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Professor Elizabeth Gemmill

Dean of Degrees, Emerita/Emeritus Fellow, Fellow

Professor of Medieval Economic and Social History

Faculty of History, Oxford Lifelong Learning

PhD and BA (Manchester); MA (by Special Resolution); FSA; FRHistS

Elizabeth is a Fellow Emerita of Kellogg College. She is a graduate of the University of Manchester and first came to Oxford in 1986 as a research assistant in the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum. She worked in the University’s central administration in the 1990s. She was appointed in October 2006 as a University Lecturer in Local History in the Department for Continuing Education, and in 2010 as Director of the Department’s Weekly Class Programme. She was awarded the title Professor of Medieval Economic and Social History in 2024.

Elizabeth’s research interests are in the economy, society, and ecclesiastical history of later medieval Britain.Connecting themes across her projects have been the workings of valuations and prices and the relationships between them. She is author of The Nobility and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England (Boydell, 2013) and co-author with Nicholas Mayhew of Changing Values in Medieval Scotland: A Study of Prices, Money, and Weights and Measures (Cambridge University Press, 1995). She is editor of Aberdeen Guild Court Records, 1437 – 1468 (Scottish History Society, 2005), The Register of John Salmon, Bishop of Norwich 1299 – 1325 (Canterbury and York Society, 2019) and, with Jerome Bertram, Medieval Inscriptions: The Epigraphy of the County of Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire Record Society, 2024). She is currently completing a book on making prices in the medieval northeast, based on the records of Durham Cathedral Priory.

Elizabeth was named in 2012 as ‘Most Acclaimed Lecturer’ in the Department for Continuing Education by Oxford University Student Union. She has won two of the Department’s ‘Oxford Lifelong Learning Inspiring Excellence’ awards: Living the Values (2023) and Academic Excellence (2025). In 2016-17 Elizabeth served as Kellogg College’s first Proctor.