John Oswald Prestwich (26 June 1914 – 25 January 2003), nicknamed "Jop", was an English medieval historian and fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.
[1][2] On 2 November 1940, having attended an Officer Cadet Training Unit, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, British Army.
He recalled later: Alamein was marvellous, because you had these desperate messages from Rommel saying 'Panzer Army is exhausted, we've enough petrol for 50 kilometres, ammunition is contemptible' and so on.
Although his small scholarly output is often noted, he had "towering influence" on the field[5] and was "one of the most influential medievalists in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century",[6] despite not founding a "Prestwich school of history".
The book also included an appendix containing a "spirited and effective demolition of feudalism as a useful or accurate description of anything that might have existed in the two centuries after the conquest".