Frederic Seebohm

Frederic Arthur Seebohm (23 November 1833 – 6 February 1912) was a British economic historian. He is notable for his emphasis on continuity between the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods.

Life Seebohm was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He was the second son of Benjamin Seebohm (1798–1871) and Esther Wheeler (1798-1864). Benjamin Seebohm was a wool merchant at Horton Grange, Bradford, the family having moved to England from Waldeck-Pyrmont in Germany. Frederic was the great-grandson of philanthropist and Quaker William Tuke, and the younger brother of steel manufacturer and ornithologist Henry Seebohm (1832-1895). Frederic was educated at Bootham School (a Quaker school in York).

He became a barrister in the Middle Temple in London in 1856. The following year he married Mary Ann Exton. Seebohm and his wife set up their home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.

Descendants Seebohm and his wife had six children (a son, Hugh, and five daughters). In 1891, their daughter Juliet married renowned surgeon Sir Rickman Godlee, himself a Quaker and the son of a Middle Temple barrister. Seebohm was the grandfather of Frederic Seebohm, Baron Seebohm (1909–1990), the soldier, banker, and innovator of social work. He was also the great-grandfather of the biographer and broadcaster Victoria Glendinning.

Partial bibliography (1865) The Crisis of Emancipation in America (1867) Oxford Reformers: John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More (1871) On International Reform (1874) Era of the Protestant Revolution (1883) The English Village Community Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry (1895) The Tribal System in Wales (1902) Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (1914, posthumous) Customary Acres and their Historical Importance