obit. for Maurice Beresford, economic historian

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<http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article338507.ece>

Professor Maurice Beresford

Economic historian and author of 'The Lost Villages of England' who
pioneered 'landscape history'

Published: 14 January 2006

Maurice Warwick Beresford, economic historian: born Sutton Coldfield,
Warwickshire 6 February 1920; Lecturer, Leeds University 1948-55,
Reader 1955-59, Professor of Economic History 1959-85 (Emeritus), Dean
1958-60, Chairman, School of Economics Studies 1965-68, 1971-72,
1981-83, Chairman of Faculty Board 1968-70; FBA 1985; died Leeds 15
December 2005.

Maurice Beresford was one of the foremost medieval economic historians
of the second half of the 20th century and a pioneer of what is now
called Landscape History.

An only child, Beresford was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1920. After
Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, where his interests in history,
geography and literature were developed, he went up to Jesus College,
Cambridge, in 1939 to read History. Already left-wing and from 1939 a
conscientious objector, he often said that he never felt at home among
what he called the "hearties and the rowing brigade" of the college.
Only in recent years did his views about his college mellow;
surprisingly, a year or two ago he even attended a reunion dinner.

His unease did not stop him, however, from getting a First in Prelims,
as a result of which he was invited to participate in an economic
history seminar run by John Saltmarsh, Fellow of King's. This was to
have a lasting influence upon his academic life, for Saltmarsh was one
of the few historians at the time interested not only in documentary
sources but in visible remains in the landscape. Beresford recalled
that Saltmarsh took the group on a walk to Grantchester, where they
could see in the irregular surface of a field above the water meadows
the supposed remains of medieval cultivation. The survival of sinuous
ridge-and-furrow (as it became known), proof of its medieval origins
and its role in reconstructing medieval field arrangements were to
become central to Beresford's early research.

After Cambridge, and with a strong social conscience and sympathy for
the underdog, Beresford did social work in London and Birmingham
before being appointed to an adult education centre, the Guildhouse,
in Rugby. It was here that in his spare time he developed his lifelong
interests in local and Midland history. It was not long before,
weekend-walking, Ordnance maps in hand, he recognised the field
remains of Warwickshire villages long since deserted.

This was just at the time when W.G. Hoskins, working mainly in
Leicestershire, had realised that deserted village sites were in fact
more numerous than had hitherto been thought. With Hoskins's
encouragement, Beresford explored his side of Watling Street; as a
result both men published original and influential papers on the
evidence for medieval village desertion, Hoskins for Leicestershire in
1946 ("The Deserted Villages of Leicestershire", published in
Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society, revised and
expanded in Essays in Leicestershire History, 1950) and Beresford for
Warwickshire in 1950 ("The Deserted Villages of Warwickshire" in
Transactions and Proceedings of the Birmingham Archaeological
Society).

Beresford's general article of 1948 for Country Life on "Tracing Lost
Villages" was picked up by J.T. Oliver at Lutterworth Press, who, in a
letter of 30 June 1949, invited him to "consider doing a whole book on
the subject". This resulted five years later in The Lost Villages of
England (1954), Beresford's first major book and the one with which he
has since been most directly identified.

To satisfy his curiosity and to prove a point, Beresford decided to
verify by excavation that particular bumps on the ground surface were
in fact the foundations of medieval buildings. He did this on sites at
Stretton Baskerville, Warwickshire, Bittesby, Leicestershire and, soon
after his appointment in 1948 to a Lectureship in Economic History at
Leeds University, at the earthworks of Wharram Percy on the Yorkshire
Wolds which, with two friends, he had, "discovered" on a weekend walk
from the youth hostel at Malton.

Adept by then at the documentary research but conscious of his lack of
proper archaeological training, Beresford admitted that he had
"trespassed from history into archaeology". This was at a time when
established British archaeologists were preoccupied with the
prehistoric and Roman periods and had not become seriously interested
in the potential of medieval sites. It was only with the arrival at
Wharram in June 1952 of John Hurst, recently graduated in archaeology
from Cambridge, that the research potential of deserted villages and
of this site in particular was realised. The excavation of Wharram
Percy (still only partial) was to occupy both men for the next 40
years.

For Beresford, it was at the centre of both his academic and social
life. Not only was he the historian at Wharram but, in his own words,
he was "the excavation's recruiting sergeant, its catering manager,
its public relations man and its sanitary engineer". Over the years,
hundreds of volunteers, young and old, gathered from universities,
adult education centres, schools and, at Beresford's instigation,
Borstal institutions, helped on the summer excavations. Beresford
became the central figure of a "Wharram network"; many men and women
who worked there became his lifelong friends.

Traces of the medieval rural landscape seen on the ground and from the
air preoccupied Beresford in the 1950s. Maps and field walking
resulted in many papers in journals, national and local, and in 1957 a
book, History on the Ground: six studies in maps and landscapes. A
year later, as a result of collaboration with Kenneth St Joseph of the
Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography, Medieval
England: an aerial survey (1958) was published. This splendidly
illustrated (but far from coffee-table) book explored the surviving
evidence for medieval settlements, rural and urban, which, with expert
interpretation, may be used to supplement evidence from maps and
documents.

Beresford, along with Hoskins, was by then being recognised as a
pioneer of a new branch of history now popularly known as Landscape
History. Almost 20 years of collaborative work with Hurst also led to
an updated survey of the historical and archaeological work in their
jointly edited Deserted Medieval Villages: studies (1971).

Beresford's interests in urban history continued to develop. Soon
after his appointment at Leeds he was "kidnapped" (his word) to write
Leeds Chamber of Commerce (1951), a centenary history. Thereafter and
at intervals, with the help of several willing car-drivers (he never
himself drove a car) he visited numerous planned medieval towns which
became the corpus of his large, seminal book New Towns of the Middle
Ages: town plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (1967) in which he
revealed an important aspect of medieval urban history hitherto
neglected. The book became the basis for all subsequent work on this
topic and it continues to be much quoted by medieval urban historians.

Although medieval urbanisation continued to occupy much of his
research time (another product was English Medieval Boroughs : a
handlist, 1973, with H.P.R. Finberg), Leeds, which we are now apt to
think of as his home town, increasingly occupied the local history
niche of his enquiring mind. Increasing demolition of 18th- and
19th-century properties, not least by the university, prompted him to
research in fine detail the building history of the university
precinct and other parts of Leeds. Again, it was the combination of
documents, early maps and direct observation which led to Walks Round
Redbrick (1980) and his massive book East End, West End: the face of
Leeds during urbanisation, 1684-1842 (1988).

Between times, many of his papers were published by the Hambledon
Press in a collected volume with the fitting title Time and Place:
collected essays (1985). In the same year he was elected a Fellow of
the British Academy. He went on writing and involving himself with
local societies until his health recently began to fail.

Maurice Beresford was a big man with a strong, penetrating voice. He
enjoyed teaching and was a very good, witty and entertaining lecturer
(almost always using slides) but, on account of many digressions,
usually found it difficult to keep to time. As he reflected later, one
was lucky to get away with under two hours. Aside from university
offices, national committees, social-work commitments and political
interests (he was essentially "old Labour"), he was a devotee of
classical music, film, theatre and ballet. Research visits to London
archives were almost always followed by theatre visits.

A bachelor, without any social pretensions, he owned two adjacent
terraced houses in the centre of Leeds. Not for him good restaurants
and fine wines; baked beans, sausages, fish and chips were his
staples. He was lively company. Dog at his side, he would reminisce at
length, eyes shut, fingers waving, seemingly in a world of his own
until he looked to you to supply a name that he had forgotten. He
could, however, be very demanding without realising it and he was not
the easiest person to have as a house guest, not least because he was
no respecter of furniture. Many chairs failed to survive his abrupt
and weighty arrival.

Fortunately, the Chair of Economic History at Leeds which he occupied
for 25 years from 1959 was not one of them and it gave him the
greatest pleasure when the university recently recognised his
distinguished contribution by the award of an honorary degree to add
to those of Loughborough, Leicester and Hull.

Robin Glasscock