Campbell was born on 26 January 1935 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.[1][2] His birth father, John Henry Mogg was a teacher and his mother Barbara Hilda Brown was also a teacher and member of the Communist Party. After a period in foster care he was adopted by his maternal grandparents in 1938.[3] He studied at Lowestoft Grammar School, where he found an interest in history. He took early entry to Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of 17 and graduated with a first in 1955.[3]
Academic career
In 1956, Campbell took up a junior research fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.[4] In 1957, at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.[5] He held additional college appointments, including Fellow Librarian (1977–2002) and senior tutor (1989–1993),[6] and also served as the University of Oxford's Senior Proctor for the 1973/74 academic year.[2] At university level teaching, he was a lecturer in modern history (as opposed to ancient history) from 1958 to 1990, Reader in Medieval History from 1990 to 1996, and Professor of Medieval History from 1996 to 2002.[6] He delivered the Ford Lectures in the 1995/96 academic year.[6] He remained at Worcester College until his retirement in 2002.[3]
Campbell's particular historical interest was in the medieval period and Anglo-Saxon studies.[7] Along with Sonia Chadwick Hawkes and David Brown, in 1979 he founded the series Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History.[8] He was also interested in agriculture in Britain and Ireland from the 13th to 19th centuries.[9] Two collections of his essays were published as Essays in Anglo-Saxon History in 1986 and The Anglo-Saxon State in 2000.[3] He was the editor of The Anglo-Saxons (1982), a collection of essays on Anglo-Saxon England, for which he wrote the section on the period from AD 350 to 660.[10]
In the 1980s, Campbell moved out of college accommodation and settled in Witney, a village near Oxford. At the age of 71, he married Dr Bӓrbel Brodt on 7 October 2006. They did not have any children, and he was devastated by her death in October 2015.[3]
Campbell, James, ed. (1982). The Anglo-Saxons. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN978-0801414824.
Campbell, James (1986). Essays in Anglo-Saxon history. London: Hambledon Press. ISBN9780826425737.
Campbell, James (2000). The Anglo-Saxon State. London: Hambledon. ISBN978-1852851767.
References
^CAMPBELL, James. A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc; online edn. November 2015, Oxford University Press. 2015. Retrieved 1 June 2016.