Thomas Pickles | University of Chester

Dr Thomas Pickles is Associate Professor of Early Medieval History in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. He is Research Coordinator for History and Programme Leader for the MRes in History. He is General Editor for the Brepols series Studies in the Early Middle Ages, a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Northern History, and Chair of the Chester Archaeological Society, and Principal Investigator of the UKRI AHRC funded project Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES). He teaches on the Undergraduate and Postgraduate History programmes, and supervises MRes and PhD researchers.

Dr Pickles teaches across the Undergraduate and Post-Graduate History programmes. His modules focus on the early and high middle ages and include subjects such as the Crusades, the viking diaspora, the Norman Conquest, and pre-modern courts. He is joint module leader for the pioneering History module History at Work, which challenges students to engage with the professional frameworks for Heritage and Teaching, and requires them to design their on frameworks and deliver real-world projects to briefs set out by external partners including the Chester PGCE History, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, the Grosvenor Museum Chester, and Chester Cathedral.

Dr Pickles researches the social and cultural analysis of religious belief and practices in the early middle ages (400-1200). His research is interdisciplinary, bringing together textual, material, and linguistic culture. His first book - Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) - investigated the social and cultural processes of conversion to Christianity and church building in the early medieval kingdom of the Deirans (modern Yorkshire). He is currently engaged in researching and writing a local-global history of Whitby Abbey from its foundation in 657 to the present day. His UKRI AHRC funded project, Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES), a collaboration with Professor Sally Foster (University of Stirling) and Dr Tomás Ó Carragáin (University College Cork), is creating a public web resource for churches across Britain and Ireland, to meet the needs of a range of strategic, educational and infrastructural stakeholders.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘The Liberty of Whitby Strand: The Origins and Significance of a Jurisdictional Immunity’, The English Historical Review (accepted, in press, 2023).

Pickles, Thomas, ‘The Christian Landscape of Early Medieval Chester and Wirral’, in Sharon M. Varey and Graeme J. White (eds), Looking at the Landscape: Glimpses into the History of Cheshire and Beyond (Chester: University of Chester Press, 2022).

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Conclusion: Why did some objects become more mobile, 1000-1700?’, in Katherine Wilson and Leah Clarke (eds), The Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 267-284.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Were Early Medieval Lists Bureaucratic? The Whitby Abbot’s Book, Folios 1r-4v’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (Austrian Journal of Historical Studies), 32 (3) (2021), pp. 66-90.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘The Social History of a Medieval Fish Weir, c. 600-2020’, Social History, 46 (4) (2021), pp. 349-371.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Why should we write about Anglo-Saxon farms and farming?’, Early Medieval Europe, 29 (3) (2020), pp. 466-482.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Conversion, Ritual and Landscape: Streoneshalh (Whitby), Osingadun, and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire’, in Meg Boulton and Michael D. J. Bintley (eds), Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), pp. 81-100.

Pickles, Thomas, Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Pickles, Thomas, ‘The Historiography of Anglo-Saxon Conversion: the state of the art’, in R. Flechner and M. Ní Mhaonaigh (eds), From Paganism to Christianity in the Insular World, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 61-92.

‘Streanaeshalch (Whitby), its satellite churches and its estates’, in T. Ó Carragáin and S. Turner (eds), Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe. Conversion and Consolidation in the Early Middle Ages (Cork: University of Cork Press, 2016), 265-76.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Introduction and Context: Cathedrals and Monasteries c. 600-c. 1100’, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Church: The Church and property’, ‘Lastingham Priory’, and ‘Whitby Abbey’, in D. Dyas (ed.), English Cathedrals and Monasteries through the Centuries: Interactive DVD (York: University of York, 2013).

Pickles, Thomas, Power, Religious Patronage and Pastoral Care: Religious Communities, Mother Parishes and Local Churches in Ryedale, c. 650-c. 1250, The Kirkdale Lecture, 2009 (York: Friends of Kirkdale, 2012).

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Anglo-Saxon Monasteries as Sacred Places: Topography, Exegesis and Vocation’, in P. Thomas and J. Sterrett (eds), Sacred Text - Sacred Space (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 35-55.

Pickles, Thomas, and John Blair, ‘Deantune and Bishopstone: The estate and the church under the Mercian kings and the South Saxon bishops’, in G. Thomas (ed.), The later Anglo-Saxon settlement at Bishopstone. A downland manor in the making, Council for British Archaeology Research Report 163 (York: CBA, 2010), pp. 17-22.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Church: The Church and property’ and ‘The Anglo-Saxon Church: Minster parishes and the development of local churches’, in D. Dyas (ed.), The English Parish Church Through the Centuries: Interactive CD-ROM (York: University of York, 2010).

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Chapter 11: Church Organisation and Pastoral Care’, in P. Stafford (ed.), A Companion to the Early Middle Ages: Britain and Ireland c. 500-c. 1100 (Oxford: Blackwells, 2009), pp. 160-76.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Biscopes-tūn, muneca-tūn and prēosta-tūn: dating, significance and distribution’, in E. Quinton (ed.), The Church in English Place-Names, English Place-Name Society Extra Series 4 (Nottingham: EPNS, 2009), pp. 39-108.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Angel Veneration on Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture from Dewsbury (WY), Otley (WY) and Halton (La): Contemplative Preachers and Pastoral Care’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 162 (2009), pp. 1-28.

Pickles, Thomas, ‘Locating Ingetlingum and Suthgedling: Gilling West and Gilling East’, Northern History, XLVI:2 (2009), pp. 313-25.

MA (Oxford)
M.St. (Oxford)
D.Phil. (Oxford)
PG CAP (York)
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy