Coatsworth is an English surname, and in England is most commonly found in County Durham in the north-east of the country. Elizabeth (Betty) Coatsworth was born on 21 October 1941, the eldest child of Ernest Wilfrid Coatsworth, a tenant farmer of Shildon, County Durham, and his wife Doris, a teacher. Betty’s sister Joan was born two and a half years later; Ann and Mary followed. Betty’s vivid childhood memories depict a by-gone era in rural England. Doris having declined to live in the farm house, since, although picturesque, it lacked the basic amenities of running water, gas, and electricity, the family lived in an old-fashioned terraced house. It was gradually updated, part of the general catching up after the recession of the 1930s and the war, which had delayed a lot of modernisation. The straggle of outbuildings at the back, which included an outside toilet and a small laundry with a huge gas-fired “copper” for heating water (the house had been built before electricity became available) was replaced by a ground-floor bathroom and the old black kitchen range gave way to modern cooking facilities. The terrace had fields of the farm both back and front, and what would have been its back garden served only as a “drying green” for the family laundry, as it was sometimes required as an entry into the fields for large farm machinery.

A very early memory of Betty’s is of a plane crashing into one of the farm’s fields nearby: this was at the end of April 1944, during the Second World War. It was not caused by enemy action but was a training flight for a British bomber which went sadly wrong, killing all on board. Betty remembers it not for the crash, but because she accompanied her father to the field to meet the civil and military authorities who came to explain how the situation was to be dealt with – it was the tight group of important men, many in uniform, plus the spokesman who was a civilian in what she saw as his “Sunday Best” (and her father’s mysterious explanation of him as the “man from the ministry”), which stuck in her memory.

Betty recalls her hardworking parents with great affection and respect. Principled, Christian, politically-aware people, they were as generous to others in the hard times during and after the war as they could be, though money was never plentiful in their own home. One way in which for many years her father supported his community was by allowing one of his fields to be used for a communal bonfire on Bonfire Night – 5 November. The local boys made the guy and collected the wood for the fire, and people brought potatoes and chestnuts to roast in the blaze, and fireworks to share. These events gradually stopped as people got better off, and held their own parties, or went to bigger, more organised events.

Doris had continued in her teaching profession after marriage and motherhood, which was rather unusual at the time, and so Betty early became responsible for shepherding the little group of sisters to Sunday School and cinema, as well as helping on the farm – as did her mother, and her sisters as they grew older. She remembers hoeing the fields after school (in areas where whatever weed-killing sprays were used then had missed), and helping to carry food and drink to seasonal workers – when the potatoes were picked and at hay time. At harvest time some workers, probably mainly the men who came with the threshing machine, had a cooked dinner at the end of the day. On these occasions tables were pushed together, unmatching chairs brought from all over the house, and a padded bench (upholstered by Doris) brought from the outbuilding where it was stored for such occasions. Providing food and drink was part of the work of the farm and took considerable effort to provision and organise – it was always much appreciated! There was no room for the family to eat at the same time – Betty’s memory is of herself and sisters carefully carrying from the kitchen one filled plate at a time – a literally heavy responsibility.

In the earlier years of Betty’s childhood, the heavy work on the farm was powered by horses. Ernest loved his horses, and it was a great grief to him when they “had to go” to be replaced by machinery. Although each farm owned some of the necessary machinery, including a tractor, other heavy machinery was lent/borrowed between farms or hired, and Ernest had no option but to go along with the move to mechanisation. Betty feels he would have been delighted to know that his own great bond with horses has been passed down to his descendants, some of whom both ride and work with horses.

Potato planting was a semi-mechanised process: Betty remembers sitting on a machine attached to the back of the tractor, facing either her mother or a sister, and feeding seed potatoes by hand, down a chute – when a bell rang – more or less frequently depending on the speed of the tractor, leading to some family arguments if it got too fast! She also remembers riding on the back of the tractor in order for her father to take her to school during a bus strike, which would offend Health and Safety regulations these days. She also recalls walking home from school on occasion, a distance of over three miles.

Betty was an academic child and she attended Bishop Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, followed by Durham University. “Betty” had been her father’s pet name for her, otherwise she had been known as “Elizabeth” up to this point, but it was at University that an old school friend introduced her to people saying, “They call her Betty at home,” and “Betty” stuck, though she still uses Elizabeth in formal situations and for her publications.

She graduated in 1963 with an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature, and immediately proceeded to a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at London University Institute of Education, which she completed in 1964. The same year she returned to north-east England to a teaching post at Jarrow Grammar School, County Durham, followed by another at Rutherford Comprehensive School, Newcastle upon Tyne. They were happy and successful years. Betty learned to drive and bought a car, becoming quite adventurous, including taking her car on a holiday to Greece, with friends to share the driving. This was in 1967 – which the more politically aware may remember was the year there was a military coup in Greece. Betty remembers the alarm of some local people, when, on a bus trip in Athens, a line of tanks rumbled past. Oddly, not one of the many people who had helped her plan the journey had mentioned that this might be a problem – and there were plenty of other equally clueless (or unconcerned) tourists around.

In 1970 she returned to Durham University to take up the post (initially part-time, full-time from 1972) of Research Assistant to Professor Rosemary Cramp at the inception of the British Academy-funded Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture Project. In 1971 she also became a part-time Tutor in the Department of Archaeology and, from 1971, College (now called Personal) Tutor at Durham University’s St Mary’s College. Simultaneously her own doctoral research on Anglo-Saxon sculpture progressed and she was awarded her PhD in 1979 for her two-volume thesis, “The Iconography of the Crucifixion in Pre-Conquest Sculpture in England.”

At this time she began the steady stream of publications on Anglo-Saxon sculpture which would continue throughout her career, peaking in the 2008 volume Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture. VIII. Western Yorkshire and her forthcoming book provisionally entitled The Crucifixion Imagined in Anglo-Saxon England. She was also inspired by other treasures of Durham, and contributed a study of its crucifixion illumination and other decoration to a collaborative facsimile edition of the Durham Gospels manuscript A. II. 17 (with Christopher Verey and Julian Brown) which was published in 1980, and an acclaimed chapter on metal items associated with the relics of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral, “The Pectoral Cross and Portable Altar from the Tomb of St Cuthbert,” in St Cuthbert: his Cult and Community to AD 1200, a highly regarded collection of essays edited by Gerald Bonner, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, published in 1989.

In December 1969 she moved to Manchester, taking up the post of Warden of Loxford Tower Hall, and a half-time Senior Lectureship in the Department of History of Art and Design, in the then Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). She was Secretary of the National Association of Principals and Wardens of Halls of Residence from 1982 to 1987. She left her Wardenship in 1987, when her Senior Lectureship became full time, and she added the duties of Tutor/Slide Librarian in 1993, continuing in both capacities until her retirement in 2004. She was energetic and successful in applications for grants towards the development of the Manchester Metropolitan University Slide Library, raising well over £100,000 in awards for the cataloguing, conservation, and digitization of the collection, particularly the slide collection of the Design Council, which was deposited at MMU, chosen from a number of candidates, in 1995 on the closure of the Design Centre. This online resource for the visual arts (researched and implemented by John Davis) is available at https://vads.ac.uk/learning/dcsc/slide.html (accessed 22 May 2020).

As part of her work for the Department of History of Art and Design Betty was able to use her knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and wider medieval material culture for Design History students and also for students of Art and Design (future designers). This drew once again on her experience at Durham, since the embroidered vestments among the relics of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral are an outstanding early example of the art in medieval England, and she became interested in the famous Opus anglicanum embroidery of the later medieval period and the influence of all this early work on later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design designers and movements. This made her aware of how difficult access to this early material was for people without her background in medieval art and archaeology. She thought that the best way to document the numerous textiles surviving from the British Isles might be through a database, and so took a Master of Science degree in Computing at the (then) University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1992. This experience fed into the database for the slide collections noted above.

In these years at Manchester Betty developed two major collaborations, the first with Michael Pinder, then Senior Lecturer in Metalwork, in the Department of Architecture, Landscape, and Three-Dimensional Design, Manchester Metropolitan University, and a practising goldsmith. Together they wrote The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith: Fine Metalwork in Anglo-Saxon England: its Practice and Practitioners, which is described in its publishers’ advertising as “the first [book] to look at the goldsmiths’ products through the eyes of both a specialist in the period and a practical craftsman.” The second was with Gale R. Owen-Crocker, then Lecturer in English at the nearby Victoria University of Manchester (now The University of Manchester), who shared Betty’s interest in textiles, her special knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period, and incidentally, her north-east origins and university education. Together they established the Manchester Medieval Textiles Project, successfully applying for a number of grants which funded two successive Research Assistants, Maria FitzGerald and Christina Lee (both of whom went on to distinguished careers), some very useful research travel, and the publication of An Annotated Bibliography of the Medieval Textiles of the British Isles (2007). They brought the existence of textiles to the notice of Anglo-Saxon specialists in more traditional fields by means of a presentation at the Stanford, California, conference of the International Society for Anglo-Saxonists in 1995 and became regular attenders at the annual Medieval Congresses in Kalamazoo, Michigan, sometimes taking the opportunity to visit American collections of medieval European textiles en route.

At Kalamazoo Betty was a founding member of the group known as DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) and has written a number of papers for its associated, peer-reviewed journal, Medieval Clothing and Textiles, joining the journal’s Editorial Board in 2018. DISTAFF is always represented at the Leeds, UK, Medieval Congresses, also, where Betty has been, and still is, a regular presence. In 2012, after over five years of research and writing, Betty and Gale, together with Maria Hayward, produced the Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c. 450–1450¸ with Betty acting as editor for entries on textiles. Many of these she commissioned from experts in the field. Others she wrote herself, and the range of her knowledge and command of the subject is well demonstrated by the entries for 2012 in the bibliography of her works in this volume (pp. XV–XXI). Impressed by the number of surviving near-complete garments from the medieval period in galleries and museums (a pleasant contrast to Anglo-Saxon fragments which are mostly brown, brittle, and tiny), Betty and Gale jointly wrote Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe, published in 2018.

Although she was the only “Anglo-Saxonist,” in her Department at MMU, Betty worked only 10 minutes’ walk away from The University of Manchester, where medieval studies were well established, and where lecturers in English, History, Art History, and most modern languages were teaching and carrying out research on the medieval period. Salford University, not far away, also supported some medieval studies. The Manchester Medieval Society, long established at The University of Manchester, was opened to non-academics under the presidency of Professor C.R. Dodwell, and greatly benefitted from that augmentation. Betty served as Secretary (2004–2008), President (1993–1995), and committee member (until 2016). The University of Manchester’s Extra-Mural Department ran a successful Certificate in Anglo-Saxon Studies for many years. Betty was a tutor on that course. The Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS), founded in 1984, brought international scholars to Manchester for its annual conferences and published a series of volumes. Betty was an Assistant Director of MANCASS from its inception, and frequently contributed to conferences and publications. The Centre organized a part-time MA in Anglo-Saxon Studies, taught over three years, with remarkable success. A number of students went on to doctorates and publications. Betty was a tutor on that degree and a member of the MA Examining Board. In recent years a cluster of MA and research students at The University of Manchester took an interest in medieval textiles and a successful series of seminars was instituted, attracting considerable numbers of interested staff and students. Betty was again a stalwart attender.

Betty’s career has coincided with what, in many ways, has been a golden era for Anglo-Saxon studies. University Archaeology Departments, which had long been dominated by interest in Classical and Near Eastern excavations, began to open up to medieval European topics in the mid-twentieth century. Many scholars who originated in English Departments turned to Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology, initially to augment their knowledge and teaching of Old English texts, but rapidly recognising the wealth of information there for its own sake. Cemetery archaeology flourished, and long-term excavations of urban sites including York and London provided hitherto undreamed-of evidence, including organic remains such as textile and leather. The annual Anglo-Saxon England, established in 1970, published interdisciplinary collections of papers by both leading scholars and beginners, and pioneered an interdisciplinary annual bibliography of Anglo-Saxon studies. The Old English Newsletter, established in 1977, continued the interdisciplinary approach and became a valuable resource for its annotated bibliographies, reports on current research, and other immediate issues. Betty co-ordinated the bibliographic entries on Archaeology, Numismatics, and Sculpture for Old English Newsletter from 2001 to 2008. The biennial conferences of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) were important meeting places for scholars of various nationalities where ideas were exchanged, new collaborations arranged, and some memorable excursions organized.¹

Betty retired from the Department of History of Art and Design and from the Slide Library at MMU in 2004, transferring as a part-time Research Fellow to MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design) from 2004 to 2008 and thereafter as an Honorary Fellow until 2015. In retirement she served for four years as Chair of MEDATS (the Medieval Dress and Textiles Society) and continues her academic work as an independent scholar.

When she ceased to be Warden of Loxford Tower Hall, which was situated in one of the most traffic-polluted parts of the city of Manchester, Betty moved full time to the leafier suburbs, where she had already bought the first of several houses, initially in Heaton Mersey, next in Heaton Norris, finally Heaton Mersey again, near her church. In all her houses, she displayed a talent for interior design, and was also daring in altering and extending her properties. Such changes rarely took place trouble-free: none of Betty’s friends will forget her months of anguish, effectively living on a building site, when an unmapped drain was discovered running through the foundation trench of her proposed new living room at Heaton Mersey, to the horror of the builder, Betty, and the local council. All was resolved in the end, and many convivial evenings and productive working lunches were enjoyed in the extended house.

St John’s Church, Heaton Mersey, played a major role in Betty’s life for many years. A regular worshipper, she served as a Lay Assistant, an elected member of the Parochial Church Council, and at various times Deanery Synod Representative and Gift Aid Secretary. She also founded and for a long time ran a much-needed monthly “Wednesday Club,” for, mainly, retired people, with varied activities including invited speakers on various topics; worked hard for a regular play-meeting for young Mums/Carers and Tots; and attended a Bible Study Discussion Group.

In 2019 she made the life-changing decision to return to Durham to be near her family, selling her loved home in Heaton Mersey and buying a new-build house in the city of Durham, within walking distance of the University library. There, despite difficulties, not least those caused by the Corona Virus pandemic, she has been working to finish her latest book, on the representation of the Crucifixion in Anglo-Saxon England, and to create a garden. Her friends and relatives confidently expected that in time she would extend or otherwise develop the house. Instead, she has announced a move to a traditional stone-built terraced property rather like the house where she was brought up, which coincidentally has the same street name, a rather satisfying return to origins. Meanwhile she is greatly missed by her Manchester friends. There is another textiles book just waiting to be written when she has time …