Fourscore Years

George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947) was a British medieval historian renowned for his extensive scholarship on medieval social, religious, and economic history, including notable works such as Five Centuries of Religion (four volumes, 1927-1950), Life in the Middle Ages (1910, revised 1928), Medieval Panorama (1938), and Chaucer and his England (1908), and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his autobiography Fourscore Years (1943). A fierce controversialist known for disputes with Catholic scholars like Hilaire Belloc, he held positions at Cambridge University, becoming a Fellow of St John's College in 1919 and of the British Academy in 1929.