E. F. Jacob - Controversy

Controversy

Initially, he studied the thirteenth century, with perceptive 'Studies' in the period of baronial reform, but, disliking the powerful hold of Sir Maurice Powicke, he switched to the unresearched 1350-1500 period. His most important works were a four-volume edition of the register of Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury, 1414-1443, founder of All Souls' and a volume in the magisterial Oxford History of England series, England in the Fifteenth Century. The first of these publications secured his reputation as a historian (although in fact his co-editor had actually transcribed the manuscript), but the latter caused considerable controversy. Firstly the book was meant to be written by K. B. McFarlane, who proved unwilling or unable to write a book of its kind. Secondly, after the book was released many academics suggested that Jacobs' had plagiarised postgraduates' work and had also made a large number of factual errors. The book also lacked shape or much interpretation of the fifteenth-century political scene, out-of-date the minute it was published. It is true that at Manchester he had his postgraduate students (including Sir Maurice Oldfield, the future security chief), working on aspects of his own projects and incorporated their findings into his own, albeit usually with a general acknowledgment. He was charged with having extended this, for his general book, to drawing on the work of other scholars' students, and without acknowledgment. In response, he declared his gratitude to the many workers in the field but asserted that the conventions of the Oxford History did not allow for specific footnotes. Perhaps significantly, his actual biography of Archbishop Chichele was a slight work from a non-academic publishing house, and he generally favoured a lecture/essay approach, as he had done even in his earliest years. His knowledge of German especially allowed him to write vignettes on the Catholic Church in the period of the Great Schism and Conciliar Movement perceptively, although again there was to be no great magnum opus, and again it was muttered that his knowledge of continental scholarship was better than his knowledge of primary sources. Even J.S. Roskell, a devoted disciple, recorded decades later that he found one lecture/subsequently-published essay painfully familiar from just the basic English monograph he himself had used for an undergraduate essay. Nonetheless, Jacob's transmission of continental scholarship to an insular English academia was invaluable and influential.