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Peter Northeast, who died after a long illness in August 2009, was a remarkable and unusual local historian. By profession a primary-school teacher and head, he had a particular interest from boyhood in natural history, particularly botany. However in the early 1960s, when headteacher at the Berkshire village of Blewbury, he caught the local history bug. At the time he and his wife lived in a handsome Queen Anne schoolhouse, about which he simply wanted to know more. This led to research in the Berkshire Record Office and the Bodleian Library, and subsequently to the writing of a parish history which is still being updated over 40 years later.
When he returned to Suffolk as the head of Rattlesden school, he devoted his leisure to historical studies, displaying characteristic energy and an amazing memory for detail. He collected and transcribed original sources, and was generous (sometimes too generous) in making them available to others. In adult education he became a highly successful extra-mural and WEA tutor, bouncing around the county from Newmarket's downs in the west to the North Sea in the east, and was famous for the amount of original research he undertook in preparation for his classes. In addition he helped beginners to get started, and corresponded with scores of friends and contacts all over the country (for example, about obscure references and difficult bits of Latin). Furthermore he worked tirelessly as a member and officer of the county's various historical and archaeological societies.
Although he collected sources of almost every kind (including innumerable nineteenth-century parliamentary papers which he quarried and xeroxed from Cambridge University Library), his principal love was Suffolk's remarkable legacy of late-medieval wills (from the late fourteenth century up to c.1540), which he used in his teaching to throw light on the social, economic and religious life of the county in its heyday. His grammar-school Latin was soon re-honed to great effect, and his translations and transcriptions became a byword for accuracy and careful editing; they were acknowledged by academic specialists of the late-medieval period who beat a path to his door in their search for evidence. By the time of his death he had read and translated some 15,000 local wills, which form the major part of the 'Northeast Collection' destined for the Suffolk Record Office. The last task he undertook before illness overwhelmed him was to assemble and summarise, in a dozen or so files, all his references to the fabric and furnishings of Suffolk's churches. His principal publications are Boxford Churchwardens' Accounts 1530-61 (Suffolk Records Society, 1982), which is constantly mentioned by scholars of the English Reformation, and the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439-1474: I (2001). Part II of the latter, recently completed by Heather Falvey, will appear under their joint names in 2010.
Peter Northeast will be remembered as a knowledgeable and meticulous scholar, modest, friendly and always cheerful. He was elected FSA in 1980. The cause of local history would be enormously benefited if we had more stalwarts like him, able to bridge the gap between academic and amateur, historian and antiquary.
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