Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Capes, William Wolfe
CAPES, WILLIAM WOLFE (1834–1914), historical scholar, the third son of Joseph Capes, who had a post at the Royal Mint and was also a bookseller in Paternoster Row, London, by his wife, Anne, daughter of Joseph Wolfe, of Reading, was born in London 1 January 1834 in the parish of St. Michael le Querne, probably in Paternoster Row. He was admitted to St. Paul’s School, London, 31 January 1843, under Herbert Kynaston [q.v.], then high master. He used daily to walk to school from Norwood, where his parents then resided. At sixteen he began his practice of foreign travel, which he continued throughout his life, by an expedition, mainly on foot, extending from Holland as far as Rome. In 1852 he proceeded to Oxford, having been elected to a Michel exhibition at Queen’s College. His chief instructors there were George Henry Sacheverell Johnson, afterwards dean of Wells, and William Thomson, afterwards archbishop of York. Under their influence admission to the foundation of the college was then being thrown open, and in June 1854 Capes, with Antony Benn Falcon and John Percival, afterwards bishop of Hereford, was elected to a taberdarship of the college, an emolument previously reserved to natives of Cumberland and Westmorland. He had before this, in 1853, obtained first classes at moderations in classics and mathematics, and in the final honour schools in 1855 he obtained a first class in classics and a second class in mathematics. He was elected fellow of Queen’s College 11 December 1856.
As an undergraduate Capes does not seem to have taken any part in the games then played in Oxford, but after graduation he rowed in the college torpid, and before he left Oxford he had bought a riding-horse. On election to his fellowship he was at once appointed tutor, and soon found himself responsible for the whole of the teaching in the college for the honour school of literae humaniores. He was very successful. Of a number of distinguished pupils those who became eminent were, besides Percival, Ingram Bywater, Walter Horatio Pater, and Archibald Henry Sayce. Having determined to take holy orders he was ordained in 1865, and served a while as curate at Abbot’s Anne, near Andover. He returned to college work, was junior proctor in 1865-1866, and examiner in literae humaniores 1867-1869, and again 1873-1875 and 1878-1879. In 1869 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Bramshott, Hampshire, and in 1870 he married Mary (died 1907), daughter of John Leadbeater, of Blackburn. He held the rectory for thirty-two years. But Oxford could not spare him. The parish was an extensive agricultural one and needed the multiplication of services on Sunday. At one time there were as many as fourteen gatherings on a Sunday for teaching and worship, and the services of his wife, his curate, the schoolmasters, and other laymen were pressed into the work. But on week-days the calls of duty were comparatively few, and Capes accordingly gave three or four days in the middle of each week of term to Oxford, and held from 1870 to 1887 the university readership of ancient history. In 1876 he was elected fellow of Hertford College, and he held that fellowship with a tutorship from 1876 to 1886.
To this period of his life belong Capes’s earliest publications: The Early Roman Empire (1874), The Age of the Antonines (1877, both in a series of Epochs of Ancient History), University Life in Ancient Athens (1877), a brilliant course of lectures based on the Greek inscriptions, and Stoicism (1888). The extension and variation at this time of the ‘books’ offered in the university honours courses induced him to prepare some editions of the texts newly introduced. An edition of Livy, books xxi, xxii (1880), was followed by one of Sallust (1884) and the part of Polybius containing the history of the Achaean League (1888). Capes was select preacher to the university 1873-1874, rural dean of Petersfield, and honorary canon of Winchester from 1894 to 1903. During his last days at Bramshott he contributed to Stephens’s and Hunt’s History of the English Church the volume covering the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which appeared in 1900.
Capes resigned the rectory of Bramshott in 1901 and settled for a while at Addington, Kent. While there he wrote Rural Life in Hampshire, an account of the neighbourhood of Bramshott, published in 1908. In that year he was collated to a residentiary canonry in Hereford Cathedral, and began a fresh course of historical work on the documents of the chapter and see. In 1908 he published the Charters and Records of Hereford Cathedral with a long introduction containing a valuable account of the constitution of a cathedral of the old foundation. Before this, acting on a suggestion of Prebendary J. R. Burton, rector of Bitterley, he had founded the Cantelupe Society, which succeeded in a few years in printing all the pre-Reformation registers of the bishops of Hereford. Six of these he himself edited, and he took an active interest in the work of his colleagues. He also set to work upon arranging and cataloguing the valuable cathedral library, but this he had not succeeded in finishing at his death, 31 October 1914. He and his wife are both buried at Bramshott. They had no children.
[R. B,. Gardiner, Registers of St. Paul's School; Bishop Percival, A Memoir of Canon Capes, 1916; private information; personal knowledge.]