She was born in Cheshire, the daughter of Rev James Mulleneux Prescott and his wife Margaret (née Warburton).
In 1958 she was elected Jubilee Research Fellow at Royal Holloway College in the University of London, where she worked on Thomas Wolsey.
Written in the form of a chronicle, the book tells the story of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular rising in protest at the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII.
Prescott was a committed member of the Church of England and her wide-ranging interests included travel and the English countryside.
She was a woman of refined but simple tastes, and lived for many years quietly with her dogs in the small Oxfordshire town of Charlbury.