The archaeologist Penelope Rogers, who has died aged 73, started out as a volunteer on digs at Hadrian’s Wall and beneath York Minster in the 1970s. She soon developed a special interest and expertise in textiles.
Despite experiencing some resistance from the archaeological community – she was a woman with no formal qualifications – in 1980 she set up a business, Textile Research, that grew to incorporate a list of 250 clients worldwide, providing analysis for museums and archaeologists of artefacts involving textiles, clothing, animal pelts and dyes. Her Anglo Saxon Lab, established in 2001 to cover all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture from the fifth to the 11th centuries AD, drew in artefacts from all over Britain and abroad – from sites in Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia, even Canada.
Ever resourceful, and frequently exasperated by the long time-lag before new research findings were made available to scholars and the wider public, she established her own outlet, Pangur Press, in order to publish or republish new or hard-to-find reports. By the turn of the century she had become known as the UK’s go-to textiles expert in her field, and in 2007 her work culminated in a definitive monograph, Cloth and Clothing in Anglo-Saxon England AD 450-700.
She was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the daughter of Nancy (nee Mullet), manager of a typing pool, and Ralph Walton, an accountant, and she later moved with her family to Darlington. Penelope excelled at Hummersknott school and won a scholarship to Girton College, University of Cambridge, but was unable to take it up because of the agoraphobia that became a feature of her adult life.
I knew Pen for 48 years, and in all that time I don’t think she ever strayed more than a few hundred yards from her basement flat in York. To casual acquaintances it must have seemed a life unbearably constrained, but she managed the condition with great practicality.
She was a loyal friend whose company I shared in her secluded garden, at pub quizzes, and on some wonderful nights out at a blues club two streets from her home. Given her circumstances – a life beset by health issues, the early death in the 90s of her dear partner Ian Rogers (whose surname she took by deed poll), and endless insecurity over the tenancy of her flat – I found her positivity, focus and ambition inspiring.
Over a cup of her super-strength coffee, she and I once agreed that you could only evaluate a person’s achievements by knowing where they came from. By that measure, her life was monumentally heroic.
