Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Seebohm, Frederic
SEEBOHM, FREDERIC (1833–1912), historian, was born at Bradford 23 November 1833. He was the second son of Benjamin Seebohm, a wool merchant and prominent minister of the Society of Friends, who had come over from Friedensthal, in the principality of Waldeck-Pyrmont, as a boy of sixteen and had settled at Bradford. His mother, Esther Wheeler, was a descendant of one of the staunchest adherents of George Fox. Both parents were profoundly imbued with the spirit of intense and active Christianity characteristic of the early quakers. There was a wide scope for charity in the 'thirties of the last century, and Frederic Seebohm kept through life the memory of the piteous struggle of the handloom weavers of the West Riding against the introduction of machinery. After going through the Bootham School, York, Seebohm read law in London and started in practice as a barrister in 1856. In 1857 he married Mary Ann, daughter of William Exton, a banker, and settled definitely in Hitchin as a partner in a bank (Sharples & Co.), which was amalgamated with the firm of Barclay & Co. in 1896. His house, ‘The Hermitage’, became the happy home of a family of five daughters and one son. He proved an able and hard-working man of business, but as in the case of George Grote, Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), and Thomas Hodgkin, his professional duties did not prevent him from becoming a leader of research; on the contrary they seemed to sharpen his intellect and to stimulate his energy. Nor did he shirk his duties as a citizen. As a friend and supporter of William Edward Forster [q.v.] he took an active share in the campaign for organizing popular education; he was a poor law guardian, a justice of the peace, a governor of the secondary schools at Hitchin, and a member of the Hertfordshire County Council education committee. After the split of the liberal party over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill (1886) he took the side of the liberal unionists. In 1893 he acted as a member of the Welsh land commission.
Seebohm's civic activity was prompted by the atmosphere of the community of Friends—the spirit of Christian fraternity. He was well acquainted with the critical work achieved by science and philosophy, but he kept up his devotion to Christianity as the moral guide in the history of the world. Speaking of various movements towards emancipation, he wrote in his little book, The Christian Hypothesis (1876): ‘Looking at all these broadly, they are ripples and waves in a great tide which is moving onwards towards the political development of mankind. And not only is the direction of the movement, taken as a whole, evidently towards the realization of the goal and object of Christian civilization, but Christianity itself has mainly furnished the moral force by which it has been so far accomplished.’
The subject which attracted Seebohm's attention in his early literary work was the rise of modern civilization in opposition to the organization of society under the sway of the Roman Church. He traced this process from the revival of learning in his book, The Oxford Reformers (1867); as he expressed it, ‘Their fellow work had been to urge, in a critical period in the history of Christendom, the necessity of that thorough and comprehensive reform which the carrying of Christianity into practice in the affairs of nations and men would involve.’ It seemed to him that the revolutionary crisis of the Reformation might have been avoided if the reforms advocated by Colet, Erasmus, and More had been carried out. The main lines of the conflict in the sixteenth century were sketched by Seebohm in a little volume on The Era of the Protestant Revolution (1874). While The Oxford Reformers lays stress on the new outlook in science and literature, The Protestant Revolution dwells on the social process underlying the intellectual revolt. The dogmatic history of the movement is treated in both cases as of secondary importance in comparison with the revival of domestic life. From this point of view the downfall of the religious orders appears as a wholesome reaction against the ‘blunder’ of celibacy and its political influence.
The principal contribution of Seebohm to historical studies is embodied in his books, The English Village Community (1883), The Tribal System in Wales (1895), and Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (1902). These inquiries originated from an attempt to trace the historical conditions of the problem of population in England, of which some articles in the Fortnightly Review (1865–1870) present an outline. Seebohm became aware that it is not the simple relation between the supply of food and the demands of individuals to be fed that provides the solution of the problem, but that this solution is conditioned by the forms of economic organization. He was struck by the peculiar character of the open-field system which had prevailed in England for more than a thousand years. Communal farming with its inconvenient intermixture of strips, compulsory rotation of crops, common pasture, common waste, were traced by him to the so-called manorial system, which, in his view, was already in existence in the Roman villa; the organization of rural labour had proceeded on these lines with the same uniform regularity as the building up of hexagonal cells by bees; the communism of the open-field villages was derived from the fact that the labouring population was by custom subjected to the exploitation of lords who were endowed with rights of individual property; the disruption of the open-field community was considered as one of the aspects of progressive emancipation. Seebohm's argument fitted well into a widespread movement of revolt against a romantic conception of ancient Teutonic freedom which had been preached on the Continent by German scholars and advocated in England by E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, and others. Fustel de Coulanges in France initiated independently a crusade against the Germanistic interpretation of mediaeval history, maintaining, among other things, that there had never existed such a thing as the village community, and assigning a decisive influence in the history of Western European origins to Roman institutions. In Germany itself G. F. Knapp and A. Dopsch criticized the doctrines derived from the study of Tacitus and of the barbarian laws, and laid stress on the organizing rôle played by the great estate. In this way Seebohm's teaching came in, as it were, on the crest of a wave of critical and constructive study.
Seebohm did not entrench himself, however, behind the one-sided conception of the great estate. He addressed himself to another and equally important line of development. His eyes were open not only to the vestiges of common husbandry in the home counties of England, but also to the scattering of homesteads in Wales and other Celtic districts. He devoted considerable attention to the practice of co-aration and to the joint family in this region. In his Tribal System in Wales he presented an extensive study of the Welsh kindred, its ramifications, its pastoral and agricultural peculiarities. Here was clearly a case of tribal, not servile, community; and Seebohm traced it to the authority of the patriarch, as he had traced the manorial arrangement to the authority of the military lord. He exaggerated to some extent this patriarchal authority as against the collective influence of the kindred, and he did not succeed in explaining the process by which tribal arrangements were transformed into the manorial system. But the strong emphasis given by his investigations to the kindred of tribesmen supplies an effective counterblast to the shallow simplifications to which some of the followers of his villa doctrine have committed themselves. His Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law contains interesting studies leading in the same direction, but it is far from being on the same level with his preceding work. In the posthumous volume on Customary Acres (1914) there are valuable observations on the continuity of land measurements, but it is a collection of materials rather than a definite statement of the subject. Seebohm was still at work on it when he died at Hitchin, after a protracted illness, on 6 February 1912.
Seebohm's greatest merit as a researcher was his sense of concrete reality in describing and explaining the remote and obscure past. Working from the known to the unknown, he succeeded in making himself at home in the surroundings of old England or of Welsh tribal life, and he introduces his readers to a strange world of archaic ideas and practices. His lucid exposition made his work accessible to a large circle of readers; it achieved also signal recognition in the world of learning, and the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Oxford conferred on him honorary degrees. The books acquired in the course of his studies in economic history have been given by his family to the Maitland Library in Oxford.
[The Times, 7 February 1912; private information; personal knowledge.]