Essays on Northern History in Honour of Maurice W. Beresford

A review of the History of the North of England and the Borders

Published by Maney Publishing

Northern History Journal, Volume 37

During the year 2000 Professor M. W. Beresford, F.B.A. reached his fifty-eighth year of historical writing and publication. To celebrate his notable achievements we have assembled this collection of papers on the history of the North of England by a representative group of his colleagues, pupils, and friends.

Maurice Beresford has made a very significant, distinguished and distinctive contribution to the study of local and regional history and topography as a highly stimulating teacher as well as the author of numerous books, chapters, and articles on a wide range of topics, from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century: the Bibliography tells its own story. Much of Maurice Beresford's work, especially in earlier days, was concerned with the medieval history of settlement, deserted villages, fields and flocks, archaeological investigation, and the elucidation of early maps. Those aspects of his interests, however, were duly recognized in The Rural Settlements of Medieval England, edited by Michael Aston, David Austin, and Christopher Dyer (Oxford, 1989), a collection of studies dedicated to Maurice Beresford and to John Hurst to mark their fruitful collaboration on the documentary history and physical remains of settlement. Contributors to this special volume of Northern History have, therefore, shifted the emphasis - largely but not entirely - to other fields of regional and local history, of time and place.

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