Richard Britnell, FBA, will almost certainly be slightly embarrassed by the production of a Festschrift in his honour. One of the editors of this volume was supervised by Richard for his doctoral work and remembers, when he became a little overheated in a discussion, Richard's gentle reminder that ‘we're not trying to change the world’. And yet, over the course of his distinguished academic career, Richard's work and teaching have indeed changed the world of medieval economic history. The papers collected in this volume, from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, several of whom are his former students, reflect the impact of Richard's scholarship on the international academic community.

Richard arrived in Durham in 1966 and spent the first part of his career working in the Department of Economic History until its closure in 1985. For most of this period, during which he met his wife Jenny, also a distinguished academic, none of Richard's teaching involved medieval economic history. The focus of the Economic History degree at Durham was the process of modern economic growth through the themes of Land, Labour and Capital. Richard's teaching concentrated upon the last of these. Among his various courses was one with the rather forbidding title, ‘Problems in Invention and Business Activity’, later rebranded as ‘Capital Formation and Technological Change’ and, finally, ‘Industrialisation in Europe’. In addition, Richard helped to teach a first-year survey course on ‘Industrial Britain: Origins and Development’, which served as an introduction to economic history and which was a compulsory requirement for all students studying Social Science degrees involving Economics, Politics and Sociology.