David Underdown obituary  Historian of early modern England who
wrote a key work on the Puritan revolution An Eyewitness
Representation of the Execution of King Charles I of England,
1649 by John Weesop. Photograph: The Gallery Collection/Corbis ©
The Gallery Collection/Corbis  The historian David Underdown,
who has died aged 84, was one of the most original of the
scholars of early modern England born between the wars. His most
famous study, Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution
(1971), is a narrative of the tangle of events that took place
in England during the late 1640s and led to the purge of the
Long Parliament and the execution of King Charles I. Almost four
decades on, the book remains a fixture of undergraduate reading
lists. Underdown went on to pioneer the study of local history,
popular politics, gender and sport.  He was born in Somerset and
educated at Wells grammar school and Exeter College, Oxford,
where he studied under the Marxist historian of 17th-century
England, Christopher Hi