Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/456

 Despite the limitations imposed upon him, there were few earnest students of history at Oxford who were not indebted to him for advice, encouragement, sympathy, and direction.

The restrictions under which he chafed allowed Stubbs to concentrate himself upon his personal work. Society and academic business did not appeal to him. He disliked dinner-parties, smoking, late hours, and committees. He conscientiously discharged every duty that lay straight before him, but he did not spend too much time in doing so. His real life, however, was in his study, and in the libraries where he sought material. His literary output was prodigious. The history of scholarship would have to be ransacked to afford parallels of a work so distinguished both in quantity and quality within the seventeen years of his professorship. He worked with extraordinary rapidity, accuracy, and sureness. Of many large literary schemes, perhaps the only one which he did not complete was his projected reproduction 'in accordance with the present state of our knowledge and materials' of all that part of Wilkins's 'Concilia' antecedent to the Reformation. Leaving the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish sections to his colleague, Arthur West Haddan [q. v.], Stubbs undertook the Anglo-Saxon period, and published in 1878 vol. iii. of 'Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents covering the History of the Anglo-Saxon Church,' but the plan never went any further. A byproduct of this was the long series of lives of Anglo-Saxon bishops, saints, kings, and writers, from Stubbs's pen, whiMch were published in the four volumes of the 'Dictionary of Christian Biography' between 1877 and 1887. He also contributed to the two volumes of the 'Dictionary of Christian Antiquities' (1875-80), and had a share in the editing of that work (Preface to vol. i. p. xi).

The most characteristic work done by Stubbs in these fruitful years is to be found in the editions of chronicles which he contributed to the Rolls Series. The two volumes of the 'Chronicles and Memorials of Richard I,' issued in 1864-5, were followed by the two volumes of the 'Gesta regis Henrici II ' attributed to Benedict of Peterborough (1867), the four volumes of Roger Howden or Hoveden's 'Chronica' (1868-71), the two volumes of the 'Memoriale or historical collections of Walter of Coventry' (1872-3), the one volume of the 'Memorials of Saint Dunstan' (1874), the two volumes of The Historical Works of Ralph Diceto' (1878), the two volumes of 'The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury' (1879-80), and the two volumes of the 'Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II' (1882-3). While professor Stubbs published for the Rolls Series fifteen large volumes. There were also the two published before, and the two volumes of William of Malmesbury issued later. This monumental series won a very high reputation for a collection which, apart from Stubbs's contributions to it, contains some bad and more indifferent work. They are in every respect models of what the 'editio princeps' of an original authority should be. The text is impeccable, and based upon the careful collation of the available manuscripts. Every help is given in the way of introductions, notes, and elaborate indexes to lighten the labours of those using the texts. They are much more than ideal examples of editorial workmanship. A liberal construction of the directions given to the Rolls editors allowed Stubbs to write 'excellent history on a large scale' in every one of his introductions which revealed him as an historical narrator of the first order, equally at home in painting a large gallery of historical portraits, and in working out the subtlest of problems. The shy student, who had been thought a mere antiquary, proved to be a constructive historian of real power and eloquence. The range of his historical vision was enormous. Here he vindicated the claims of Dunstan to be a pioneer of English political unity and of mediæval intellectual life. There he threw new light on the reign of Edward I, and for the first time analysed fully the causes of the fall of Edward II. Yet while all periods were treated with wonderful grasp, a special mastery was shown of the age of Henry II. It was unfortunate for Stubbs's wider fame that the form in which the historical part of these introductions appeared made them inaccessible to general readers. An attempt to collect them in a detached form, made after his death (Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series, 1902), was too carelessly performed to be entirely successful.

Side by side with his other tasks, Stubbs devoted himself to writing on a large scale the constitutional history of mediæval England. As a forerunner to this great work, he issued in 1870 the most widely used of all his publications. This was 'Select Charters, and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I,'