Ralph Pugh

Ralph Bernard Pugh (1 August 1910 – 3 December 1982) was an historian and editor of the Victoria History of the Counties of England from 1949 to 1977.

He was also a professor of English history at the University of London, a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a teacher of palaeography, and an expert on medieval penology.

Life Born at Sutton, Surrey, Pugh was the only child of Bernard Pugh (1859–1940), a journalist, by his marriage to Mabel Elizabeth (circa 1869–1943), and the grandson of Samuel Pugh, a Baptist minister in Devizes, Wiltshire, where until 1917 his uncles Clarence and Cyril Pugh were masters of the local grammar school. He was educated at Homefield, a preparatory school, then from 1924 to 1929 at St Paul's School, London, and finally at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he read modern history and graduated BA in 1932 with a First. He began a doctoral thesis on early nineteenth-century European historiography, but did not complete it.

Career In 1934 Pugh was appointed an assistant keeper at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, where he worked on calendars of archives. In 1937 he was the chief mover in the foundation of the records branch of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society and went on to edit its first volume.

In 1973 Pugh was a Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library of Washington, D.C.

Personal life Pugh never married and did not learn to drive a car. He was a High Anglican, and despite his stoop was very tall. His manners were very formal, and he was an enthusiast for precision. In Who's Who, he gave his recreation as sight-seeing.

He was Vice-President of the Selden Society from 1966 to 1969 and a member of the Council of the National Trust from 1967 to 1975.

His health was troubled by worsening spinal curvature and by pipe-smoking. Late in 1982 he was admitted to hospital with diverticulitis, contracted pneumonia, and died on 3 December, to be cremated at Golders Green.

Selected publications Abstracts of Feet of Fines for Wiltshire, Edw. I and II (Wiltshire Record Society, 1939) Calendar of Antrobus deeds before 1625 (Wiltshire Record Society, 1947) How to Write a Parish History (1954) The Crown Estate (1960) Records of the Colonial and Dominions Offices (1964) 'The structure and aims of the Victoria History of the Counties of England', in Historical Research, vol. 40 (1967), pp. 65–73 Itinerant Justices in English History (1967) Imprisonment in Medieval England (1968) Court Rolls of the Wiltshire Manors of Adam de Stratton (Wiltshire Record Society, 1970) 'The Victoria History: its origin and progress', in The Victoria History of the Counties of England: General Introduction (1970), pp. 1–27 Calendar of London Trailbaston Trials (1976) Wiltshire Gaol Delivery and Trailbaston Trials, 1275–1306 (Wiltshire Record Society, 1978)