Marjorie Chibnall was known for her many studies of Anglo-Norman history, including, most notably, her mighty six-volume edition and translation of the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History, published between 1969 and 1980 — the product of 30 years of painstaking work. Her first publications, a series of papers on alien priories (English religious houses under the control of a mother house abroad) began before the Second World War, and she continued to publish into her 90s. Her last book The Normans, published in 2006 when she was 91, won praise from a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement as “a masterly work, the most elegant and concise account of Norman history currently in print”. And between the 1930s and 2000s there was a very considerable body of work of the highest quality. As well as being a fine scholar – a Fellow of the British Academy, an OBE, and perhaps most distinguished of all an Honorary DLitt of the University of Cambridge – she was also an inspirational teacher. Between 1947 and 1965 she taught at Girton College, but retired in 1965. In 1965 she became one of the first fellows of Clare Hall (a year before its formal foundation), where she brought to a young college her own exacting standards. Her work on the drafting of the college statutes, no doubt influenced by her knowledge of medieval monasteries, produced a model of good sense and pellucid expression, parts of which are still being copied by colleges of far greater antiquity.