Obituary ÂŒ Margaret Spufford

Obituary – Margaret Spufford Margaret Spufford was one of the great post-Second World War English social historians. Her contribution to scholarship, particularly to our understanding of English social and cultural history, was immense. Each of her major works was written with a sympathetic eye on the lives of the ordinary man and woman. They were erudite, thought-provoking, and humane. Her most ground-breaking work came in a trio of books which explored the social history of Tudor and especially Stuart England. Her Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1985) was a challenging attempt to get into the mindset of the early-modern reader through the chapbooks they bought and read. A later work, The Great Reclothing of Rural England (1984), described the world of the petty chapmen who carried on England’s seventeenth-century clothing trade, something of immense and immediate practical significance to ordinary families up and down the land. But it is her first great monograph that is perhaps best remembered. Contrasting Communities (1979) was a bold attempt to recover the social and religious history of England through the detailed study of three Cambridgeshire villages: Chippenham, Orwell, and Willingham. Appropriately given its origins in a University of Leicester PhD in Local History, it was as fine an example of ‘Leicester school’ social history as they come, and a book which historians still read to their great profit today. The book showcased many of the characteristics which underpinned her scholarship, perhaps most notably an ability to dig deep into local history but also to let that illuminate the bigger picture of social change. But it also showed an unwillingness to patronise the poor peasants and labourers she wrote about, something which ran through her work. Puritanism, for example, was never for her something that was merely adjunct to the social structure – an inevitable result of population growth and burgeoning inequality. Ordinary people could think: they were intelligent, and historians should respect that. She was also, of course, an important local population historian. Despite her considerable academic reputation, she never thought herself above publishing in the more specialist historical journals, or the more local ones. A long-time supporter of Local Population Studies, she published an important article in its pages in 1971, discussing the process of will-making, specifically the influence of scribes.1 She also contributed an important chapter on preambles to When Death Do Us Part (2000).2 Later in life she was appointed to a professorship at the University of Roehampton, where she promptly embarked upon an ambitious and invaluable project to produce a volume of hearth tax 1 M. Spufford, ‘The Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in the 16th and 17th Centuries and their Influence’, Local Population Studies, 7 (1971), pp. 28–43. 2 M. Spufford, ‘Religious Preambles and the Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in Cambridgeshire, 1570–1700’, in T. Arkell, N. Evans and N. Goose (ed.), When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), pp. 144–57. 4 Obituary returns for each English county. Eight have appeared and two more are on the way – it will be a fitting memorial for a great historian, and something that local population historians of the future will make great use of. She did not have an easy life. She suffered illness, disability and personal tragedy. Her daughter Bridget was born with a rare genetic disorder and was given seven to fourteen years to live. Bridget died in 1989, aged 22, her life being remembered in Margaret Spufford’s most heartfelt book, Celebration (1989). Shortly after Bridget’s death, Margaret set up a trust to fund a hostel in Cambridge for students suffering severe disabilities. It flourished from 1991 to 2013. That she negotiated all that life put in her way while maintaining such impressive scholarship is a true testament to her resolve and character. In 1995 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy, and the following year she received an OBE for services to Social History and to disabled students. She will be fondly remembered by readers of Local Population Studies, particularly those who were lucky enough to meet her. Shortly before she died she was advising a group of Japanese historians on a local community study of the village of Kami Shiojiri. Margaret Spufford’s final book, The Clothing of the Common Sort,is being prepared for publication by one of her students. She is survived by her husband Peter, who is Emeritus Professor of European History in the University of Cambridge, and her son Francis. 5.

Load more