Historians will be consulting Peter's work for many years

Eugene Byrne on the life of Professor Peter Fleming, one of Bristol's most influential historians, and a good friend of Bristol Times.

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>> BT was saddened to hear of the recent death of Peter Fleming, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the West of England.

His contribution to our understanding and knowledge of medieval Bristol was huge. Long before his time various 18th and 19th century antiquarians had researched and written about the city in the middle ages, but hardly anyone read their accounts anymore, and in any event Peter Fleming researched further and deeper.

Historians will be consulting his work for decades to come, but his great achievement was in taking medieval Bristol to a wider public. He was an entertaining and engaging speaker and writer with a great flair for showing us how our distant forebears were often just the same as us, but sometimes very different. His lectures, whether to students, academics or the general public, were delivered with theatricality and humour.

(The photo was taken at a lecture he gave in the crypt of St John in the Wall at just the moment he was enunciating, with considerable relish, the obscene medieval name for what we now call Nelson Street.)