Norman Scarfe is one of the most eminent of the historians of East Anglia, and the doyen of Suffolk scholars. He is not constrained by conventional periodisation: his extensive corpus of published work demonstrates an extraordinary facility in the treatment of evidence from the early Anglo-Saxon period to near contemporary history. He recognised the crucial importance of the synthesis of material and documentary sources long before this became fashionable, and the results are brilliantly displayed in The Suffolk Landscape. His three-volume edition of the travel diaries of the La Rochefoucauld