User:Rich Farmbrough/DNB/C/h/Charles Clarke (d.1767)

Charles Clarke||1767| Charles Clarke (died 1767), antiquary, describes himself in his literary advertisements as 'late of Baliol College, Oxford', but his name does not appear in the college admission book, nor is there evidence of his having been matriculated. His attainments as an antiquary were slender indeed, to judge from the one extant specimen entitled 'Some conjectures relative to a very ancient piece of money lately found at Eltham in Kent endeavouring to restore it to the place it merits in the Cimeliarch of English coins, and to prove it a coin of Rich the First King of England of that name. To which are added some remarks on a dissertation [by Dr. John Kennedy]. . . on Oriuna, the supposed wife of Carausius, and on the Roman coins therein mentioned', quarto, London, 1751. A reply to the first part was published the following year by the Rev. George North F.S.A. who in his 'Remarks on “Some Conjectures', ” made short work of Clarke's idle imaginings. The piece, he conclusively showed, was an ordinary token of the kind known among numismatists as 'Penyard pence'. Clarke, greatly angered, sought to take revenge in an attempted refutation of North's 'Epistolary Dissertation on some supposed Golden coins', which he repeatedly advertised but had the good sense not to publish. It is rather surprising to find that he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries on 13 February 1752. On the second leaf of his unlucky 'Conjectures' he had announced the speedy publication of what was to have been his chief performance, entitled 'The Hebrew Samaritan, Greek, and Roman Medalist'. The work never appeared, possibly from the fact that the author had become convinced of the danger of trifling with numismatics. He died at Glamsford, Suffolk, in April 1767, and was buried there on the 20th of the same month (''Glemsford Burial Register','). In Nichols's 'Literary Anecdotes' (v. 448) Clarke is described as 'Rev.;' the error probably arose from a misprint. in the list of the Society of Antiquaries for 1753.

DNB references
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