To be published by Picador in 2027, Sophie's next book explores thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Britain, when episodic conflict gave way to continual war. It ranges from kings to war-torn communities and soldiers, from kingdoms to borderlands and battlefields, and from the legal institutions utilised by warring governments to the neighbourhood juries who delivered post-war justice. It examines war from strategy, recruitment and campaigning to battle, medical care, the treatment of the dead, post-war justice and the ways wars were remembered by the communities through which they tore.
Sophie’s second book reveals how, between 1258 and 1265, Simon de Montfort seized power from the king and established a council to govern England, and went to war lit with crusading fervour. Dan Jones called the book ‘a bold and brilliantly written reassessment … alive with human detail and acute political judgement’. Sir Noel Malcolm FBA (Sunday Telegraph) described the book as ‘finely written and based on a deep, scholarly knowledge of the sources’, and Professor Saul David (Daily Telegraph) as ‘exhaustively researched and beautifully written’. The Song was published by Picador in the UK and Commonwealth and Oxford University Press in the USA (2019), and was a Waterstones top-ten bestseller.
Sophie's first book was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Challenging conventional accounts of the age of Magna Carta and England's first revolution, it showed how religious ideas and episcopal authority shaped debates over the limits of kingship. John Maddicott FBA (Journal of Ecclesiastical History) called it ‘bold in its range and persuasive in its reasoning’, while Professor Robert Swanson (Reviews in History) called it 'a stimulating and provocative interpretation ... which merits serious attention not only for the book's specific analysis of 13th-century England, but as a model for applications more widely across succeeding centuries'.
Published in the Journal of Legal History, this article asks what it meant for ordinary men and women to go to war against their government, and what happened to them. Examining the archives of the crown's response to the civil wars of 1263–67 and 1321–22, it shows how juries were used to investigate rebellion, assess culpability and gather intelligence, weighing loyalty to the king against the realities of coerced participation in war. The article offers a people's history of treason, revealing how communities were drawn into the ethical and legal dilemmas of civil war.
At the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Simon de Montfort's head, testicles, a hand and a foot were taken as trophies by his enemies. Published in English Historical Review, this article explains why: a practice of the Anglo-Welsh marches, responding to Simon's policy to cede the borderlands to Wales. It also reveals why Simon became the focus of a cult in the eastern Anglo-Scottish borders. Rooting these phenomena in the contested borderlands of England, Wales and Scotland, the article places the first English revolution in the context of a British, rather than an English, war.
During the parliament of 1265 held by Simon de Montfort's revolutionary council, Magna Carta was confirmed. Although the significance of Simon’s parliament has been debated throughout the intervening centuries, its role in the story of Magna Carta has generally been forgotten. This article, published in English Historical Review, uses hitherto unknown copies of the 1265 Charter's text to reveal the Montfortian support base at this momentous parliament, as well as the strategies that Simon’s council pursued to entrench its authority. It also provides a transcription.