Bishop of Oxford. Born at Knaresborough, 21st June 1825, the son of a solicitor, he was educated first at Ripon Grammar School, whence he passed to Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1848 he graduated with a classical first-class. He was immediately elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, and took orders and became vicar of Navestock, Essex, in 1850. He was librarian to Archbishop Longley at Lambeth Palace from 1862 to 1868; and in 1866 was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. This he retained until 1884, when he was made Bishop of Chester. In 1889 he was translated to the See of Oxford. Thus during the best years of his life his official duties were fortunately not so heavy as to hinder his historical work. In 1858 he published “Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum,” an attempt to exhibit the course of Episcopal succession in England; and in 1863 he issued a translation of Mosheim’s “Institutes of Ecclesiastical History,” thoroughly revised and modernised. The two works, however, which gave Bishop Stubbs his distinctive reputation for historical acumen, impartiality, and erudition, are—“Select Charters and other illustrations of English Constitutional History” from the earliest period to the reign of Edward I. (1870); and the “Constitutional History of England in its origin and Development” down to the accession of the House of Tudor (1874–1878). He also wrote “The Early Plantagenets,” in Longman’s Epochs of Modern History (1876), and in 1886 published “Seventeen Lectures” on the study of Mediæval and Modern History. He edited numerous volumes of chronicles, &c., for the Rolls Series.

Personal

  Bishop Stubbs’s character was essentially of an English type; in its logic, its absence of extreme partisanship, and its balanced judgment. His love of humour was not the least attribute of this native distinction; many of his dry or merely funny sayings gave him more credit as a man than conventional minds were willing to allow to a bishop.

General

  This is [“Constitutional History of England”] incomparably superior to all other general authorities on the period of which it treats…. With this spirit of sober earnestness, the author has brought to his work unrivalled familiarity with the original sources of information, untiring industry, coolness of judgment, and keenness of discrimination. Every student of English constitutional history should make this his text-book and his chief authority. By some students it may be deemed dry; but all such should remember that nine-tenths of all fruitful work is drudgery; and, if they find it impossible to take an interest in this work, they may as well abandon all hope of acquiring any comprehensive knowledge of the subject.

  Dr. Stubbs stands by universal recognition at the head of English historical scholars. There is hardly an aspect of English mediæval history on which he has not thrown new light, while in constitutional and ecclesiastical history his work is quite unique. He unites to colossal learning and unwearied research a thoroughness and patience surpassing that of the German scholar, and historical power and insight of the highest kind. In matters of fact he is the most accurate and trustworthy of all historians, and it has been said that he never makes a mistake. His judgment is invariably sober and impartial, and his only object is to find out the truth. His strong ecclesiastical and political sympathies only serve to make more real and vivid to him the continuity of Church and Constitution. As a writer he is always strong and clear.

  Shares with Professor Freeman the distinction of being the most learned, painstaking, and reliable of the historians of the earlier periods of British history, and follows the same methods of historical research and composition.

  Probably no one man has done so much to throw light on the obscure by-ways of history.

  No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising. We are taken behind the scenes and shown the ropes and pulleys; we are taken into the laboratory and shown the unanalysed stuff, the retorts and test tubes; or rather we are allowed to see the organic growth of history in an historian’s mind and are encouraged to use the microscope. This “practical demonstration,” if we may so call it, of the historian’s art and science from the preliminary hunt for manuscripts, through the work of collation and filiation and minute criticism, onward to the perfected tale, the eloquence and the reflections, has been of incalculable benefit to the cause of history in England and far more effective than any abstract discourse on methodology could be. In this respect we must look to the very greatest among the Germans to find the peer of Dr. Stubbs, and we must remember that a Mommsen’s productive days are cut short by a bishopric.

  Perhaps no Englishman of learning, certainly no English historian, has left behind him so large a number of works of the highest excellence…. No one who knew anything of the Bishop’s work doubted that one of his characteristic excellences was due to the fact that he was a theologian as well as a historian. Much that has been dark to other writers on mediæval history was clear to him because he knew the theology of the Fathers and the philosophy of the schoolmen as well as the chronicles of the monks and the laws of the kings. The extraordinary width of his reading in ancient and modern literature was another special feature which gave distinction to his work. It gave, too, it may be added, inimitable humor to his lectures…. William Stubbs was a great historian in the widest sense. Men in high place know too that he was a wise and great man. And those who have worked under him, as historian or as Bishop, remember, most of all, the generosity, the sincerity, the beauty, of his character.

  Perhaps constitutional history does not lend itself either to humour or to eloquence. At any rate, Stubbs was more eminent as a historian than as a man of letters. For evidence of his ability to write with vigour and point the reader must go either to his little book on the Early Plantagenets, his only contribution to the innumerable manuals which have been produced in such profusion by later historians, or preferably to the Prefaces in the Rolls Series. Since Stubbs’s death these Prefaces have been collected and re-published in a separate volume, and they will probably prove more attractive to the general reader than the “Constitutional History,” which is too solid and substantial for the ordinary appetite.