Founders: Maurice Beresford

AbstractMaurice Beresford died on 15 December 2005. To rank the founding fathers of landscape studies would be invidious but, as Chris Taylor says below, he was the last survivor of the Triumvirate, with Herbert Finberg and William Hoskins, who brought a landscape dimension to local history. His influence over fifty years was immense, partly because of his teaching role in a major provincial university, partly because of his gregarious and academically generous nature and long-term involvement with learned societies and the Wharram Percy project, but perhaps most of all through his publications. What made those exceptional was that, during a prolific writing career, he defined and published seminal works on several entirely different aspects of what we would today call the historic environment: deserted (or 'lost', as he first termed them) medieval villages; new towns of the Middle Ages; and urban suburbs, especially those of Leeds. These were landscapes he knew intimately, not just through historic maps,...