H. E. J. Cowdrey

A leading expert on the Gregorian reforms, his most important work is the monograph Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085, considered a masterpiece "unlikely to be surpassed".

[2][3] Born in Basingstoke on 29 November 1926, Cowdrey attended Queen Mary's School for Boys there from 1937 until 1943, when he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford.

On 22 October 1946, he was in one of the magazines during the second Corfu Channel incident, when Mauritius and her flotilla passed through an unexpected minefield off Albania.

He also learned biblical Hebrew and ancient Greek, in addition to the modern languages he already knew (English, French, German and Italian).

[7] This was a refutation of the thesis of Carl Erdmann that the goal of the crusade at the start was the defence of the Byzantine Empire and the eastern church.

[2] In 1983, The Age of Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the Normans in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries, a preliminary to Cowdrey's projected book on Gregory VII, appeared.

It is a study of Lanfranc of Canterbury, an Italian monk from Normandy, that seeks to show that he understood England and the needs of the English church.