James Thomas Lang, M.A.

`Jim' Lang was born in York in 1935 and educated at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in the city. He read English at Durham University but developed an over-riding enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon sculpture under the influence of Professor Rosemary Cramp, and was to become one of the region's best-known early medieval archaeologists. Most of Lang's professional career was spent in teaching, an activity at which he excelled at all levels; he was just as comfortable with schoolchildren as with undergraduates and elderly adult education students. He taught for six years from 1959-65 as assistant master at Malet Lambert Grammar School in Hull and then from 1965-8 at Chester College for the training of teachers. Having exchanged his early specialism in English for pre-Conquest archaeology, particularly the study of sculpture, Lang was appointed lecturer at Neville's Cross College, Durham (later known as New College) in 1968. He remained at Durham, subsequently as senior lecturer, until 1984 and during this time became almost as engrossed in Irish medieval archaeology as he was in that of the north of England. He published the Castledermot hogback in 1971 and was invited to study the Viking age decorated wood from the Wood Quay excavations in Dublin. His Viking Decorated Wood was published in the Medieval Dublin Excavation Series in 1988. Lang joined the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission (English Heritage) in 1985 as education officer and in 1989 was appointed Inspector of Ancient Monuments for the North of England, later Senior Inspector and Head of the Historic Branch from 1989-95, when he retired. Rosemary Cramp, Lang's mentor and friend from his student days, had long recognized his scholarship and recruited him to the British Academy's Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture, of which she is general editor. Lang was responsible for volume III (1991) on York and Eastern Yorkshire, with contributions by John Higgitt, Raymond I. Page and John R. Senior. Although his work in the Inspectorate had its compensations, Lang missed the stimulus and rewards peculiar to teaching, especially the pleasure derived from the achievements of his students, and he was not sorry to retire from English Heritage. Throughout his life, he was a well-known and always welcome figure on the conference circuit in Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the United States. He had been appointed Honorary Visiting Professor of Archaeology at the University of York in 1994, a chair created for him, and he was looking forward to many more years of teaching and writing. But this was not to be. He fell ill and, working against the clock, completed a further volume of the Corpus before he died, aged 61, on 24 January 1997.