Margaret Evelyn Bridges – always “Martha” to family and friends – was born on October 9 1932, the youngest of four children of Kitty and Edward, later Lord Bridges, the greatest civil servant of the last century. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, was her grandfather. She grew up at Goodman’s Furze, on the North Downs near Epsom, and went to school here at Downe House.  

“Downe at that time, had what Ian McMaster, one of the governors and then the British Consul in Florence, called a slightly Florentine liberal atmosphere, with its cloisters now housing rooms for piano practice, its encouragement of music and the arts, and its freedom from unnecessary rules; we prided ourselves on not being ‘schooly’.” 

A scholarship took her in 1951 to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to read History, and there her academic career flourished. She became a lecturer at St Anne’s College in 1956, and embarked on a DPhil. In 1954 she married academic Trevor Aston, fellow and librarian of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Margaret went to Germany in 1960-61 as a Theodor Heuss Scholar, and then spent five as a research fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.  

Her first book was a biography of Thomas Arundel (1353-1414), the Archbishop of Canterbury and opponent of the Lollards, followers of the controversial theologian John Wycliffe. Next, Aston went to Prague where, defying Soviet bureaucracy, she inspected transcriptions of Lollard texts dating from the 1400s. The resulting book, The Fifteenth Century: the Prospect of Europe (1968) was the first Western text to refer to the Prague manuscripts. Aston’s final book, volume II of the OUP series England’s Iconoclasts will be published this spring. 

She married her second husband, the diplomat Paul Jex Buxton, in 1971 — a match Aston described as “pure contentment”. Her first marriage, to the brilliant, troubled Oxford historian Trevor Aston, ended in divorce in 1969. Her second husband passed away in 2009.  

“Martha” is survived by her daughter Sophie, an artist. Another daughter, Hero, who had Downs’ syndrome, predeceased her. She is also survived by her stepchildren Charles, Mary and Tobias, and [Pease] Blossom, her Cavalier King Charles spaniel whose name was taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

“Martha was proud in the best sense, and reserved; having immensely high standards she would always ‘go the extra mile’ but she was also modest.  Her courtesy and consideration for others meant that she never put herself forward and it was the rest of us who rejoiced in the decoration she had so justly deserved. She cared: for her family, for her friends, for her dogs, for the earth. She fitted E.M.Forster’s description of his aristocrats: 

‘Sensitive for others as well as themselves, considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.’  

We all have our memories and shall miss her horribly.” 

Personal quotes kindly provided by M.E. Batstone (Milford, DH 1950)