Frederic Seebohm

Frederic Seebohm (1833–1912) was an English historian and banker. A Quaker, he spent his working life in a family bank at Hitchin in Hertfordshire and wrote history in his spare time. The Oxford Reformers (1867), a study of John Colet, Erasmus and Thomas More, established his reputation, and The Era of the Protestant Revolution followed. His most influential book, The English Village Community (1883), used maps and field evidence to argue that the open-field manor grew from Roman and servile origins, and it opened a long debate among economic historians. He continued the inquiry in The Tribal System in Wales.