Ella Sophia Armitage

Ella Sophia Armitage (born March 3, 1841 in Liverpool , † March 20, 1931 in Middlesbrough ) was an English historian and archaeologist.

Life

Ella Sophia Bulley was born in 1841 as the second of 14 children of the cotton merchant Samuel Marshall Bulley and his wife Mary Rachel (née Raffles). In October 1871 she was one of the first five students to attend the newly formed Newnham College in Cambridge and in 1874 was the university's first research student . In the same year she married the pastor Elkanah Armitage (1844-1929), with whom she later had a daughter and a son.

From 1877 to 1879 Armitage taught history at Owens College in Manchester. Her specialty were medieval castles. In 1887 she was the first woman to serve on the school leadership at Rotherham College, and in 1894 she became an associate commissioner for James Bryce on the Royal Higher Education Commission to study the education of young girls in Devon .

Together with John Horace Round , George Neilson and Goddard Henry Orpen , Armitage explored the history of medieval hilltop castles in Great Britain. If it was previously assumed that these castles were of Anglo-Saxon origin, Armitage was able to prove that they were only built after the Norman conquest of Great Britain. Armitage wrote several books on the subject. Her book The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles is one of the seminal works in this field.

Awards

• 1919: Honorary Masters from Manchester University for services in archeology
• Honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

Fonts

• The Childhood of the English Nation or the Beginnings of English History . Longmans, Green, and Co, London 1877
• Richard I. and Edward I. Longmans, Green, and Co, London 1881
• The Connection Between England and Scotland Rivingtons, London, 1885
• A key to English Antiquities: with special reference to the Sheffield and Rotherham district . JM Dent & Co, London 1905
• The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles . J. Murray, London 1912

literature

• Joan Counihan: Mrs Ella Armitage, John Horace Round, GT Clark, and Earls Norman Castles . In: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1985 . (= Anglo-Norman Studies VIII ). Boydell Press, Woodbridge / Wolfeboro 1986, pp. 74–87 ( digitized from Google Books )
• Catharine MC Haines: International Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary to 1950 . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara / Denver / Oxford 2001, pp. 9f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Joan Counihan: Armitage (née Bulley), Ella Sophia (1841–1931) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed February 22, 2017