Margaret Aston was the daughter of a baronet, yet she delved with joy into the creed of the commoner. She never held a professorship, and her research, unusually, spanned four centuries.
She was a pioneer in using paintings and woodcuts to throw fresh light on dry historical records. The best example, The King’s Bedpost (1995), explored a painting kept in the National Portrait Gallery. Titled Edward VI and the Pope: An Allegory of the Reformation, it shows the dying Henry VIII handing over power to the young Edward VI, as the Pope, now toppled, languishes beneath Edward’s feet. It was thought to date from the 1550s. Aston proved that it was painted a decade later. The giveaway clue was that Henry VIII’s bedpost was a copy of a print made in the 1560s.
Margaret Evelyn Bridges was the youngest child of Edward (later Lord) Bridges, who was cabinet secretary during the Second World War. She was brought up on the North Downs near Epsom, and delighted in poring over Ordnance Survey maps. The pleasure of plotting a walk never left her. She won a history scholarship in 1951 to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Her first book was a biography of Thomas Arundel (1353-1414), the Archbishop of Canterbury and opponent of the Lollards, followers of the controversial theologian John Wycliffe. Next, Aston went to Prague where, defying Soviety bureaucracy, she inspected transcriptions of Lollard texts dating from the 1400s. The resulting book, The Fifteenth Century: the Prospect of Europe (1968) was the first Western text to refer to the Prague manuscripts. Aston’s final book, volume II of the OUP series England’s Iconoclasts will be published this spring.
She married her second husband, the diplomat Paul Jex Buxton, in 1971 — a match Aston described as “pure contentment”. Her first marriage, to the brilliant, troubled Oxford historian Trevor Aston, had quickly foundered. Buxton became the under-secretary for Northern Ireland, where their house was bombed by the IRA. Later, they lived at Chipping Ongar in a house adjoining a castle moat where Aston ordered her notes into lucid prose.
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Buxton died in 2009. Aston is survived by her daughter Sophie, an artist. Another daughter, Hero, who had Downs’ syndrome, predeceased her. She is also survived by her stepchildren Charles, Mary and Tobias, and [Pease]blossom, her Cavalier King Charles spaniel whose name was taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Margaret Aston, CBE, historian, was born in October 9, 1932. She died on November 22, 2014, aged 82