James Cochran Stevenson Runciman 1903–2000

James Cochran Stevenson Runciman (SR) lived a long life, which may be brought to order by identifying four overlapping phases. In the first, SR, went up from Eton (where as a Colleger he transferred from Classics to History) to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1921 at the age of eighteen, graduating (double first) in 1924, where he was fellow (1927–38, honorary fellow from 1965) and University lecturer (1932–8). His grandfather's death in 1938 allowed SR to choose to become an ‘independent scholar’, a second phase which never ended. But a third phase supervened from 1940–7, SR's more fruitful equivalent of Edward Gibbon's service with the Hampshire Militia in 1759–62. It was a period of independence and maturity away from home. The British Academy's election of SR to its fellowship in 1957 marks the beginning of a fourth phase. It came after the conclusion of SR's greatest uncommissioned work, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1951–4).