Emeritus Professor Glanville Rees Jeffreys Jones

`Glan' Jones was born on 12 December 1923 in Llangyfelach, Glamorgan, where his family had lived for generations. He was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the war and then went on to read geography at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. The college has a long tradition of research in historical geography and Jones was drawn to the study of medieval rural settlement in Wales, influenced by Professor T. Jones Pierce, who supervised his postgraduate study of the defensive measures adopted by the thirteenth-century princes of Gwynedd in their conflicts with the English crown. Jones' important researches into Welsh medieval economic organization were, however, conducted from his base at Leeds University, where he spent the whole of his career. Beginning as an assistant lecturer in the school of geography in 1949, he was appointed reader in historical geography in 1969, professor in 1974, and emeritus professor on retirement in 1989. Nevertheless, he maintained close links with the University of Wales, serving for many years as an external examiner and on numerous appointments boards. As well as being a dedicated and accomplished teacher, Jones was a meticulous scholar. His total fluency in the Welsh language and intimate knowledge of the landscape facilitated his life-long, painstaking study of documentary sources, particularly legal material and poetry, from which emerged a fresh elucidation of the field systems and settlement patterns arising out of Welsh methods of land exploitation and inheritance. Jones further explored the implications of this fundamental reconsideration of the respective roles of tillage and stock-raising in a medieval economy on border areas settled by the Anglo-Saxons, and on wider regions of central England, especially Leeds, with its distinctive British inheritance and important associations with early Welsh poetry. His findings were published in learned journals, such as Antiquity, Geografiske Annaler, etc. and as contributions to The Agrarian History of England and Wales, etc. In addition to his academic work, Jones played a full part in the life of the university, particularly as a member of the committee responsible for the university's affiliated colleges. There are ten of these, covering a diversity of vocations, such as the City of Leeds College of Music, the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, and Leeds College of Nursing and Midwifery, all of which suffered during the financial stringencies of eighties. The staff and students were particularly grateful for Jones' very practical concern for their future and that of the colleges. Jones' health deteriorated over the last few years and he died in Leeds on 23 July 1996.