Roger Schofield gained an international reputation for his contributions to the innovative reconstruction of the population history of England, co-authored with E.A. Wrigley and published in two seminal volumes: The Population History of England 1541–1871 (1981), and English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 (1997). Both monographs were based on laboratory-like and interdisciplinary teamwork at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge, undertaken when he was a research officer from 1966 and Director from 1974 to 1994. The two monographs were distinctive in crossing several branches of the social sciences. Roger Schofield played an important role in the international development of historical demography through his work on behalf of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. In England he was of central importance in the foundation of the Local Population Studies Society, and for 30 years fostered the research of local amateurs using registers of the Anglican church to reconstruct parochial population history. During his early career, he had been a postgraduate student of Geoffrey Elton at Clare College when he did important research on early Tudor taxation that has remained seminal. In 1965 he was appointed to a post in Tudor history at Queen Mary College (London) but resigned in the same year just before his lecturing was due to begin. He was never thereafter to hold a formal post in a university department of history but was always supported by the SSRC/ESRC. At his intellectual peak in 1988, aged 51, he suffered the first of a series of strokes which cruelly forced his retirement in 1994 on grounds of ill health.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 22