Gerald Hodgett, economic and church historian, was born on November 27, 1916. He died on September 15, 2007, aged 90

Gerald Hodgett brought a humane spirit to the potentially dry study of medieval church records.

One of the first to focus on the unpensioned plight of ex-monks and nuns after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, he understood that one incentive for ex-religious to set up house together was “to share the burdens of housekeeping”.

He taught first in Nottinghamshire and then, during the war, at Friends’ School, Lisburn, Northern Ireland. It was also at this time that he joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the early 1940s, having been raised a Presbyterian. Hodgett took up a lectureship at King’s College London in 1947 and became a reader there in 1961. In later years Hodgett pursued his interest in Quaker history to the United States: he was a research scholar at the Huntingdon Library in California, and also taught at St Louis, Missouri.

Hodgett had a lifelong academic attachment to his own corner of England. His first foray into the extensive records of the Lincoln diocese was his MA thesis on “The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Lincolnshire” which bore fruit in his 1959 monograph The State of the Ex-Religious and Former Chantry Priests in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1547-1574.

Hodgett’s views on the unhappy fate of the ex-religious, in his seminal article “The Unpensioned Ex-Religious in Tudor England” (Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1962), though they did not win universal acceptance, spurred others into further archival research.

He then took on one of the great lost monasteries of London, Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, the first post-Conquest religious house to be established inside the City, in 1107-08, and the first to be dissolved, in 1532.

Hodgett’s edition and translation of its cartulary was heralded as an important event in London studies, enhanced in 2005 by the Museum of London’s publication of the surviving archaeological evidence.

Hodgett’s writing was always accessible, and his undergraduate textbook, A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe (London, 1972), with its discussion of capitalism in the pre-modern textile industry, brought him

probably his widest audience, both in the UK and overseas.

He persuaded the young Delia Smith to write an introduction for his Stere Htt Well, a book of medieval refinements, recipes and remedies (London, 1972), based on a manuscript in Samuel Pepys’s library. He was a member of the Friends Historical Society, serving as president in 1979, and editing its journal, 1986-96.

Betty Weston, MBE, charity fundraiser, was born on July 8, 1919. She died on October 23, 2007, aged 88

Betty Weston raised millions of pounds for charities for the disabled, the elderly and children as the national organiser for Alexandra Rose Day, the charity founded in 1912 by Queen Alexandra to mark the 50th anniversary of her arrival in the UK from Denmark in 1863. Thousands of volunteers sold roses in the capital and the first Rose Day raised £32,000 (more than £2 million today), and the proceeds were given to hospitals and charities.

By the 1950s Rose Day was as important as the Poppy Appeal is today: one village Rose Day collection alone could raise as much as £5,000, and the annual Rose Ball was one of the highlights of the London season.

Weston organised more than 25 Rose Balls, the last at the age of 70. As national organiser she was also responsible for making an annual visit to the Prime Minister to give him a rose, overseeing the Rose Day collections each June, the Alexandra Rose Marylebone Market and taking charge of fundraising film and television premieres and concerts. The money raised would then be distributed among approximately 275 smaller, local charities.

Betty Blair was born in Willesden, London, in 1919 and initally worked as a cashier at Sainsbury’s. For several years she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1949 she joined the Alexandra Rose Day organisation, first as a junior secretary, later as an assistant to Jessie Morshead, then the national organiser. When Morshead retired in 1959 Weston took on her role.

A formidable organiser, Weston managed to attract high-profile show business names for Rose Day events, thanks to a partnership with Lady Grade, now the vice-president of the charity and the wife of the television impresario Lew Grade. Such events included an evening in 1970 when Frank Sinatra and Count Basie and his orchestra starred at an Alexandra night at the Royal Festival Hall; a concert by the Bay City Rollers; and film premieres including Champions, On Golden Pond and The King and I.

Weston’s last Rose Ball, held in the Great Ball Room at the Grovesnor Hotel, took place in 1989 and was attended by more than 1,300 guests. She retired just afterwards. In 1990 Weston was appointed MBE.

Weston’s husband, Laurie, predeceased her.

Dr Margaret Norris (O’Meara), physician and anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia activist, was born on May 26, 1921. She died on December 8, 2007, aged 86

Peggy Norris was a passionate and formidable anti-abortion campaigner who was one of the initial committee members of SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, an association which was founded in 1967 in opposition to David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Later, Norris fought attempts to legalise euthanasia and founded the anti-euthanasia pressure group, Alert.

Peggy O’Meara was born in Kilcormac, King’s County (now Co Offaly), Ireland, in 1921. In 1943 she graduated from the National University of Ireland and worked in UK and Irish hospitals.

After the war she went to Germany with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, treating Polish concentration camp survivors, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis. In 1948 she married Dr Jim Norris, and until 1979 worked as a GP on Merseyside.

In 1967 Norris and her husband were among the first supporters of SPUC, a non-denominational association set up to fight David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Norris regretted the Roman Catholic bishops’ decision not to make a powerful attack on the Bill, as they had followed advice that to do so would be counterproductive.

Fellow members of SPUC’s executive committee included the gynaecologist Aleck Bourne, who in 1938 had carried out an abortion on a raped woman, a case which made therapeutic termination legal in case law.

Norris’s anti-abortion stance was deeply influenced by the time she had spent in postwar Germany and observing the consequences of the Nazi philosophy as applied to medicine. Other anti-abortionists at the time founded a separate anti-abortion group, the charity LIFE, which provides counselling and care for women considering abortion.

After abortion became legal, Norris was at the forefront of the series of large SPUC demonstrations organised in London, Liverpool and elsewhere calling for an amendment of the law. There, she and other SPUC supporters faced pro-abortion students who chanted “not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate.” In Liverpool Norris was with Malcolm Muggeridge when an angry crowd shouting “Half of you were unwanted” showered them from a bridge with condoms. Muggeridge responded: “I have heard it all before . . . trying to silence us . . . in Germany in 1936.”

In 1974, however, Norris resigned from the executive committee of SPUC, along with a majority of the original committee and secretariat, a move resulting from an internal wrangle. Four years later she founded the Medical Education Trust, which promotes ethical standards in medicine and disseminates little publicised scientific reports from governments and scientists on public health concerns.

In 1972 she was also a founder member of the Dutch-inspired World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life (WFDWRHL). It argued that doctors should adhere to the 1948 Declaration of Geneva, which states that human life should be respected from conception until natural death. In 1991 Norris started Alert as an anti-euthanasia pressure group.

A tall, attractive woman with an apparently tough exterior, Norris combined unfailing kindness with generosity, while concealing her own vulnerability behind a brisk aura of certainty. She was also known internationally as an articulate speaker and writer on anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia issues, who liked, in an argument, to pin down her adversaries on the precise use and meaning of their terms. In 1991 Cardinal Basil Hume appointed Norris a Dame of St Gregory.

Norris’s husband predeceased her, and she is survived by three sons and two daughters. Another son died in a motorcycle accident.