During my first degree at Keele University, from 1976 to 1980, I wrote several extended essays, including work on Charles III of Spain and Gothic architecture. My essay entitled Athelstan, Rex Totius Britanniae won the Wedgwood Prize. My final-year dissertation was on Brittany and the Honour of Richmond, examining the close relationship between the Dukes of Brittany and their English territories, especially in Richmond, North Yorkshire, and the part this played in Anglo-French relations from the Norman Conquest to the Hundred Years War.

I also studied Historical Geography as part of my Geography degree, along with Geomorphology and Quaternary Studies. My final-year Geography dissertation was on Nineteenth-Century Knutsford, a comparative study of sources using the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, especially Cranford, and the 1851 and 1861 Census returns.

For my MA, I studied part-time at Birkbeck College, University of London, from 1985 to 1988. My dissertation was on Property Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Maidstone, using the 1851 rate books to make a comparison with R. S. Holmes’s study of Ramsgate using the same resource.

For my PhD, I returned to Mediaeval History and to my first love, the Anglo-Saxons. It took me several years to decide on a specific topic, but I eventually registered to study part-time with Dr Janet Nelson, later Professor Dame Janet Nelson, at King’s College London. The title of my thesis was The Royal Women of Anglo-Saxon England.

The main source for this study was the body of surviving charters. As there are nine women for whom substantial charter evidence exists, I concentrated on the seven who had not previously been studied in depth using this resource. I had to take several years out from the study for family reasons, but eventually submitted my thesis in 2006 and graduated in 2009.

My first job after graduating from Keele was as Head of History at a small school in Walmer, where I devised and taught the whole syllabus for British History, from the Stone Age to the twentieth century. For family reasons, I left teaching in 1984 for a career in the Civil Service, which gave me more free time to study.

I undertook further courses at Morley College and Goldsmiths College on the Anglo-Saxons, the Greeks, the Celts and other early civilisations, studying under Professor Michelle Brown, Dr Sue Blundell and Joan Nicholson. I returned to teaching as a part-time Adult Education tutor in 1992.

I also used my historical background to become an eyeOpener guide at the British Museum in 1994. There, I trained to guide visitors through numerous galleries, from the Ancient World of Greece and Rome to the Mediaeval and Modern European galleries.

I have taught a number of courses at Bexley College and the City Lit, based on the lives of the Kings and Queens of England, as well as on the areas in which I have been trained by British Museum experts.