Barbara Wright is a palæographer with over twenty-five years experience in medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman documents. She has studied at Keele University and the University of Leeds, as well as with the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) and Yorkshire Archaeological & Historical Society (YAHS) in Leeds.

The Mortimer family of Wigmore (Herefordshire) have been her main focus of interest. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries they possessed lands throughout England, Wales and Ireland, and had connections in France. Barbara and Graham Wright have travelled extensively to see and photograph places with medieval and Mortimer significance.

Since 1985, Barbara has been compiling a catalogue of original documents relating to the Mortimer family, and used this accumulation of information in a collaboration with English Heritage in their landscape survey of the Wigmore estate and, more recently, a history of Wigmore Castle.

Barbara's research has been used as background information by the BBC for its programme about Wigmore Abbey, in The House Detectives at Large series, with Dan Cruickshank, Carenza Lewis and Anna Bennett. Devised by Dr Nick Barrett, now the BBC's resident expert on genealogy, the programme featured the abbey ruins and the Abbot's House, which is home to John Challis (Boycie from Only Fools and Horses and The Green, Green Grass).

Besides the monographs published by The Flower Press, Barbara's work has appeared in the Yorkshire Archaeological Society's (YAS) Newsletter and on the Website of the YAS Medieval Section, and in Skipton Castle and its Builders by Richard T. Spence, and she has given a number of public talks and papers, including at the International Medieval Congress (IMC) in Leeds and, most recently, to The Mortimer History Society.

A transcription and translation of The Black Book of Wigmore, a fourteenth-century copy of over 1700 charters belonging to the Mortimer family, is Barbara's main task at the moment - a collection that she hopes to publish in due course.