| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| INTERVIEW |
For an economic historian, it was quite an achievement to transform the world of medieval archaeology. The remains of deserted villages and medieval field systems were virtually unrecognised 50 years ago, but Maurice Beresford identified them for what they are.
The effect of his discovery was enormous. It gave breadth to medieval archaeology (previously confined mostly to castles and manor houses), it stimulated landscape history, then in its infancy, and it raised vast demographic questions about the Middle Ages that are still not fully answered.
It also nearly spelled ruin for its author, then a young man in his first academic job, whose more senior colleagues lined up to denounce him in print for his heretical views. Fortunately, he was proved right and they wrong; not least by the famous 40-season dig at Wharram Percy, which he co-directed with John Hurst.
Now 74, Maurice Beresford still lives in Leeds where he has spent most of his academic career, including 35 years as Professor of Economic History (now Emeritus). We met at his terraced home, a shambolic elderly-bachelor's house full of Indoor plants, the dining table a clutter of newspapers and torn-out crosswords, empty cassette boxes and a tippex bottle on its side. He shares his home with a frantic dog which, at the sound of the telephone, runs at great speed yelping and barking around the room.
Prof Beresford sits opposite me on a stacked-up pile of sofa cushions. An introspective man, he stares fixedly out of the window when speaking, or screws his eyes shut, sometimes covering them with a hand, while letting the other hand dangle in the air, fingers wiggling. He talks at great length, forcing me to interrupt at times, and looking puzzled when I do as though he'd forgotten I was there.
Born in 1920 in Sutton Coldfield to working-class parents, Maurice Beresford was influenced at grammar school by the Left Book Club and dissenting literature Graves, Sassoon and others - and registered as a conscientious objector while a student at Cambridge in 1939.
There, with Eric Hobsbawm and other idealists of the far left, he joined the Cambridge University Socialist Club, but channelled his political energy into social work, first as a volunteer during vacations and then as a paid worker after university. He was driven by guilt about his own `easy life', he says, as well as by genuine sympathy. After a year, he found himself `too green' for the work - `I was like a fish out of water' - but he retained his social conscience, serving later in life as a voluntary prison teacher, and on parole, probation, citizens' advice bureau and other related committees.
He became a teacher; but as a `nonathlete of a very high order', he avoided children - `They would have found me a drip' - and instead taught adults for five years, before moving to his first academic post in Leeds. It was during this period that his research into landscape history began; but its roots ran deep, back to childhood expeditions with Ordnance Survey maps, and to hours spent poring over historical maps for recreation as a student.
Maps, for Prof Beresford, are both the beginning and the end of history - a subject of little interest, he says, without a topographical aspect - and it was mainly by matching maps with aerial photos that he proved the survival of medieval ridge-and- furrow. His love of maps stems partly from a fascination with systematic patterns (he also reads train-timetables avidly), but it was kept alive by an aesthetic appreciation of scenery.
Maurice Beresford is interested in places, and how they changed, not so much in people. Unlike many left-wing social historians, his interest in the past is not coloured by his world-view of the present. `I have never felt sorry for medieval peasants,' he said.
Although best-known by archaeologists for his medieval village work, he has also made large contributions to the study of medieval towns and to the topography of Leeds. He is a cultured man, passionately interested in music, theatre, ballet, film and literature. The two books that most influenced him as a student, he says, were Roger Manvell's guide to film and Arnold Haskell's to ballet; and his shelves groan with orchestral and operatic scores.
His conversation rarely dips below a level of high seriousness, giving few clues to a lighter side. And as it ranged, not concisely, over so much ground, my two-hour tape soon clicked off and I had to leave for a train.
`Oh, is that it? I feel we've hardly begun,' he said, as the dog once again took off round the room, yelping and raising dust. I left sure he was right; that this unusually thoughtful man had plenty more of interest to say.
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1995