English historian, a native of Bradford and came of a Quaker family. His interest in problems of modern life, social and religious, led him to study the conditions of English rural life in the past and the religious movements of the Reformation. In his English Village Community (1853) he dwelt on the survival of Roman influences in agricultural life; and in his Tribal Systems in Wales (1895) he reconstituted a Celtic society from 14th-century evidence. He died at Hitchin on the 6th of February 1912. See also The Oxford Reformers of 1498.
