Robert Charles Palmer

The second of seven children, Bob was born on February 8, 1947 to Albert and Josephine Palmer. He loved to say that his childhood in Cottage Grove, Oregon was austere and intellectual: he walked to school through feet of snow and watched only documentaries. Perhaps these specifics weren’t true (he did watch cartoons), but Bob discovered his love of learning at his local libraries, poring over books of mythology and working his way systematically through the stacks. His real friends in those early years, he said, were the books.

At fourteen, Bob joined the seminary boarding school at Mount Angel, where he trained to become a Benedictine monk. Following six years in the seminary, he completed his novitiate and lived as a monk during his sophomore and junior years of college. Bob was known for being studious, thoughtful, and consistently punctual – so punctual, in fact, that his friends once dragged him out of chapel, just to make him late a single time. Although Bob was on track to become a moral theologian, he eventually decided to part ways with both Catholicism and the monastery, but he retained the habit of looking at the ground when he walked for the rest of his life.

He decided, instead, to get a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and devote his life to medieval English legal history. It was in Iowa City that Bob met his wife, Pat, when he showed up right on time for a party Pat was throwing with her roommates. (The hosts were still not dressed.) He was serious, she thought, but also funny; he carried fried chicken in his briefcase. They got married in December of 1971.

The rest of Bob’s life was characterized by extraordinary devotion to his two great loves: history and his family. He became the Cullen Professor of History and Law at the University of Houston and wrote many books and articles on English and American legal history, including The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150-1350; The Whilton Dispute, 1264-1380; English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381; and Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550. (Although his books were well-regarded and influential, his own mother once complained that they contained words that weren’t even in the dictionary.)

However proud he was of his research and writing, Bob’s great dream was to democratize the study of English legal history by digitizing many of the records at The National Archives in London. While he had an endowment that allowed him to travel to London every summer to conduct his research, many historians, graduate students, and hobbyist researchers did not, and Bob spent the last couple decades of his life fixing this inequality. After negotiating a license between The National Archives and the University of Houston’s O’Quinn Law Library, Bob and his daughter, Elspeth, began photographing medieval and Renaissance documents in 2006. They were soon joined by his colleague Susanne Brand and several other industrious photographers (including, for a time, Bob’s son-in-law, Andy). The vision, the dream, and so much of the manpower, however, came from Bob, whose commitment and belief were almost mythological in scale; he believed he could do the nearly impossible, and so he did. Using simple, inexpensive methods, Bob and the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT) project achieved something truly great: free access to historical documents for anyone, anywhere in the world. By the time of his death, AALT consisted of around 10 million images of documents from the 12th to 19th centuries. He also created and maintained the wiki for the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (WAALT), a site where researchers can index AALT records and collaborate on research. He was deeply grateful for his WAALT contributors, like Vance Mead and Rosemary Simons, and always eager to welcome more. Just as Bob wanted, these projects will all continue with support from his daughter, his collaborators and colleagues, and Amanda Watson at the University of Houston Law Center.

If you saw or met Bob in the archives, you might have noted his focus and persistence, his generosity, and his kindness, but his family was lucky to know so much more of him. He truly was one of the world’s great characters, with a personality so rich and unusual that he invented many alter-egos to express it all. (As his son, Edward, once noted, it could be hard to keep track of all the names he called himself or who he was at any given time.) Certainly, Bob would do just about anything for a laugh, and this silliness was mesmerizing to children. When Elspeth left him to babysit his grandchildren, she’d come home to find that Bob had established elaborate routines, set to song, or invented games that the children would clamor for, like “Bippity-Boppity Bib” or “Shake-a-by.” He loved cleverness and feistiness, and he roared with laughter every time his precocious grandchildren put their mother in her place. But he was tender-hearted, too, a person of grand visions and dreams, big loves and big emotions. He cried during the Olympics and at the end of movies; he hugged his children tightly. Nature moved him, and he loved touring Kew Gardens with Pat, sitting together peacefully in the Japanese garden with a book and then having a scone at the Orangery. As you might expect of a man who could take millions of photographs of old records, Bob loved a routine and rarely minded repetition. He might watch the same movie every day for a month or more – from classics like Chicago or Finding Nemo, to deeper cuts like Gunless or Bolt – or order the same pizza for decades. And although he was a person of habit, he was never boring. He delighted in bold flavors and bright colors. He was curious, inquisitive, and enthusiastic about learning. He was the first to raise his hand with a question.

Bob took tremendous pride in his family, too. He loved talking about current events and progressive politics with his son, and he loved having his daughter as his co-worker and collaborator. Along with Pat, he gave them a truly special childhood, split between Texas and London. He shepherded them around castles, gave them a love of history, and answered all of their questions. (Sometimes it seemed he knew the answers to everything!) Bob admired justice, fairness, morality, and equality wherever he found them, and he was deeply dependable. His family could count on him in any crisis, to think through any problem they had. He looked after his wife, Pat, with incredible devotion and humor. He made his family laugh and brought them so much joy.

There was no one else, anywhere, quite like Bob. The world is a better place because he was here – for his family and also for many researchers around the world who will continue to benefit from his extraordinary work and dedication.

As his grandchildren would say, his family loves him all the way across the universe and all the way back, on and on to infinity. They are so proud of him, and they will miss him forever.

Bob is survived by his wife, Pat; his son, Edward; his daughter and son-in-law, Elspeth and Andy Rosbrook; and his grandchildren, Saoirse and Willoughby, who deeply adored Grandpa Bob and his jokes. He is also survived by his siblings James Palmer, William Palmer, Patricia Rouse, Jeanne Gibson, and Joseph Palmer.

If you loved Bob or if he made a difference in your life or research, his family would be so grateful if you would donate to his fund for the Anglo-American Legal Tradition project, his important and beloved legacy. Please go to the University of Houston Law Center’s giving page, https://giving.uh.edu/law/, and select “Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT)” as the beneficiary. UK donors can also make Gift Aid donations to the AALT through the Selden Society (https://www.seldensociety.ac.uk/). Please contact the secretary, Professor Michael Lobban (selden-society@qmul.ac.uk), if you would like more information on how to do this. Other queries or comments about Bob, his legacy, or donations can be directed to his daughter, Elspeth Rosbrook (elspethpalmer@gmail.com).

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.earthmanbellaire.com for the Palmer family.