Background

Churchill Babington was born on the 11th of March, 1821 in Roecliffe, Leicestershire, United Kingdom.

Education

Churchill Babington was first educated by his father, Matthew Drake Babington, and then studied under Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, the orientalist and archaeologist. He entered Street John's College, Cambridge in 1839 and graduated in 1843, seventh in the first class of the classical tripos and a senior optime.

Career

In 1846 Churchill Babington was elected to a fellowship and took orders. He proceeded to the degree of Master of Arts in 1846 and Doctor of Divinity in 1879. From 1848 to 1861 he was vicar of Horningsea, near Cambridge, and from 1866 to his death he was vicar of Cockfield in Suffolk. From 1865 to 1880 he held the Disney professorship of archaeology at Cambridge. In his lectures, illustrated from his own collections of coins and vases, he dealt chiefly with Greek and Ancient Roman pottery and numismatics. Babington wrote on a variety of subjects.

His early familiarity with country life gave him a taste for natural history, especially botany and ornithology. He was also an authority on conchology.

Churchill Babington was the author of the appendices on botany (in part) and ornithology in Potter"s History and Antiquities of Charnwood Forest (1842). In 1853, he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. He was the author of Mr Macaulay"s Character of the Clergy (1849), a defence of the clergy of the 17th Century, which received the approval of Gladstone. He also brought out the editio princeps of the speeches of Hypereides Against Demosthenes (1850), On Behalf of Lycophron and Euxenippus (1868), and his Funeral Oration (1858).

lieutenant was by his edition of these speeches from the papyri discovered at Thebes (Egypt) in 1847 and 1856 that Babington"s fame as a Greek scholar was made.

In 1855 Churchill Babington published an edition of Benefizio della Morte di Cristo, a remarkable book of the Reformation period, attributed to Paleario, of which nearly all the copies had been destroyed by the Inquisition. Babington"s edition was a facsimile of the editio princeps published at Venice in 1543, with an Introduction and French and English versions.

Churchill Babington also edited the first two volumes of Higden's Polychronicon (1858) and Bishop Pecock's Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (1860). He catalogued the classical manuscripts in the University Library and the Greek and English coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Achievements

• In addition to contributing to various classical and scientific journals, Babington catalogued the classical manuscripts in the University Library and the Greek and English coins in the Fitzwilliam museum. In 1845 Churchill obtained the Hulsean Prize for his essay The Influence of Christianity in promoting the Abolition of Slavery in Europe.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Influence Of Christianity In Promoting The Abolition Of Slavery
  • An introductory lecture on archaeology delivered before the University of Cambridge
  • Catalogue of the Birds of Suffolk, with an Intr. and Remarks On Their Distribution
  • Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth ... Library Collection - Rolls) (Volume 2)
  • The Brick Of Suffolac
  • Mr. Macaulay's Character of the Clergy in the Latter Part of the Seventeenth Century, Considered. With an Appendix on His Character of the Gentry, as given in His History of England

Connections

Father:

Matthew Drake Babington