The W G Hoskins Lecture 1996

‘Over the Hedge or Chance in Research’ presented by Maurice Beresford.

The seventh Hoskins lecture

18 May 1996

The seventh W.G. Hoskins lecture was given in the hall of St Crispin’s School on Saturday, 18th May 1996, to a record audience. The speaker was Maurice Beresford and his subject was ‘Over the hedge or chance in research’. A black and white slide of a young W.G. Hoskins (‘William’) and Finberg (‘Herbert’) on a field trip, lost, and poring over an Ordnance Survey map, greeted the audience as they took their seats. It was re-assuring to see our mentors in such a familiar predicament. With more slides, a tape of a BBC programme of 1953 with Hoskins and himself discussing deserted villages and an entertaining commentary, Maurice Beresford took us on an autobiographical field trip of great historiographical interest.

He described the series of’ ‘chances’ which shaped his career, from the accident of attending a school where geography was taught so badly that he would have had no chance of achieving the examination results to study his favourite subject at university, through an almost accidental introduction to fieldwork from John Saltmarsh, to the extreme good fortune of living in Sutton Coldfield, so that an undergraduate vacation essay on the history of his home area could be a survey of a classic infield-outfield system and form the basis of a published paper in the Economic History Review in 1943 on what was then a brand-new area of study. Many of us must have envied him the apparent ease with which publishers accepted work from young and relatively unknown academics back in the 1940’s and 50’s, despite the horror story of a publisher’s reader who refused to accept theories about deserted mediaeval villages which overturned the received wisdom of her undergraduate days. The bibliophiles amongst us were advised to look out for one of his rare early works The Hedge and the Plough, published by Rugby Borough Library in 1947, and now a collector’s item.

Beresford talked about his work at Bittesby, his first meetings with Hoskins, and an early attempt at archaeological excavation at Stretton Baskerville in Warwickshire. He explained the series of chances which led him to start work at Wharram Percy: a BBC interview about the Black Death in which he mentioned Wharram Percy as an example of a deserted medieval village, followed by a letter from the schoolmaster at nearby Settringham who knew Lord Middleton, owner of the land on which the site stood, and was able to secure permission for the excavation, and who also offered his schoolroom as summer accommodation for the diggers. This combination of opportunity created an excavation which began in 1950 and continued until 1990. He moved on to talk about his research on new planted towns of the Middle Ages, and explained disarmingly that his work on towns in France was the result of ‘sheer lust for finding an interesting way of spending the rest of the summer when I wasn’t at Wharram’. We suspected there was more to it than that. He also described, with relish, and apparent surprise, a series of chance meetings in recent years with students and helpers from his early days. Given his expansive personality, it did not seem so surprising that people who had once known him, but whose careers had gone in different directions, should choose to meet him again when the opportunity arose.

It was an assured performance, enlivened by anecdote and dry humour, and an evident appreciation of his good fortune in having been in the right places at the right times. ‘Ignorance’ he told us, ‘is a very good beginning’. It was clear that for Maurice Beresford it was a very good beginning indeed. The afternoon concluded, as usual, with an immense tea and a book sale in Marc Fitch House.

From an original report by Pam Inder.