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.