Christopher Charles Taylor 7 November 1935 – 28 May 2021

Christopher Taylor, who has died at the age of 85, was the greatest landscape historian of our age. The originality and solidity of his scholarship stimulated new fields of research and changed the direction of others. That contribution was recognised in 1995 by his election to a Fellowship of the British Academy, the highest academic honour in the arts and humanities in the United Kingdom and one rarely bestowed on anyone working outside higher education. He received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Keele, in 1997. Chris spent his entire career with the Royal Commission for Historic Monuments of England. He first worked for the Commission as Desmond Bonney’s Summer Assistant during the vacations of his undergraduate degree in 1957, 1958 and 1959. In spring 1960 he was interviewed — and then appointed, as an Investigator for the Commission — by Stuart Piggott and Collin Bowen (then Head of the Commission’s Salisbury office). Years later, Desmond Bonney told him that Bowen — whom Chris regarded as ‘perhaps the greatest analytical fieldworker ever’ — had ensured his appointment (2010c, p. 84). Chris became Head of Archaeological Survey in 1980, a post he held to his retirement in 1993, alongside his appointment as Head of the Cambridge office from 1981 to 1988. His immersion, through the Commission, in field archaeology gave him an unparalleled body of knowledge. Over the course of his career he visited, surveyed and/ or made detailed interpretations of a huge range of archaeological sites from causewayed enclosures, hillforts, rural settlements, barrows, linear ditches, field systems, deserted and shrunken villages, abandoned hamlets and farmsteads to mill sites, deer parks, fishponds, moats, castles, gardens, to list just a few. Any conversation with him showed that he