from Medieval Academy News

James Field Willard (1876–1935): A Pioneering Medievalist
by Scott G. Bruce and Anne E. Lester

The year 2006 marks the centenary of James Field Willard's appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A fellow and one-time vice president of the Medieval Academy, Willard was the first medieval historian to teach in the state of Colorado. Born in Philadelphia on 30 December 1876, he earned his Ph.D. in 1902 at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Boulder in 1906.

As was common at the time, within a year of his appointment he was promoted to Professor of History and became Chair of the fledgling History Department, positions he held until his death in 1935. While conducting his research, Willard faced challenges particular to his time, but he also worked under conditions that would be strikingly familiar to archival historians today. Personal journals preserved in the Archives of the University of Colorado shed light on Willard's perceptions of European society during the Depression and present an outsider's perspective on the study of the Middle Ages among contemporary English academics.

Willard was a highly respected and widely esteemed specialist on the administrative history of late medieval England. In addition to his dissertation, The Royal Authority and Early English Universities (1902), he wrote a monograph entitled Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 1290-1334: A Study in Medieval English Financial Administration (1933). With the support of the Medieval Academy of America, Willard planned his most ambitious project, The English Government at Work, 1327-1336 (3 vols., 1940-1950), a collaborative, multi-volume work on various aspects of English administration under Edward III. According to his co-editor, William A. Morris: "[Willard's] aim was through the cooperation of various specialists to depict a mediaeval government transacting its business. He was concerned primarily with the actual performance rather than the duties of officials; and he wished to show how the various departments and institutions of government, . . . in their operation depended one upon another. He envisaged a study of administration in mediaeval England for a single decade, a period short enough in general to permit each collaborator to cover in detail the various series of records of value to him." (English Government at Work, vol. 1, p. v).

Willard's death delayed it, but its posthumous publication in the 1940s secured him a place among the most important and influential American medievalists of the early twentieth century.

Despite the seeming narrowness of his field of specialization, Willard thought broadly and comparatively about history and governance. His experience conducting research in British archives undoubtedly informed his interest in creating a local repository to preserve materials concerning the history of the American West, particularly primary sources pertaining to the Colorado Gold Rush (1858-1859) and the history of the Colorado colonies (1868-1872). These collections formed the basis for the Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After his death, Willard's private and professional papers found their way into this collection. These include travel journals, research notes, tourist brochures, lecture outlines, course syllabi, grade books, and personal correspondence. Taken together, these documents provide a vivid portrait of a pioneering medieval historian at work.

Journals kept during his two-year sabbatical in England (1930-1932) illuminate many of the practical challenges facing an American medievalist conducting research abroad. Travel between Colorado and England presented a formidable obstacle. Willard and his wife Margaret, who accompanied him on all of his research trips, endured a two-week journey, embarking first by train from Boulder to Chicago to New York, and then by ship from New York to London. Funding for the trip was another challenge.

In 1930, Willard began work on his collaborative enterprise, The English Government at Work, which he referred to in his journals simply as "the project." Although the project was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and one hundred dollars from the recently founded Medieval Academy of America, the lion's share of the expenses for Willard's two years abroad must have come out of his own pocket.

While in England, Willard kept two types of journals: day-books and what he called memoranda. The day-books recorded appointments and obligations, like dinner parties and theater dates, and provide some indication of his work habits. In the mornings Willard typically worked from home (2 Bedford Place in London) on his manuscript; he spent his afternoons in the Public Record Office, punctuated by the obligatory tea with a colleague or acquaintance.

In many respects the memoranda books are more intriguing. They comprise four small leather-bound volumes in which Willard recorded his reflections on contemporary English society and culture in the form of short essays. Some of his topics included the weather, art exhibits, economic conditions, rumors of war, class structure and the nobility in English society, and the character of the English people. There was also a section on ways of speech, which included a glossary of English terms and their American equivalents. He indexed the contents of these volumes carefully on the end pages of each book.

Willard socialized with some of the most prominent British medievalists of his day and recorded his impressions of them under the heading "People We Have Met." He clearly respected Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963), Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, of whom he wrote: "He is an old friend . . . He is full of a rather elfish humor, which manifested itself when we were in his home. He is rather shy and seemingly quite diffident, though he can be quite frank in his expression of opinions-in private-and he has quite definite views about all kinds of subjects. His addresses and printed papers are very well written and he is deeply in love with the Middle Ages" (Memoranda, vol. 2, pp. 12-13).

By contrast, his portrait of G. G. Coulton (1858-1947), Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is less personal, but nonetheless revealing of the tensions between Catholic and secular interpretations of the medieval church that were prevalent at this time: "I have only met him once, so have to record current opinion . . . He is an outspoken as well as a very learned controversialist who dislikes the ways of Roman Catholic historians with an intensity that is amazing . . . Powicke and others think him so biased that he may not be trusted. He annoys Powicke, but Powicke looks at the Middle Ages and the medieval church through colored glasses. . . Others regard Coulton as a necessary check upon the Roman Catholics. They find him a realist, as well as a man of enormous learning, and feel that his rather bitter attacks are quite necessary in order that the Roman Catholics may not go too far. I am somewhat of this opinion myself.

[Cardinal Francis Aiden] Gasquet (1846-1929) and company make the conditions in the Middle Ages . . . far too like the happy valley of the utopians . . . [Coulton] finds that the medieval church was corrupt-as it was-, that monks did not follow monastic rules, that the secular clergy had many vices, etc. As a corrective, Coulton has his place . . . Coulton is, therefore, a man of mark in England. People curse him, condemn him, praise him or love him, but they do not laugh at him. No man with his learning and influence can be laughed down. At least he is an excellent antidote to Gasquet and to many Protestant writers who, in their zeal for the church or their desire to be 'fair' picture the medieval church as an utterly unreal institution. Coulton, whatever his faults, pictures the church as run by human beings" (Memoranda, vol. 3, pp. 124-27).

Willard's memoranda books reveal a scholar who was as self-conscious and circumspect in his consideration of contemporary society as he was in his treatment of the medieval past. At a time when travel was time-consuming and funding was scant, Willard navigated the world of English academia and conducted archival research amidst severe economic depression and looming international conflict. As such, his example is both instructive and consoling for those of us who return every summer to archives and libraries throughout Europe.

Editor's note. The authors are both in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The editor would welcome other pieces on lesser-known pioneers in any field of medieval studies.