Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Grundy, George Beardoe

10 January 1861 – 6 December 1948

Grundy was an Oxford don and historian, with a strong militaristic background. His specialism was the military history of Ancient Greece and Rome, but he also turned his attention to Saxon charters, field names and old highways and produced influential lists and articles for a number of English counties, including Hampshire.

Grundy was born in Wallasey and educated at Risley School and Lichfield Grammar. At the age of 27, after a spell as an army tutor, he matriculated at Brasenose College and four years later received the title of ‘Geographical Student of the University of Oxford’, becoming a lecturer on ancient geography. From 1897 to 1903 he was a lecturer in ancient history and from 1903 to 1931 a fellow and tutor of ancient history at Corpus Christi College.

Grundy was a strong supporter of the military establishment and its values and equally devoted to the Conservative party. His disenchantment with democracy and socialism and admiration for the aristocracy is evident in his major works The Great Persian War and Its Preliminaries (1901) and Thucydides and the History of His Age (1911), which attempted to revise earlier humanistic interpretations of the Athenian political scene.

Grundy’s work on Saxon charters resulted in publications on Worcestershire (1931), Oxfordshire (1933) and Somerset (1935). His Hampshire itineraries were published a decade earlier, as a series of substantial papers in the Archaeological Journal and were accompanied by a significant article in the Proceedings, ‘On Place Names in general and the Hampshire Place Names in particular’ (1922) which contains many useful leads and ends with an entertaining ‘Vocabulary of Field Names’.

After fifty-five years at Oxford, Grundy rounded off his literary works in 1945 with ‘an unconventional autobiography’.

Sources

Wikipedia

Portrait

Photograph taken from the cover of his autobiograpy, image below, Fifty-five Years at Oxford: An Unconventional Autobiograhy (Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, 1945).

Contribution to county’s history

Innumerable researchers have made use of Grundy’s work, both in articles for the Proceedings e.g.

• Klingelhofer E (1990) Anglo-Saxon manors of the Upper Itchen Valley, Proc Hants Field Club 46, 31-39.


• Currie C K (1994) Saxon Charters and Landscape Evolution in the south-central Hampshire Basin, Proc Hants Field Club 50, 103-25.

and broader works that include Hampshire e.g. Langlands A (2019) The Ancient Ways of Wessex.

Relevant published works

• Grundy G B (1922) On Place Names in general and the Hampshire Place Names in particular, Proc Hants Field Club 9, 221-261.

• Grundy, G B, 'The Saxon land charters of Hampshire with notes on place and field names', Archaeological Journal, 2nd series, xxviii (1921), pp 55-173; xxxi (1924), pp 31-287; xxxiii (1926), pp 91-253; xxxiv (1927), pp 160-340.

• Grundy G B (1945) Fifty-five years at Oxford: an unconventional autobiography. London: Methuen. 1945.

Critical Comments

Grundy’s approach – extensive use of first edition OS maps, without verification in the field – still serves as a valuable ‘desk-based assessment’.  The identification of individual boundary marks can be problematic, but Grundy successfully demonstrated that Anglo Saxon estate boundaries, as recorded in the charters, closely follow the parish boundaries on the maps. 

Other Comments

Contributor

Dave Allen, September 2023

Key Words

Saxon land charters, place names, field names

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