also civility. You can see that in his remarks on the debate over Guy Bois' Mutation de l'An Mil, where essentially he said that this was an object lesson in how not to conduct a historical discussion. I know from personal correspondence that he thought the overly combative approach of a particular eminent historian set the discipline back. I was at the launch of the Italian translation of his book on central medieval Rome. The historian invited to respond to the book behaved, frankly, disgracefully, using the opportunity for an extended attack. Chris by contrast was civil, patient, appreciative even. It was remarkable - and probably not just to someone with a short temper (and ability to pick a fight with his own reflection) like mine. The one time we fell out was over that issue.(2) If I am honest, after much reflection, I still think I was right to be cross but looking back I can better appreciate that his view came from a very good place. One I ought to try harder to inhabit.
Such was Chris personality that I heard him cited as an authority on everything from departmental politics to the pros and cons of dishwashers. Really. Once I was talking to a colleague about some reservations I had about getting a dishwasher and they replied, 'Yes! That's what Chris says too!', as though that made my position on the matter unassailable.
So yes, to be Chris wasn't just about being a fantastic and interesting historian; he was just a lovely, generous bloke too. The discipline - well, academia, the University Sector in general - would be a far better place if it had a lot more Chris Wickhams.
I like to think Chris was a friend but, even if I am giving myself airs and graces, just having known him was an enormous privilege.
And he liked cats.
I don't believe in this stuff but it cheers me up to think that when Chris crossed to the other side he was met by his old friend Tim Reuter (whose loss I know Chris felt badly at the time) and taken off for a pint and a simultaneously sophisticated and entertaining talk about the intellectual shortcomings of the historiography of the twelfth century.
RIP Chris. I will miss you so much.
P.s. Two things:
1. Don't lose touch with the people you care about just because you don't think you have anything interesting to tell them. They (and you) won't be around forever.
2. Fuck cancer.
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1: The first time I met him was atypical. I was, early in my career, going through an 'imposter syndrome' phase. When Chris asked me what I worked on and I told him I was writing a regional history/archaeology of the area around Metz he asked me how it sat with the works of a series of other historians who - me being me - I hadn't read at the time (possibly still not), and I was completely overawed and felt like a total fraud/bullshitter. Obviously this was entirely on me; it certainly wasn't what was intended. Apparently Chris used to joke that whenever a new book came out and he was talking about it to two other historians (whom I won't name in case I get it the wrong way round) 'X always likes it; Y always hates it; and I haven't read it'.
2: Well, I say 'fell out'. I got very cross with him. I am not sure I figured sufficiently on his radar for it to have bothered him very much and in any case the next time we met he took me for a coffee in what he said was his favourite cafe in Rome, and that was that.
