Alfred Brown

At Glasgow University, which he entered when still 16, he graduated with first-class honours in history and constitutional history, won a prize for an essay on Lord Durham and his 1840 report, and gained a scholarship to Balliol College.

After national service in the RAF at Turnhouse as education officer (he had asked for service overseas) he went to Oxford in 1949 to research the fifteenth-century privy seal.

He graduated D.Phil in 1955 but had left Oxford to become assistant to S B Chrimes, then head of constitutional law and history at the University of Glasgow in 1951.

However, the times were changing, with a chair of medieval history created in 1954, and with constitutional history struggling for continued recognition. When Chrimes left for Cardiff in 1953, Al had largely prepared the volume of late medieval constitutional history documents edited by Chrimes and Brown.

For two years as temporary lecturer, he did his health no good struggling to give all the courses inherited from Chrimes, but a safe lectureship came when Glasgow University chose to include constitutional history in 1956, when Lionel Stones became professor of medieval history.

There Al joined with a will in defence of that subject as a unit to be taken by all honours history students, in a department with an outstanding record of care for students.

Less formal help was unstinted: the student who panicked in a finals paper and took to their home intending to sit no others might have returned next session. But Al turned up at their home in the evening, listened and talked, and had him or her back in the exam hall with new courage to complete their degree the next morning.

For almost 40 years he took a group of students to The Burn at Edzell for a reading party, where daytime walks, tennis and highly competitive croquet were balanced by twice-daily rounds of medieval history.

He gradually assumed greater responsibilities in the department, recognised by the title of professor in 1972, and by his appointment to succeed Stones in the chair at Glasgow in 1978.

By then the university had to attract students from a base wider than the west of Scotland. Al enjoyed recruiting in the isles, perhaps in Orkney most, having his annual dinner with George Mackay Brown, to whom he had presented an honorary degree. For recruitment of overseas students he went twice to China in the 1980s.

Apart from his student days, he had only been away from Glasgow for his military service and two years at Balliol. His appointment as vice-principal at Glasgow University was well earned, a five-year stint when he enjoyed pulling the levers of power to get things done.

He published his volume on the late middle-ages in the governance of England series in 1989, a thoughtful analysis showing how teaching and research interact to inspire scholarship. There were other articles on the same period and a jointly-written history of the modern Glasgow University, but the commissioned biography of Henry IV was never finished, the price paid for his generous service to university and church.

A faithful Catholic, he was university-nominated governor of the erstwhile St Andrew's College of Education, where his business sense was invaluable. Later he played a large part in negotiating the move from college to university faculty of education. In retirement, as chairman of the finance committee of the archdiocese of Glasgow, he saw that measures to reduce the burden of its debt were driven through, efforts recognised by the award of a papal knighthood. He retired from the committee before the darkness of Alzheimer's disease began to affect him, and in 2003 moved to Edinburgh to be near his son and grandchildren. He died in Edinburgh after a mercifully brief battle with cancer.