A mid-life career change: from writer to historian

The start of my journey from full-time B2B tech content writer to fledgling historian of early medieval Scotland

Around Easter time last year, like a lot of people during the pandemic, I decided I needed to make a radical change to my life.

I’d been freelancing as a content writer for tech companies for a year, having sold the writing agency I’d spent the previous 12 years building. In fact, I’d thought that selling my company and starting out afresh as a freelancer would be the change I was after.

But I was wrong. With no real-world conferences or tradeshows to lavish budgets on, the tech industry piled its cash into content creation. The work coming my way was relentless. In a way that was a good thing - it’s paid for a new roof and new carpets in my house.

But the effort of writing thousands upon thousands of authoritative-sounding words about things I struggle to understand started to become too much.

I was sick of always being at square one on any given topic; of having to cram reams of information into my brain in order to produce something that felt like an expert had written it.

I was cramming stuff about telecoms network traffic, GNSS simulation, platform economies, sensor fusion, edge computing, hybrid work patterns. I am not and never will be an expert in any of these things.

Every time any of my clients published something I’d (ghost)written - i.e. most days - I felt like a complete fraud.

I tried to reassure myself that the job of a content writer isn’t to be the expert but to channel the expertise of the client. And that my writing must be on some level good, otherwise nobody would hire me.

But it didn’t seem like enough. I’d just turned 50. I didn’t want to spend the entire rest of my life writing things other people wanted me to write. I wanted to write things *I* wanted to write. I wanted to be the expert, to feel like I was writing from a position of authority about things that I know and love.

What were those things, though? During lockdown, my husband James and I had started re-watching the whole of Time Team. I was overwhelmingly reminded that when I was young I’d wanted to be an archaeologist (inspired not by Time Team, but an earlier TV series: Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War).

Plus, for as long as I could remember, I’d been intrigued by the early-medieval Pictish symbol stones dotted around the region where I grew up, in the northeast of Scotland.

Having read and re-read John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B, I’d fancied that one day, like Michael Ventris, I would be the one who finally managed to make sense of the ogham inscriptions carved into some of them, which nobody has been able to interpret with any degree of consensus.

I decided that what I really wanted to do with my life, if not to actually decipher the Pictish ogham inscriptions (since it turns out that far greater minds than mine have been working on them for years), was to make some kind of original contribution to Pictish studies.

I wanted that contribution to be legit, and peer-reviewed, and produced under the supervision of someone who actually knows about this stuff.

Basically, I figured I had to go back to university. But there were a number of problems with that.

For one, I live in south-west Cornwall, about as far from any university that specialises in early medieval Scotland as it’s possible to get on the British mainland.

I also have a family, for which I’m (usually, unless James - who’s a scriptwriter - has something on TV) the main breadwinner, so I couldn’t go back to studying full-time.

Then there’s the fact that over the course of my adult life I’ve developed an annoyingly persistent agoraphobia, which isn’t very compatible with re-training as an archaeologist, since most archaeology is inconveniently located outside. So an Archaeology degree was out.

Eventually, I figured that what I needed was a degree of some kind in medieval studies, which would give me a general grounding in how to ‘do’ history, and show me how to the apply that knowledge to the early Middle Ages. Then I could build my own research into early medieval Scotland on top.

This degree would have to be part-time as I still had to earn money, and it would have to be distance learning as even the nearest university offering medieval studies (Exeter) is 3.5 hours away by train - too far and too expensive to commute.

As it turned out, only one course (but there was one!) met that brief: a taught History MA with a Medieval Studies pathway, by distance learning, with the University of Birmingham.

It took a good few weeks to get up the courage to apply, as I was immensely intimidated by the world of academia and convinced I would be especially rubbish at History. I did History at A-level but hated it and only got a C - although in my defence it was all Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, which was not my kind of thing at all.

In the end, a handful of Twitter chums persuaded me to apply, and in October 2021 I did.

…all of which is quite a long preamble to say that in September this year I’ll be starting my MA History with Medieval Studies, and I am beyond excited about it.

My personal statement

To apply for an MA at Birmingham you have to provide a “personal statement” of <800 words, about why you want to take the course and what qualifies you for it.

I’ve decided to post mine below, both as background to this blog, and in case it’s useful for anyone else to see an example of a personal statement that led to an offer of a place.

And also to say that if you’re thinking of applying for a degree - especially as a mature student - don’t let impostor syndrome or self-doubt put you off. I very nearly didn’t apply for this, but I’m incredibly glad now that I did.

NB It wasn’t required, but I decided to go for a bit of “show don’t tell” by including academic references.

I still can’t decide if that was a smart or insufferably pretentious thing to have done, but I got accepted 10 days after I submitted the application, so it worked in that sense! And a good thing too, as it took almost as long to format the references as it did to write the statement. A lesson learned there.

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Fiona Campbell-Howes – Personal Statement

Course applied for: MA History (Medieval Studies pathway) Distance Learning, September 2022

What piqued my interest in medieval history

I grew up in Moray, an area of north-east Scotland that during the 1970s and 1980s felt like a remote backwater of the United Kingdom. My father had a copy of The Moray Book (Omand, 1976), from which I learned that the southern shore of the Moray Firth had a rich history of Pictish settlement (Small, 1976), and I was immediately hooked.

In Forres, near where I lived, stood an extraordinary 7m tall carved cross-slab, known as Sueno’s Stone, which local tradition held (incorrectly) to be a monument commemorating an 11th century victory of Malcolm II of Scotland over Sweyn Forkbeard, father of King Cnut of England (Sellar, 1993).

A few miles to the east was the promontory fort of Burghead, which recent excavations by the Northern Picts project have revealed to be a Pictish stronghold of considerable size and longevity (Noble, 2021). At nearby Kinneddar, an assemblage of carved stone fragments suggest a major Pictish ecclesiastical site (Noble et al, 2019).

Clearly, something notable was happening in Moray in the early medieval period – but what? This question has been at the back of my mind for the past 35+ years, and it’s one I’ve long promised myself I would study in depth when I had the opportunity. That feeling has only intensified since Alex Woolf convincingly argued that the great Pictish kingdom of Fortriu was not centred on Perthshire, as had been widely thought, but around the shores of the Moray Firth (Woolf, 2006).

Why I want to take an MA History with Medieval Studies

Having sold my business in 2020, I’m now in a position to dedicate a significant amount of time to studying this extremely opaque period of proto-Scottish history. However, although my previous academic studies (a BA in Modern Languages and an MA in Popular Culture) and my copywriting career have given me ample research, planning and writing skills and an introduction to critical approaches, I haven’t formally studied history since A-level, so I don’t have any grounding in historical research methods.

In particular, I lack the research skills needed to investigate a period which, in north-east Scotland, can only just be considered historical. There is only one contemporary (10th century) documentary source from Pictland itself (the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba in the Poppleton Manuscript), so the history of Fortriu has to be pieced together from documentary sources from Ireland, Iona, Wales, Anglo-Saxon England and further afield in place and time, as well as from archaeological and art-historical research, linguistic and toponymic evidence, geology, palaeogeography, and more.

Why I want to study with the University of Birmingham

With all of this in mind, I looked for a postgraduate course that could help me develop interdisciplinary research skills and start applying them to my research. I’m not in a position to do a residential course as I have a family to care for, so I was overjoyed to find the MA History by Distance Learning at Birmingham, with a Medieval Studies pathway that promises to provide a solid grounding in interdisciplinary research methods, decoding medieval documents, and using key concepts and theories as explored in the Making of the World: Themes in Global History module.

My specific research interest

I have already given considerable thought to a dissertation topic, and I would very much like to explore the significance and contemporary (probably late 9th century, though this is uncertain) geopolitical context of the aforementioned Sueno’s Stone. More specifically, I’m keen to understand why it stands where it does. Archaeological evidence suggests it still stands on the spot where it was originally erected (McCullagh, 1995), but why that location was chosen – and by whom – remains a mystery.

19th century photograph of Sueno’s Stone by James Valentine (National Galleries Scotland)

Aside from the cross, its carvings are of a strikingly martial nature, with depictions of mounted warriors, pitched battle, and mass beheadings of a defeated enemy. I hope that the Medieval Warfare module will help me to assess the narrative and meaning behind these images, which were clearly intended to make a powerful statement in their own time but which are largely incomprehensible to historians today – although a paper presented at the 2021 Pictish Arts Society conference sheds some intriguing new light (Borland and Loggie, 2021).

My future research aspirations

I hope that my proposed focus on early medieval Scotland isn’t too prejudicial to my being considered for an MA at Birmingham. As the historical sources from Pictland are so meagre, access to scholars with research specialisms in Anglo-Saxon England and Viking Britain would be invaluable, and the prospect of studying within such a high-ranking History department is very exciting. I hope to progress to further research after completing the MA, perhaps building on work undertaken for my dissertation. A pathway towards future research opportunities would interest me very much.

References

Borland, J. and Loggie, R., 2021. Sueno’s Stone: Recent research and recording (online presentation at the Pictish Arts Society conference 2021)

McCullagh, R., 1995. Excavations at Sueno’s Stone, Forres, Moray. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 125, pp. 697-718.

Noble, G., 2021. Discovering the Picts: From Enemies of Rome to Powerful Kingdoms of Early Medieval Scotland (online lecture to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow)

Noble, G. et al, 2019, Kinneddar: A major ecclesiastical site of the Picts. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 148, pp. 113-145

Omand, D., 1976, The Moray Book, Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh

Sellar, W.D.H., 1993, Sueno’s Stone and its interpreters. Sellar, W.D.H. ed, 1993, Moray: Province and People, Scottish Society for Northern Studies, Edinburgh pp. 96-116

Small, A., 1976, Iron Age and Pictish Moray. Omand, D. ed., 1976, The Moray Book, Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh pp.113-24

Woolf, A., 2006, Dún Nechtain, Fortriu and the geography of the Picts. Scottish Historical Review, 85(2), pp. 182-201