ABSTRACT
William Stubbs, after Frederic William Maitland the greatest English historian of his day and a key figure in the transformation of the role of history in English intellectual life, was born on 21 June 1825. The son of a Yorkshire solicitor, he was well educated at Ripon Grammar School, but his family circumstances became such that he could gain a university education at Christ Church, Oxford, only as a servitor, an undergraduate admitted on special, and humble, terms because of poverty. After graduating in 1848 with a first-class degree in classics, Stubbs entered the church and from 1850 until 1866 was vicar of Navestock in Essex. There he began to earn the reputation as a student of medieval history that won him in 1866 the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford. During his tenure he published his greatest work, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origins and Development. He did little more historical work after becoming bishop of Chester in 1884; in 1888 he was translated to the see of Oxford.
