Richard Smith interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 12th April 2011

0:05:07 Born in Sible Hedingham in North Essex; parents born respectively in Castle and Sible Hedingham so a kind of endogamous marriage which I have spent most of my life trying to prove not characteristic of the English population; my father came from Castle Hedingham which was one of the seats of the De Veres, so I always thought that the village he came from was the one I really wanted to have been born in because it had a status that Sible Hedingham didn’t quite possess; I am quite sure that the Castle Hedingham connection has something to do with the way my life subsequently evolved; I still remember a volume that my grandmother had; she had served as a cook in the house at the castle, a rather grand Tudor house - she had a history of the castle; I remember aged about seven, looking at this and beginning to realize that I did live in a community that had genuine history to it; I am sure it had some kind of indirect influence on the way I thought about things that interested me subsequently; getting to know that the church had an unusually early Norman nave led me to begin to recognize what Norman architecture looked like; subsequently going to a small country grammar school nearby, and the fact that I had a very interesting history teacher - he was interested in the fact that I could tell him about Castle Hedingham, and gave me a status in the class

2:34:07 I got to know my grandparents on my father's side particularly as I only knew my mother's father briefly; they were domestic servants in a grand house; my grandfather was a gamekeeper and my grandmother a cook; they were active in the local community; they had sons and daughters who were given French names; the family, the Majendies, who had taken over the Estate, were a French family, and my grandmother decided to give her children French forenames - my father's was Louis; this was slightly incongruous as a set of names in a North Essex village at the time; thank goodness the family discontinued that practice with my generation; they were Socialists in a very Tory community and I am sure that had some influence on my Uncle Victor and my father who were both very active in the local Labour Party; the family was quite politicised from the point of view of Labour politicians popping in and out; the oddity was that it was a solid Tory constituency - Rab Butler's, a man who was greatly admired even though he had never been successful in the top echelons of the Tory Party; there was never any chance that Labour could win this constituency; in vain at every election the likes of Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle would turn up at the Village Hall, and my father would have to provide tea and make them feel that they were making some sort of effort towards a Socialist victory which never happened there; I think they were all quite interesting experiences to observe as a child, particularly in an area of North Essex that was rather sleepy, to put it mildly, and one that by the time I was reaching my teens I was only too desperate to get out of, even though I had the lucky break of going to a small country grammar school in Earls Colne; the more I think about it, I can see that it really was quite important; I had a history teacher, Ernst Wangerman, who subsequently went on to have a chair in European History at Leeds; he had been a pupil of Christopher Hill's and had published his Oxford DPhil in the Oxford series; I thought that quite exotic from the point of view of teachers I had previously known, and he was very encouraging and set an example; the thought of a university career and other things that he subsequently achieved would have been fairly remote in that part of the world at that time

6:28:14 My father was an apprentice joiner and cabinet maker, a skilled craftsman, but clearly would have, in a different generation, been a professional I would imagine; those kinds of skills that he had as a Labour agent in the constituency I think were indicative of that; my mother was a housewife right through her life; I was an only child which I am sure has a lot to do with other aspects of my personality; she was not terribly interested in my academic career and would have been quite happy if I had ended up staying in the village, but my father was desperate for me to get out; he was probably thinking about all the things that he had not managed to achieve himself, and I was a kind of vehicle for that; he was very gregarious, much more so than I am as I am still a relatively shy person; my mother was a very timid person, who found it difficult to talk to people who she didn't know very well; my father was outward-going and a group organizer as a trades unionist and a Labour agent; he was always running meetings and felt he could talk to anybody, and didn't find it difficult talking to people who were socially and significantly many more rungs up the ladder; he set me a good example which I think was influential in some way; my mother was widowed very early as my father died in his fifties, so she had a long period of widowhood - some thirty-five years; I was in my early twenties when he died, and as an only child I found my dealing with my mother sometimes quite complicated, particularly as I was not living in North Essex; I got married in the United States but came back to Cambridge initially, which meant I was close to Sible Hedingham; I was born in 1946; I think I must have been conceived on VE night, certainly some time in early May 1945; as a demographer I am very interested in that sort of moment in the immediate post-war moment

10:02:20 I think my earliest memory was in the garden with my mother's father who was tall - six foot three - and had been a professional soldier, and I have a sort of memory of him gardening with runner beans in the background; it must have been the combination of the height of the man and the red flowers on the runner beans that I can still remember quite vividly; like many of my primary school peers we were interested in collecting bird's eggs, much to my shame nowadays, so springtime was a very active period of looking for more exotic eggs; we all had egg collections and it was quite a competitive activity; I had two uncles who were farmers, one very close to Sible Hedingham, at Witham in Essex, and another who was a fenland farmer who had married my mother's sister; most school vacations I would try to get to one of their farms; I worked for my uncle in the North-Cambridgeshire fens, from about the age of ten right thought my university years helping to bring in the harvest, something that I am sure again was influential; I think that having a feel for the agricultural seasons and the difficulties of managing the environment, even in twentieth century farming technology, could have been helpful; North Essex was a fairly intensively cultivated landscape, where there is not much wild land or untrained vegetation; my memory is that we would always try to get into the Colne River valley, and that was an area where we spent a lot of time, damming streams which fed into the Colne, in those days looking for otters and fishing at one of the mills; there were two Domesday mills that are still there that had mill ponds that we fished in; I still have sets of photographs of myself and friends sitting round the mill pond, fishing for perch, pike and the minor sticklebacks that we used to net out; I went to a Church of England primary school in the village, and still have quite vivid memories; it was a school that must have been built very soon after the 1870 Education Act, so it had a late-Victorian or Edwardian feel; we still had great coke stoves in the classrooms; I have a very vivid memory of coke burning in the mornings when the head teacher must have stoked up the fires in winter; it is a memorable odour, particularly when we arrived wet having walked through the rain, the teacher used to hang our clothes on railings around the stove; it was still 11+ days, which I took, and went into the local grammar school in Earls Colne

15:41:24 It was a small grammar school with only about 180 pupils, and a sixth form of about a dozen; it was just behind the church in York Road; we did all the things you would expect; we had carol services in the church at Christmas; the head teacher was a Downing man called James Sykes who had been there since about 1934 when I went in 1957; I had no idea then that I would end up in Downing College; I tried to find his record in the College archive and there was barely anything about him; it was a good grammar school I think in retrospect; the quality of the teaching was very high; there were only eleven members of staff, half of whom were Oxbridge graduates, so again I was very lucky in that regard; it had a small boarding house so there were about thirty boarders; having the boarders again made the place more interesting as it meant that things went on in the school all week with quite a lot of activities after conventional school hours; as a result of that there were two teachers who lived in, one being Ernst Wangerman; he had a huge library and he would frequently ask boys to go into Colchester to borrow books during school hours; he would send them off on the bus and they would come back from the public library where for some reason they were able to use his ticket; I slightly regretted the fact that as I got older the range of subjects that a small school could offer was not very broad; for 'O' levels I did a standard mixture of Latin, French, English language and literature, art and religious education, also physics, chemistry and maths; I wasn't sure at the age of sixteen what 'A' levels to take but ended up taking history, geography and French

18:53:09 I got quite involved in school drama and did more of it in my fourth and fifth year; I was a very keen cricketer; I still am, and now that I have had two cataract operations I can now see the ball again; when I was in Oxford I used to play for the Trojan Wanderers; Jack Pole, Professor of American History, had a team that was supposedly made up of Berlioz enthusiasts; I also played with a colleague of mine, Robin Briggs, another Essex lad who grew up in Braintree and Colchester; cricket has always been important to me as an outlet; I am not very athletic, but there is something cerebral about cricket, the pace is about right, and playing a cricket match is a bit like writing an academic paper, I find; I have only recently reconnected with my old cricket master at school who still lives in Halstead, not very far from where I now live; he was the geography teacher as well; I think that geography and games players went together in those days; it has been quite interesting talking to him about all the teachers who taught me that he knew, and what he thought they were really like; some of the people who I thought were remarkably fine upstanding citizens turned out to be quite different; living in Hedingham and going to school on the bus every day - about eight miles to Earls Colne - was a kind of ritual we went through; Sir Reuben Hunt was then the Chairman of the Governors and he lived in Colne Priory; the works were still fully operational and it gave Earls Colne an interesting industrial air at the time because there were terraced houses where a lot of the men who worked in the foundry lived; they came out of the foundry looking rather black in their overalls which was not the sort of thing you expected to see in a North Essex village; there were other anomalies as Halstead had a textile firm, Courtaulds, where my mother worked, incidentally, before she married; she was a silk weaver during the war, weaving silk for parachutes; I don't know how Reuben Hunt's foundry emerged, but Courtaulds presence in Braintree and Bocking were quite important users of surplus labour in this relatively impoverished area, when they moved out of East London in the early nineteenth century; Courtaulds continued to be important right up until the 1970s as textile firms in the community; I remember when Donald Coleman, the former economic history professor here at Cambridge, wrote a three-volume history of Courtaulds, and was able to buy a very substantial manor house in Cavendish, not far from where I live now; there were a couple of pages showing the wages in the late nineteenth century when my maternal grandmother was also working there, and there is a page with her name- Emily Brett; I remember telling him about this although he didn't believe it

24:17:12 Music was important because the head teacher, who was a classicist, was very keen on music and a good pianist; I played the piano in a rudimentary fashion; we didn't have a piano at home so it was difficult for me to practice; James Sykes was encouraging, and also keen on developing the school choir, and I liked to sing in a choral context; regrettably, I did not continue as an undergraduate; I was too much of a swot, too involved in academic things; I like to listen to music; presume I have a very conventional set of likes and dislikes; I like Bach and its complexity; I am also romantic so I do like Slavonic composers; I can listen to music and write, but it may mean that I am not listening as carefully as I should; in the last fifteen years I have become interested in jazz; I regularly go to a jazz club now, at least once a month; I like jazz piano for the same reason, its complexity

27:09:21 I was confirmed; my father was an Anglican socialist; I probably went through the motions just to please my father of getting confirmed, and going to church every Sunday during my teens; once I was in sixth form I was really resisting; I suppose I am very conventional in that regard - I am a non-believer but still find that sitting in a mediaeval church a quasi-spiritual experience; I do like to listen to music in churches; there is something called Suffolk Villages Festival where they have regular baroque concerts in churches; it is just a marvellous way to go and listen; I sometimes have sensations when I'm in the church that get the better of me; I am not hostile to religion which is why I have great sympathy with Martin Rees accepting the Templeton prize.

29:52:21 My school did not have a reputation for sending pupils to either Oxford or Cambridge; James Sykes said that I would not get into either, but might get into University College, London; I did not know whether I wanted to do geography or history; I got an interview to read geography there and was interviewed by Clifford Darby in the winter of 1965; I did not know that he was a distinguished historical-geographer, or know what historical geography was; it was not something that the 'A' level curriculum introduced you to; I think it was fortunate because it insured that I kept my history and geography in some kind of active form as an undergraduate geographer, and became more and more interested in the historical aspect during my time at University College; Darby gave a heavily choreographed set of lectures that the whole of the University of London used to come to on the making of the English landscape; he had a competitor in W.G Hoskins, though I think Hoskins was fundamentally more interesting; but there was something about Darby's approach to settlement geography, place-name studies for instance, and the early work that he did on the distribution of serfs in the Domesday book; you could relate to it quite quickly if you came from East Anglia with its distinctive features in Domesday geography which made it interesting to me; you could see how what he was doing did have an influence; I remember a seminar where we had to present papers on key source materials; this would have been in 1966; I was assigned the parish register to write about, and it so happened that in that year, Tony Wrigley and Peter Laslett were giving lectures on the old Third Programme on family reconstitution; it was the year that their 'Introduction to Historical Demography' was published, and I bought a copy; I gave the presentation, and I don't think Darby who was running the class had even seen the book; he must have been quite taken aback by this, and I said that the only reason I knew about it was because I had heard Peter Laslett talking; in the same series, Tony Wrigley gave an early version of the ‘Importance of London’ paper; again, this struck me as very interesting; he was introduced as a lecturer in geography at Cambridge but had been collaborating with Peter Laslett; I did not know at that time that he had got a first in history at Cambridge so was really more than just a geographer; I went to a Geographical Society dinner where I sat next to Paul Wheatley, who had just come to University College; he had been at Berkeley and he said that he thought the only interesting thing that was going on in British history at the time was what Peter Laslett was doing; he was working on the religious underpinnings of urban origins in China and he had worked on similar issues in S.E. Asia; he wrote 'The Pivot of the Four Quarters' which was an attempt to bring Fustel de Coulanges into prominence; he introduced me to Karl Polanyi, and that sort of dimension of economic anthropology as an undergraduate, and the question of how the shift from reciprocal to redistributional arrangements would underpin urban growth; this struck me as very interesting, and the sort of thing that I wasn't being exposed to in any other context; I am not sure it was anything you would have come across in a more conventional historical or anthropological setting at the time; so he was really quite important; he was trying to persuade me by the time I was graduating to go to Sheffield and learn Japanese; he knew that I had an interest in population, and knew enough about the quality of the Japanese records, though I don't think that Hayami had started his pioneering work in Japanese registers; he thought I could make a name for myself by working on the Japanese sources, but I wanted to work on a mediaeval topic; Darby moved from University College to take the chair in Cambridge in 1967; I graduated in 1968

and came to work with him as a post-graduate student; Darby's work on the mediaeval fenland and the reconstruction of the characteristics population distribution and the geography of the fens, and having spent a lot of my vacations in fields about twelve miles from Ely, looking at the cathedral looming across the landscape, did draw me; I was always interested in issues to do with why the fens were so prosperous in terms of their underlying income per capita; when you looked at the Lay Subsidies you saw this area which looked bereft of people having such high per capita income; when I came up I wanted to work on North Essex and Suffolk as I was interested in the early development of the textile industry; I had read Joan Thirsk's 'Industries in the Countryside' as an undergraduate, and her ideas about the links between partible inheritance and the fragmentation of holdings, and the development of industry as a bi-employment, and wondered if it could be made to work in those areas; I discovered they were not areas of partible inheritance at all, so I spent a year with Darby trying to map fulling mills as indicators of industrial development along the rivers Colne and Stour; I still have these rather rudimentary mapping exercises that I went through, but I got rather bored with that kind of static work; it so happened that I alighted on a manor where I had found partible inheritance in the British Library, a place called Rickinghall, a manor of the Bury St Edmunds' estates; I was having to teach myself to read manorial documents because within the geography department there was very little formal training in these sorts of things; John Saltmarsh was a figure that Darby rather revered, so didn't think that I was the kind of material who should be sent to him; I did go to the University reader in palaeography, T.A.M. Bishop, who had a room in Laundress Lane; he taught palaeography to anybody, but he was a purist and thought we all needed to know Carolingian miniscule, so he sat at the end of this very long room with a box of letters which he would show us; after about three weeks we were given a piece of facsimile to translate which was impossible; I don't know any of the mediaevalists that I was being exposed to Caroligian miniscule with; Arthur Hibbert was here and giving lectures on urban issues; the only person who was really interested was Postan; I remember him summoning me to Peterhouse, after I had told Tony Wrigley what I was doing; he told me that geography was a good subject to begin with but an even better subject to get out of; I don't think I really took him seriously at the time, but there was an element of truth in it.

42:41:18 Darby, as a supervisor, was not really very interested in the kinds of questions I was trying to address because they were dynamic and did not translate into geographical patterns; I was really looking at processes of social behaviour and they wouldn't convert into the conventional mapping routines that he wanted; it was a difficult relationship for a year and a half;

I gave him a paper that I had written on the relationship between inheritance and subsequent land marketing by the sons as to what they did with the land; afterward he said that it was not in any sense historical geography, and that I should go and talk to Tony Wrigley; Tony was in the geography department so said he could not supervise me, but that he had a young colleague, Roger Schofield, who did work on mediaeval and Tudor taxation; he had just arrived from working in the Public Record Office to join the population group in 1967; he took me on and it was a wonderful, fortuitous link; in that respect I am grateful to Darby for kicking me out of his patch; Roger was an exotic character; I had read his paper on the geographical distribution of wealth, based on his Cambridge PhD; he was married to an actress, and lived in London and commuted to Cambridge; I was at St Catharine's living in the hostel in Panton Street, and he would cycle through from the station to the old Silver Street office, so I had seen him before becoming his supervisee; he often used to wear a red and white spotted neckerchief, and blue denim trousers and top; he was not the average academic to look at in those days; he mixed with an interesting theatrical set in London; but he was just remarkable and immediately saw the value of the material I was working on, and encouraged me; it was a risky sort of encouragement in some sense because there was no clear way of knowing how I was going to convert all this into something coherent ; I needed to look at some more material which had been sold to the University of Chicago, part of the Nicholas Bacon collection; Chicago had bought the archives of one of the key manors that I wanted to work on - Redgrave in North Suffolk; Rickert and Manly, the people who were editing Chaucer at Chicago, decided at some point in the 1920s that they wanted to teach their English students to read English court hand; these documents came up for sale and they bought them; no one worked on them apart from one woman, Sylvia Thrupp; I went, and I rather rapidly got married to Peggy, who was the archivist there; thus I had privileged access to the archives at all hours; pursuing this manor which nobody had worked on changed my life; I would not have gone to Chicago, nor had an American wife, but we came back very soon thereafter; when I came back to Cambridge in the early seventies I had just finished my PhD; I did have a period when another demographic historian acted as temporary supervisor while I was away, a man called David Herlihy; he was then at the University of Wisconsin, and was working on the great Florentine catasto; it was very interesting, and gave me the opportunity to look at some Southern European evidence, of a very different social structure which helped my to firm up my ideas of the distinctiveness of England and English patterns, which were entirely unlike the things that he was talking about; he realized it too, and encouraged me to go out a bit on a limb with that; he had never seen English manorial documents, or seen them analysed in the way that I was doing; I think that was rather lucky to have encountered him in that way; unfortunately he moved on to Harvard and I didn't keep in touch with him, and he died at a relatively young age.

49:21:17 I became very interested in the relationship between inheritance, intergenerational population growth and social networks; I had read Homans on partible inheritance and he was quite convinced that it led to rather complex extended family structures, where you had either frequently married brothers living together or very close together, and that the fragmentation of holdings led to structures which were very different from the areas where you had primogeniture and more of a stem-family type arrangement; these were two stereotypes that were dominant in English peasant society, and had a wider presence in writing about European behaviour generally, but Homans never looked at what happened to the land after the brothers had inherited it; it became quickly apparent that they were buying and selling land, and often one brother emerged as the dominant landholder, and the rest either went off as labourers or did something very different; there was no really strong family attachment to the land, and that was what interested me at the time, and also I was trying to build up the sorts of social networks that these individuals created, which you could do with the manorial court records and would be very difficult to do without the sources; I think I was trying to show that the partible inheritance driver for industrial growth didn't work; the reality was very far removed from the theory; it was an attempt too look at an inheritance driven approach to social structure which I didn't find terribly persuasive in that form; I got very interested in the operation of the peasant land market, and I suppose that is when I met you; it was very hard to find family arrangements that were durable though I found evidence of maintenance contracts where elderly parents were at least given space on the farmstead to coexist with their children, but they didn't give persuasive evidence that they co-resided; the contractual basis, the spatial arrangements, the fact that there were frequent clauses setting up means by which they might have access to use the kitchen or the well suggested that co-residing was not the underlying arrangement; I suppose at the time I had just become a very sceptical observer on these patterns that had a prominence in the literature; it was helped enormously by the fact that I was fortunate to get an assistant lectureship in historical geography/demography in 1974 when Tony Wrigley gave up his post in the geography department to have a full-time appointment from the Social Science Research Council with the Cambridge Group; I remember giving a paper in a seminar that Peter Laslett then ran at Trinity in the evening; it was about illegitimacy because I had found some very interesting material in these manorial documents about women who were giving birth out of wedlock, and trying to relate them to the number of fines which were being paid to merchet for marriage, to get some kind of ratio of merchet payments to marriages; it was quite raw, but Peter was very interested; he had certainly published the first paper with Karla Osterveen on illegitimacy, so he was interested in these ratios and said they looked very similar to lots of ratios that you would find if you plotted marriages and bastard births in late sixteenth century England; I didn't really think very much at that point but John Hajnal was also in the audience and he asked me if it were possible to get at patterns of peasant marriage in these documents; he was spending the year in Cambridge and had already published his famous article on European marriage patterns; I said I thought it was possible, and then a few months later the Cambridge Group advertised a post for a research officership in the population group; I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss although there was a risk as I already had a University post; I got appointed and know that David Levine was also in for the post at the time; I thought he would get it as he had done a conventional family reconstitution and had the skill, but obviously Peter and Tony thought that what I was doing might be more interesting; I suppose you were then running a seminar, and I don't know how it came about, but you invited me to give a talk here in King's, in 1974; I gave a paper on network analysis; John Barnes gave me a bit of a rough time although he was very interested in it, and we spoke a lot about it subsequently as I was using techniques that he had pioneered himself; it must have been after that that either you read my thesis or I gave you some bits of it; then I got more interested in trying to look for late marriage and low incidence of marriage in other medieval sources, and went back to reconsider the late fourteenth-century poll taxes which took up a lot of my time in the late seventies.

57:17:06 On the reason why I did not publish the results of my thesis, despite having the evidence to write a book similar to your 'Origins of English Individualism', I was in the middle of a group of researchers who would never have made those claims, and indeed were never willing to interest themselves in quite that form, they would have thought that I was pushing the evidence beyond where it could be legitimately taken; I was very sympathetic to a lot of what you were doing with it because it would be very difficult to have pursued the kinds of interests that I have had subsequently within the group if I were not fundamentally supportive of that kind of view; it did require one to start to look at what was actually happening rather than assuming that things should take a particular form if they are going to abide by any kind of evolutionary development; Postan was never really fully persuaded, partly because of the diagnosis that you to some extent made about East Europeans who brought that baggage into their interpretations of mediaeval England; there was no question about it; I found it very difficult to understand why, as economic historians at the time, even though Domesday scholars revered Maitland, that they didn't really read Maitland and didn't really take him on board in the context of thinking about other features of the social structure; it was a very interesting kind of absence from the literature and discussion; for the most part these people did not interest themselves in the law either; you had to subscribe to the view that the customary law that was enacted and practised in the manorial courts was very different from anything that came out from the common law courts, and it quickly became apparent that it wasn't; that interested me quite a lot for a period after that; I got involved in helping to establish a new legal history journal - 'Law History Review' which was then being run out of the Cornell law school , which again seemed odd for anybody who was a historical geographer/demographer and early-family historian; customary law and common law issues continue to interest me; of course, Hilton had been so adamant that the common law and "manorial law" were so different and they were never part and parcel of any kind of continuum, that it was impossible to have any kind of constructive dialogue with him on those matters; I suppose you will also remember difficult relations with someone like Hilton at the time

Second Part

0:05:07 The reaction of a lot of people on the left to my material that you were familiar with and using as part of your argument was tricky because they realized that this was very carefully researched; oddly enough the methodology that I had put together was picked up by Hilton because he got a substantial grant from the Social Science Research Council to do more work on the exploitation of court rolls; I don't think that it would have happened without the interest that you had generated in the debate about English mediaeval social structure, particularly rural social structure; I remember Michael Anderson, who was then on the research board of the SSRC, read my thesis because it had been submitted as part of Hilton's case for a grant; I had used some exchange theory to try to look at why brothers stayed together or why certain people interacted in the court in a certain way; it was partly stimulated by the way he had used it to look at family relations in nineteenth century Preston; I was interested in that aspect of Homans' work on exchange theory which was very different to what he was doing when working on manorial sources; he said to me that he was very supportive of that application because of what he had read in the dissertation, and I didn't know him very well in those days; there was an irony in the fact that a centre of Marxist mediaeval economic history in Birmingham was to some extent getting substantial financial support as a result of the interest that 'The Origins of English Individualism' stirred up; however Hilton had sent a research assistant to see you before the publication but by then you had got interested in my results so that was how he knew about them; my relationship with him was very difficult but did continue to have a link through an Israeli scholar, Zvi Razi, who was one of his pupils who did careful work on manorial documents, although still very much within a particular kind of Marxist framework of analysis; he never really changed his mind although I did subsequently write things jointly with him; he became

persuaded that the manorial courts did absorb common law practices, and he got quite interested with me in why manorial courts became written in the course of the thirteenth century when they had presumably been oral prior to that date, where we were arguing that this was entirely a stimulus from written common law proceedings, and precedents became dominant, and manorial tenants wanted courts that ran on not dissimilar lines to the Royal courts, and there was not a big divide between them; in that sense I did have a small conversion of one Marxist to think slightly more realistically; I always found it very difficult to understand how Marxist historians conceptualized the countryside as almost like some kind of apartheid society, where freemen and villeins were somehow living in totally different encampments when the world wasn't like that at all; it was in many respects sociologically highly naive when you take away the layers, how they were thinking in these ways; they were to some extent using a kind of rudimentary class warfare approach to the whole thing.

6:07:11 That was now thirty-five years ago; I would say that if anything my views have not changed but they have shifted somewhat to focus on what I would regard at the sort of corporate institutions that go with individualism; I have become more interested in how manorial courts worked as an alternative to the family, and the kinds of relationships based on kinship; my more recent interests have been in considering the way in which the local poor law is a kind of correlate of a kind of individualized type of social system; I think there are people now, particularly early-modernists who are interested in institutions that sit alongside societies with very weakly developed kin structures who accept that now; they may not accept that it was older than post-sixteen hundred, but they acknowledge that these things don't just begin at the end of the Elizabethan era and embed themselves later; of course, there are still some who think that the poor law was just a kind of consequence of an early-modern shift in family relations; although it is difficult to reconstruct these things, parish guilds, manorial courts, even some of the collective arrangement that could be secured through legal devices, predate the Elizabethan Poor Law; your interest in Maitland's trusts are all part of that; you still have people who are interested in the Poor Law mainly from the point of view of a kind of left-wing view about the way it works, and continues to impose itself in various forms of disciplining the poor; I am actually doing something at the moment, trying to look comparatively at the way in which the Poor Law operates as a collective institution in ways that are very different from what you would find in large parts of the continent, certainly in France and Italy; it gives you some sort of sense of why the parish is such a strong institution in an English context as well, comparatively speaking with much of continental Europe where you don't have that kind of entity; the habit of sending children away from home early from the mediaeval period is a very durable feature; it is always difficult to draw a major contrast, but in more recent years I have been interested in the ways in which young adults in Spain and Italy don't leave the home; as a result one of the reasons why young adult unemployment rates are so high there is in part because they don't enter into a broader geographical labour market, so those feature don't just go away and have very deep historical roots; this shows too in the extent to which young people go to university in their home town; there have been attempts here to attempt to cut costs by encouraging young people to do so in England, but it seems to me that people like us should be telling government that it is hostile to something that is deep in our being Peter Laslett did this frequently and of course, sometimes controversially.

13:21:23 There were in Peter Laslett, characteristics unlike any other that I had seen in any academic that I had encountered; he was genuinely interested in what other people were doing; he could be very dismissive, but there was something about his inquisitive nature which I always found very appealing, and he was particularly keen to talk to young people; he was exotic, as someone who had shifted his intellectual interests so fundamentally, and that he could have this kind of relationship with Quentin Skinner and John Dunn who respected him as a political scientist, but probably didn't respect his other work to the same degree and thought it somewhat naive; he was very encouraging; he had a deep friendship with John Hajnal - they were like blood-brothers over their academic interests - and Peter took notice about what John Hajnal said to him; he had a very distinctive working regime; I don't think he did very much lecturing in the faculty although he ran a population history seminar for PartII for a period; on the occasions when Peter had to lecture I literally had to go down to his rooms in Trinity at half-past eleven, and escort him to the history faculty; but when he went he gave an unbelievable performance, and there are quite a lot of people of a slightly younger generation who write about their experience of Peter lecturing on family and population history; then he would come into the Population Group in the afternoons - he would write at home in the mornings, and go into Trinity later and have lunch there, then come into the group usually about two o'clock and stay until about seven; he would have done his writing for the day - he always did his two hours in the morning - and would wander around, talking to everybody; it was quite infuriating at times, but these conversations were memorable; then there would be tea and he would continue talking; the afternoons were for him just for brain-storming, while everyone else was trying to work; he always had lots of schemes which were underway; he travelled a great deal and would come back and tell us what was happening elsewhere; he was exceptionally important because while the Cambridge Group continued to plough along with these big empirical projects that couldn't be rushed, 'The Population History of England' being a good example of that, Peter kept the Group in the public eye by this high level f activity; he would sometimes make outrageous claims or statements but it did enable Tony and Roger to take the time that was needed, if not I think the funding body might have run out of patience; so he was a vital ingredient in this mix; his interest in the social structure, his scepticism of certain forms of crude Marxist thinking, and his deep appreciation of English empiricism as he saw it, embodied in the work of people like Gregory King whom he regarded as just another form of the Cambridge Group only three hundred years earlier; I think it very important when one thinks about that style of research in historical social science; I have never really been able to establish quite how it was that Tony and Peter came together because their personalities were so different; in terms of their public persona, their reluctance to over-state anything, I mean Tony is so different from Peter; they had religious non-conformism common by background—Tony a Unitarian and Peter a Baptist , and Roger Schofield was a Quaker by background even though he never looked a Quaker to me; I have always felt very privileged to have been able to work with them for so long, and still with Tony who is remarkably productive and active now as he approaches eighty; Peter was the source of so many encouragements down particular pathways that I don't think I would ever have trodden; he got me interested in bastardy, he encouraged the work I was doing on the European marriage pattern, and he got me interested in aging to some extent as well; Tony has always been the person I have worried most about in terms of anything I write of a technical, analytical character; if I don't feel I have persuaded him it is right I just don't feel that I have made the case in any way that is at all plausible; he is much more thoughtful and careful in his judgement, though extremely polite, and you never know sometimes whether he agreed with what you were doing; I remember him examining my doctoral dissertation with Joan Thirsk in his room in Peterhouse; Joan had lost her watch down the side of the couch, which was clearly preoccupying her for a very high proportion of the viva; Tony was ploughing away with these incredibly difficult questions that he kept throwing at me, and I was trying to answer them while watching Joan Thirsk literally crawling under the couch to find this watch; they were a very interested pair of examiners, neither of them being mediaevalists; those qualities that I saw in that viva, Tony has always possessed, and I have seen them in action right up until last week when I was giving a lecture to the plenary history conference on the Pomeranz thesis; I was looking again at demographic attributes of England and the Yangtze, and arguing that Pomeranz had got it quite wrong as far as I was concerned; Tony came up to me afterwards and asked if I was sure that I knew enough about the Yangtze to make these claims about the accuracy of Pomeranz's original work; I said that I only knew what I had read, and I don't think that he would have done that sort of thing, partly because I don't think he is the kind of scholar who writes something, to some extent, by criticizing what somebody else has done; but then he told me that he thought I was right, so that was OK, but I know he would never have approached the issue in that way; he continues to be a remarkable example of someone who is driven to investigate issues; I suppose he is still very preoccupied with the distinctiveness of English industrial growth and change, and continues to write interestingly on it; he has insured that population history as a sub-discipline is always engaged with larger questions and has never been a historical-demographer for its own sake, and I learnt that from him in particular; if you are going to keep that area of research going you have got to insure that it links into other, bigger, questions; I think the areas of historical demography that have blossomed for a while in Paris and to a lesser extent in places like Berkeley and Michigan, have really faded because they haven't engaged with large questions; we are very lucky in England to have the industrial revolution and the distinctiveness of England's economic trajectory as a framework for investigation, so it does insure that there is always a big question to which the demography and family history in one form or another relates; that ought to have similar success with East Asian sources, and to some extent the Japanese do achieve a little of that; at some point I expect we shall know more about the Yangtze than we do at present

24:44:01 I also regard Jack Goody as a remarkable scholar; we don't always agree on things, but the kinds of problems that he pulls out to focus on are important; he has always been supportive of the Cambridge Group, indeed I think one of his recent volumes he devoted to the Group and Peter Laslett; I know that he had rather different views on family forms in east and west, and I wouldn't subscribe to his views about why we have late marriage in Western Europe, but they are big questions; I think he is a kind of Max Weber of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century; when the British Academy divided the social science sections some years back, and social anthropology had its own section with geography, leaving sociology, demography and social statistics; I happened to be Chair of the latter and Peter Brown the Secretary contacted me to say that Jack Goody wanted to join our section; I sent out a delighted e-mail suggesting the link to Weber, and got a few surprised responses that I so categorised Jack , but I believed it and still do; when one looks at the corpus and the kinds of questions he has addressed, and his remarkable commitment to comparative approaches, I admire those qualities immensely; one hopes that there are people around that will sustain that kind of tradition; it was fortuitous that he was so influential in Social and Political Sciences and Social Anthropology in Cambridge at the time that the Group was really getting off the ground; he was very supportive and a good friend of Peter's; there was something about that generation after the war, Moses Finlay was another; I saw him after going to a seminar that he gave in Peter's rooms in Trinity, when he gave a paper on whether there was senile dementia in the Ancient World, and was quite convinced that they didn't have it, based on his venture into a demographic analysis of the Greek authors; Peter asked where he had got his aging evidence from; there are lots of younger Ancient historians who came out of that Finlay school; of course, there was Keith Hopkins here, and Peter Garnsey; Keith I admired but lost a sense of where he was going in the latter part of his career, but the work that he did between the late sixties and the early eighties was very good; I still remember vividly, in 1981-2 that for a number of summers I taught a graduate seminar at the Gulbenkian Institute outside Lisbon; for some reason Keith had signed up for this course, and I had him every day as I was giving these classes; it was frightening to have him there, but very good for the class, and probably for me, because he was pretty sharp.

31:03:19 There was some concern that the Group was going to lose its funding in 1983 and a post came up in Oxford; Tony said he thought it would be a good idea to move; I applied and got it; I was then in my mid-thirties; it was interesting, but I don't think I really succeeded in getting historical demography off the ground in Oxford; there were people in the biological anthropology group who were interested – Geoff Harrison was, also Tony Boyce - and there were some very supportive social historians in the University who I taught with, like Paul Slack and Robin Briggs; I taught a paper right through the period I was there with Paul Slack on seventeenth century society; I did the social demography of family structure part of it while Paul did the Poor Law, towns and other things; that was good and I always found Paul very receptive to these sorts of issues; he published during that period his first big book on the plague which was very heavily dependent on these sorts of methods that we were using; for some reason I was asked to take over the Wellcome Unit of Medicine, after I had been there about four years, when Charles Webster was elected a senior research fellow at All Souls, at the same time as Tony Wrigley; I think in retrospect that that was a mistake; it did expose me to areas of medical history with epidemiological associations that I subsequently found useful, but I always felt that the history of medicine with the vast amount of research funding that was being made available by the Trust, was investigating numbers of questions of no importance whatsoever; I ran that group for about five years and tried to move it more towards the style of research that the Cambridge Group undertook, collective projects where we worked together on themes; we had a good project with Mary Dobson; one project that I still remember was one conducted with Anne Digby, on an oral history of General Practice; I got very interested in the shift in attitudes of practitioners over the course of the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948; that was interesting methodologically to do; we collected a vast amount of information in interviews with over two hundred G.Ps.; then poor Roger had his first stroke and Tony Wrigley, having been in Oxford for about four years, came back to take the Chair of Economic History and the Mastership at Corpus; I think somehow he managed to persuade the history faculty that they needed to create a post to replace Roger who had previously been paid exclusively by the SSRC; I got that job and came back in 1994 to run a Group that was very different; Peter was still actively engaged although retired, Roger, unfortunately, was a pale shadow of his old self although he was still interesting to talk to, and Tony was obviously preoccupied with running things in his college; he became President of the British Academy, was Master of Corpus, and Professor of Economic History, but he still came in about one day a week, but the Group was not the Group that I had left in 1983-4; we had now, without large-scale funding from the ESRC, to run it as a soft-money research centre, collecting grants from different places, but still trying to keep the interest of groups of people in rather similar related areas; it is still going; I don't think we have really big questions at the forefront of our activity, but we still do a lot of work of a major kind on the demography correlates of occupational change, a huge project that we have been running over the last four years; I have become more and more interested in the impact of large metropolitan centres on the epidemiological environments that they create, and the links they have with the economy and society around them; London's demography is something I have been working on with a series of grants, and I think that very important; I want to argue that the emergence of a large metropolitan centre like London in the seventeenth century, connected in all kinds of ways with the national movements of people, goods and diseases, creates a new type of demographic regime in England, and probably to some extent in the Dutch Republic, that sets it apart from anything that is happening in Asia at the same time; it really creates a situation in which you can build up a large number of individuals who have immunities to most of the major infectious diseases, that enable adult mortality to come down in a dramatic way over the course of the eighteenth century; it is a remarkable development that really takes off around 1680-90, and eventually draws in Northern France and much of Southern Scandinavia and Denmark, and Germany; they start moving in the same direction even though they are very different economically; their exposure to infections particularly as they are associated with an initial deterioration in the life chances of the very young, but those that survive are carrying huge benefits from a previous exposure; it shows up in the way those mothers transmit health advantages to the foetus; that would be one of the arguments why other large urban centres don't generate that kind of epidemiological shift; we are fortunate in being able do this in London, given the ways we have been able to devise means of doing family reconstitutions on London parishes which was thought not to be possible twenty years ago because of the high migration and turnover patterns; we have got a lot of people who are doing work on the demographic correlates of the old Poor Law as post-docs and post-graduates; I think we are still addressing big enough questions, but my fear is whether we will be able to continue to do that in future, and whether the funding bodies will look favourably on this kind of work; the department in which the Cambridge Group is now based has just established a chair in demography, and it will depend a great deal on who gets elected as to how this whole area will develop

42:12:08 My own writing method is a bit of a scattergun one in the sense that I am always interested in interconnections between bits and pieces, and I write short pieces and try to organize them into some sort of more coherent form; it is not done in the first instance as a continuous piece of writing, but as bits that I then somehow think about, and in the process of thinking in a more coherent, integrated fashion, they get merged together; its probably not a form of writing and thinking that is advisable; there is a randomness about it as to how these things eventually cohere; I am always thinking of some connection between an observation that I have made when reading, for example, with something else; I then work on a bigger set of interconnections and have to work it out in this very fragmentary way; I imagine someone like Tony Wrigley has it all worked out in his head pretty well before he sits down to write; I would find it very hard to do it otherwise, and it may well be that I have a low boredom threshold that once I have played around with one idea I then want to play around with another; I write best in the early morning and again in the early evening; I tend to do most of my writing at home rather than the office, and I do pace around the house a lot, I eat a lot and am always munching on biscuits between paragraphs; it is a very restless sort of writing experience that I go through; I do enjoy it and I don't find writing painful; my wife always knows when I am writing because I move about the house; I know that there are quite a lot of people who do write like this, which surprised me because I had thought it rather odd and couldn't really be regarded as serious; thought that serious writers sat and contemplated the page (or screen) before them for long periods before writing; I think that is the way that Tony Wrigley does it

46:38:19 We don't have children; we had planned to, but then Peggy decided to do a PhD in her thirties, and then it just slipped off the agenda; I think we both regret it; Peggy got a university post at Reading when we were living in Oxford, in the History of Printing, which was the subject of her PhD; she progressed to Reader in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication; she decided at sixty that she wanted to retire, which she did in 2004; we had a house in Reading and another in Cambridge, and we wanted a house that was big enough to accommodate all our books; we decided we would like to move out of Cambridge and moved to Clare, on the northern side of the Hedinghams and just across the Stour; she is still researching and is very actively involved in the local museum; I have in the last year become involved in establishing a free school in Clare; you might not regard that to be a politically acceptable activity, but the quality of secondary education in South Suffolk is low, and the Local Authority was closing down our secondary school; a group of us decided to take advantage of current government legislation to re-establish the secondary school which we are modelling on the basis of a Cambridgeshire Village College; there are three trustees and I have been working almost two full days a week on this for the last six months, and probably will do until we open the school formally in September; I might not have done that if I had had children, but it may be another way of passing something on through other people’s children

49:41:07 I have never really been actively involved in any political party; I am interested in politics; I suppose I am deeply sceptical of a great deal of what goes as political activity; I am very keen on community activity in a broader sense, not a "big society" Cameron sense; I am interested in civil society and the kinds of institutions that somehow bring disparate bodies and individuals together so that you have some kind of sense of social coherence; parties vary a great deal in the extent that they achieve that; I don't really like big government, but I don't like highly individualistic situation where there is no intermediate level; I am interested in political processes that enable communities to function effectively; this school is supposed to be an example of a community-led school that will provide a set of facilities for a community and its immediate hinterland of small villages; I have worked in both geography and history departments and followed what interested me; some people are surprised by this, but I don't really think that disciplines are very important; however, it is not always good for a successful career as institutions don't much like that kind of approach; I have been exceptionally lucky in that regard.