In the Michaelmas term of 1981 I well remember a lunch-time conversation in the Senior Common Room of Worcester College. My colleagues were gently teasing me because twenty years in Oxford had still not destroyed my inbred Scottish reverence for the title ‘Professor’. I protested that the trepidation I was feeling about my meeting with the formidable and distinguished scholar who was to visit the College Library the next morning was fully justified and I added for good measure that he was a Visiting Fellow of All Souls. This gave everyone pause and then our elderly politics tutor chipped in. He frequently affected Bertie Wooster's style. ‘Oh, I've met him’, he said, ‘and he is rather a swell, but a very good egg – a real gent – you'll like Austin Woolrych’. And, of course, he was quite right. Austin is all of those things and I was to like him very much indeed. As soon as I met him, he put me at ease and almost before I knew it, we were having great fun imagining C. H. Firth's dawning excitement as Henry Pottinger (the highly eccentric Librarian of Worcester in the latter half of the nineteenth century) showed him the Clarke manuscripts for the first time and he realised what a treasure trove he had stumbled on. Not quite Schliemann and the face of Agamemnon perhaps, but when he opened the folio volume bound in smooth brown leather that contains the Putney Debates Firth must have felt that he was hearing, not only the voice of Oliver Cromwell, but also that much more elusive and faint murmur, the voice of the common man.