Edward Arthur Thompson

Edward Arthur Thompson (22 May 1914 – 1 January 1994) was an Irish-born British classicist, medievalist and professor at the University of Nottingham from 1948 to 1979. He wrote from a Marxist perspective, and argued that the Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine to counter the internal threat of the peasant bagaudae.

Thompson was born on 22 May 1914 in the town of Waterford, Ireland to an Presbyterian family of both Irish and Scottish descent.

Although taught to read only at the age of eight, Thompson proceeded to attend and finish at The High School, Dublin, with which he maintained sufficient links to be requested by its then-headmaster, Dr. John Bennett, to send a copy of A History of Attila and the Huns when Thompson published the book in 1948.

Although his father worked for the administration of the National Health Insurance, Edward Thompson would be the first of his family to enter university: he graduated with First Class Honours in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin in 1936, later attributing his selection of the classics as a discipline to the arbitrary choice of his headmaster at The High School.

Thompson's first appointment in academia, as Lecturer in Classics, was a two-year stint at Trinity College, Dublin  – although initially appointed for one year, Thompson's contract was renewed, and he stayed on (though at a reduced salary) until 1941. Already prepared to enter the Second World War with an enlistment in the British Army, Thompson finally secured an appointment at the University of Swansea, having learned of an opening for somebody who could teach Greek from a friend, Swansea classicist Ben Farrington.

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