William Stubbs

William Stubbs 1825-1901, English historian, educated at Oxford. Ordained in 1850, he was a professor of modern history at Oxford until in 1884 he was made bishop of Chester. Stubbs's critical studies of source materials transformed the study of medieval history. His Constitutional History of England (3 vol., 1874-78) and Select Charters (1870, 9th ed. rev. by H. W. Davis, 1913) remain standard textbooks. Stubbs also edited many texts for the "Rolls Series" of medieval English chronicles.

Stubbs, William (1825–1901), historian and bishop. He was Regius professor of modern history at Oxford (1866–84) and then Bp. of Chester (1884–9) and of Oxford (1889–1901). He was the greatest British historian of his time. Many of his works deal with ecclesiastical sources.

Stubbs, William (1825–1901), was appointed Regius professor of modern history at Oxford in 1866. He was the first substantial scholar to hold such a chair at either university. He showed supreme professional skill, acquired by the study of contemporary German academic method, in the 18 volumes of medieval texts he edited for the Rolls Series, and this was the foundation for his great Constitutional History of [Medieval] England (3 vols, 1874–8), which has been described as ‘one of the most astonishing achievements of the Victorian mind’. Together with his Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History to 1307 (1870), it imposed a pattern and a method on the teaching of history in all British universities which survived until the mid-20th cent. (in Oxford longer), though he published nothing more after his elevation to the bishopric of Chester in 1884 and subsequently (1888) Oxford.