18 MARCH 2006, Page 26

False news from Berkeley

From Dr Ian Mortimer

Sir: Jonathan Sumption implies in his review (Books, 25 February) that my research on Edward II’s death — which concludes that he was not murdered, and that news of the death was the result of deliberate misinformation from Berkeley — is an ‘impossible proposition’. This new theory has gone through four rounds of peer review, and was published in the December 2005 edition of the English Historical Review, the leading scholarly journal in the field of English mediaeval studies, published by OUP. Thus it is safe to say that a number of academic specialists do not feel it is an impossible proposition, nor that my methods are anything less than scholarly.

Ian Mortimer University of Exeter