Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Capes, William Wolfe

23 February 1834 (christening) - 30 October 1914

Capes was a particularly brilliant example of a clergyman scholar at the University of Oxford, where in 1870 he became Reader in Ancient History. He wrote several general works on ancient Rome and other Classical subjects and between about 1905 and his death transcribed and edited six volumes on the charters and records of Hereford Cathedral, where he was a residentiary canon. Also, in 1903, with the dean of Winchester, W.R.W. Stephens, he coedited The Bishops of Winchester: Birinus to Stigand and Walkelin to Gardiner.

He deserves to be included in CHH because in 1901, ‘at the close of a long period of ministerial work in Bramshott’, where he was instituted rector in 1869, he published Scenes of Rural Life Among the Manors of Bramshott. As a work of local history it benefited hugely from his academic credentials, though he shied away from ‘dry-as-dust-references which might repel all but resolute readers with [a] robust appetite for bristling facts’. As it is, most of his material came from easily identifiable parish documents. Clearly, he was very well read and had a firm grasp of the use of such sources within the framework of national law and politics. He includes explanatory notes and several appendices of transcriptions of documents and family pedigrees.

This eminently readable book gives life to the parish’s major happenings and is peppered with the comments of a scholar, such as ‘the rolls [in the seventeenth century] are still kept in a sort of Latin, with free admixture of people’s language, and little care for technical precision’. It also demonstrates Capes’ deep knowledge of the countryside of Bramshott and local activities such ‘Wealden’ iron-making, which involved immigrant labour, recorded as ‘strangers at the hammer’. It covers the full gamut of the history of the parish, with chapters on all major periods through to the ‘poor laws and other social changes’ of the nineteenth century. One chapter, ‘the Hookes and the Civil War’, deals with an influential local family with Parliamentarian sentiments.

It is important to note that the major part of the parish today is the former ‘hamlet of Liphook’, which developed as a key stopping point on the London-Portsmouth road, now the A3 (there is a U3A Liphook History group). The place of the road and its impact on the parish form a continuous thread throughout Scenes of Rural Life.

Capes was the son of Joseph, who had a role at the Royal Mint and was also a London bookseller. He started his education at St Paul’s School, London and went up as an exhibitioner to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he held a fellowship 1856-70. He later became a fellow of Hertford College. His undergraduate career is notable for his being the only candidate in 1855 to get a Second Class result in mathematics – no one got a First. In 1868 at a relatively late age he was ordained (the DNB gives 1865, followed by a short curacy at Abbots Ann) and the next year was instituted to a college living as rector of Bramshott (with Liphook).  The reason for this change is evident, as on 23 August 1870, at Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire, he married Mary Leadbeater. He seems to have been a diligent rector with a ‘multiplication of services on Sunday…[and as many as fourteen gatherings…for teaching and worship,… the services of his wife, his curate, the schoolmasters, and other laymen were pressed into the work’ (DNB). Between 1894 and 1903 he was an honorary canon of Winchester. After resigning the living at Bramshott he and his wife lived for a while in Addington, Kent, before they moved to Hereford. Here he became a canon, ‘sorted records in the library’, edited volumes on the charters and records of the cathedral and founded the Cantelupe Society (1905-32), a text publication society. His wife died in Hereford in 1908: they are both are both buried in Bramshott.

Sources

• Wikipedia

• Alumni Oxonienses

• Family Search

• The Register of Thomas Poltone, Bishop of Hereford, A.D. 1420-1422. 1916, contains a memoir of Capes by the Bishop of Hereford. (not seen)

• Dictionary of National Biography

• Hollings, C.D., 2023, Oxford mathematics at a low ebb? An 1855 dispute over examination results, Annals of Science

Portrait

Contribution to county’s history

As well as writing the history of one Hampshire parish, he demonstrated how to write a good local history, albeit without full references.

Relevant published works

• Scenes of Rural Life Among the Manors of Bramshott, Macmillan, London, 1901

• With W.R.W. Stephens, 1903, The Bishops of Winchester: Birinus to Stigand and Walkelin to Gardiner Winchester, Warren & Sons.

Critical Comments

Other Comments

It would be interesting to see how later works on Liphook carried on telling the story of the parish.

Contributor

Barry Shurlock, 26 May 2024.

Keywords

Winchester, Bramshott, Liphook, Hereford, road history, iron-making

Any queries or further suggestions for this part of the list should be addressed to celebrating@hantsfieldclub.org.uk.

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