Edward Royle was born, bred and educated in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, before completing his education and beginning his academic career at the University of Cambridge. His only connection with Scotland came when his Yorkshire-born uncle met a Scottish lass in the army after the war and was carried off to her home on Arran, which he frequently visited as a boy. From Cambridge he moved to the University of York in 1972, where he is now Emeritus Professor of History and a specialist in the social history of Britain since the mid-eighteenth century. He has published extensively on radical and religious history in this period, including Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium (1998) and Modern Britain: a social history, 1750-2011 (3rd edition 2012). His most recent work is Power in the Land. The Ramsdens and their Huddersfield estate, 1542-1920, an edited collection of essays to celebrate the centenary of the purchase by the Town Council of the Huddersfield Estate from the Ramsden family– who still own the Ardverikie estate in Inverness.