Ella Sophia Armitage

Who was Ella Sophia Armitage?

Ella Sophia Armitage was an English historian and archaeologist. She was born Ella Sophia Bulley in Liverpool, the second daughter of Samuel Marshall Bulley, a cotton merchant, and Mary Rachel Raffles. In October 1871 she was one of the first students to enter Newnham College, Cambridge, and in 1874 she became the college's first research student. In the same year she married the Reverend Elkanah Armitage, with whom she would have two children. From 1877 to 1879 she taught history at Owens College, Manchester, and developed her interest in mediaeval earthworks and castles. In 1887 she became the first woman on the school board at Rotherham, and in 1894 she was appointed assistant commissioner to James Bryce on the Royal Commission on Secondary Education to investigate girls' education in Devon.

Armitage—along with John Horace Round, George Neilson, and Goddard Henry Orpen—proved in a string of publications that British motte-and-bailey castles, which had previously been assumed to be of Anglo-Saxon origin, were not constructed until after the 1066 Norman conquest of England; her book The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles is considered a seminal work on the subject.