Caroline Thorn: an Appreciation

Summary

Caroline Maureen Jane THORN née Parker

Born in London on 25 June 1949

Died of lymphatic cancer in the Royal United Hospital in Bath on 6 July 2011

Aged 62

Caroline Thorn made a quiet but significant contribution to the elucidation of Domesday Book for over thirty-five years and she became one of that small group of scholars who had worked on every line of the Book and of its many ‘satellites’.

She was born in London and educated in Godalming and Guildford in Surrey, but spent her holidays on the loughs and mountains of Northern Ireland, before studying Latin and Ancient Greek in the then innovative and thriving department of Classics at Southampton University, where she met her future husband Frank who was researching for a doctoral thesis on the Roman poet Vergil. She obtained a first-class degree in 1970 followed by an MA in Medieval History (1971) during which she studied historiography, the renaissance of the twelfth century and a number of texts in medieval Latin, being tutored in palaeography by Dr Paul Harvey. Her dissertation was on the life of St Oswald.

Caroline settled in Bath, Somerset, and continued to study various medieval texts with a view to editing and publishing, but her scholarship found a sharper focus when in 1975 she replied to a televisual solicitation by Dr John Morris of University College London, who, on a programme called ‘Look Stranger’, was calling for help from ‘married women with Latin’. The Phillimore edition of Domesday, begun in that year and promised at twelve counties a year over three years, was already behind schedule; Caroline joined the editorial team and worked on every county in the series as a sub-editor and proof-reader but was also engaged to translate (the whole of Wiltshire and Somerset and most of Devon), and to insert additional information from the Exon Domesday into the translations of the Great Domesday text. This last introduced her to the Exon manuscript which she visited frequently and on which she became an expert.

John Morris died suddenly in 1977 and Caroline with others, under the benevolent direction of John McNeal Dodgson, also of University College London, was promoted to county editor.