# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Skeat, Walter William

​SKEAT, WALTER WILLIAM (1835–1912), philologist, the second son of William Skeat, architect, by his wife, Sarah Bluck, was born in London 21 November 1835. He attended King's College School, where Thomas Oswald Cockayne [q.v.], one of the best Anglo-Saxon scholars of the time, was his form-master; passed thence to Highgate School; and entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1854. At Cambridge, C. S. Calverley, J. R. Seeley, and Walter Besant were among his friends. He studied theology and mathematics, took the mathematical tripos (fourteenth wrangler) in 1858, and was elected a fellow of his college in 1860. In the latter year he took orders, and entered on his first curacy at East Dereham, Norfolk. In the next year he became curate of Godalming, but a serious illness affecting his throat closed his career in the Church. He returned to Cambridge ​and was appointed to a mathematical lectureship at Christ's College in 1864. The duties left him ample leisure, and he now began the serious study of Early English, with such results that in 1878 his election to the new Elrington and Bosworth professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge was assured. Teaching, untiring research, and writing occupied the rest of an evenly happy and full life. He died at Cambridge 6 October 1912. He had married in 1860 Bertha, eldest daughter of Francis Jones, of Lewisham; his wife, two sons, and three daughters survived him.
Skeat's interest in Early English authors was first roused by the extracts in the history book which he used at school, and he worked back to them through the Faerie Queen. But it was Frederick James Furnivall [q.v.] who first set him to work as an editor. The discussion of plans for the New English Dictionary had revealed a dearth of trustworthy early texts, and to supply the want Furnivall and Richard Morris [q.v.] formed the Early English Text Society in 1864. Skeat was pressed into the service, and punctually edited Lancelot of the Laik (1865). In 1866 he began his great edition of Piers Plowman, which was finished twenty years later. The first part of his edition of John Barbour's The Bruce appeared in 1870; and by 1872 he had published the Treatise on the Astrolabe, one of many studies preliminary to his seven-volume edition of Chaucer (1894–1897). This might seem a life's work, but it is only a part of Skeat's contribution to the study of one century—the fourteenth. He produced two standard works in Anglo-Saxon, the Anglo-Saxon Gospels (1871–1887) and Ælfric's Lives of Saints (1881–1900); and in 1873 he founded the English Dialect Society, which prepared the way for the English Dialect Dictionary (edited by Joseph Wright, 1896–1905). Another important book, his Etymological Dictionary (1879–1882, revised and enlarged, 1910), was begun with the purpose of collecting and sifting material for the use of the New English Dictionary. Besides these larger works, none of which has yet been superseded, he found time to edit Chatterton (1871), to write many text-books for schools and universities, to popularize philology and modernize old authors, and to contribute freely to the learned societies and journals concerned with English studies. Furthermore, in his latter years he led the way in the systematic study of place-names, county by county. All this vast output is distinguished by accuracy in matter of fact, wide learning, and humanity; and most of it Skeat produced without prospect of reward, out of devotion to his subject.
Skeat's own prescription for such monuments of scholarship was enthusiasm, with unremitting application, and he wasted no time. He would take part in a fireside conversation, all the while sorting glossary slips as tranquilly as a woman does her knitting. Besides, he could set practical limits to his curiosity; in the preface to the first edition of the Etymological Dictionary he explains that he usually gave three hours to a difficult word: 'During that time I made the best I could of it and then let it go.' This requires self-sacrifice in a scholar, but it is the secret of Skeat's great service. The new school of philology which arose towards 1880, when the lines of Skeat's work were laid down and much of it done, produced men like Zupitza and Sievers in Germany, or Henry Sweet [q.v.], A. S. Napier, and Henry Bradley in England, who went beyond Skeat in linguistic theory and in exact methods. But Skeat's pioneer work made such advances possible. At a critical moment in English studies he saw the wisdom of Furnivall's doctrine, that the essential thing was to attract workers, and to make available for them quickly a great quantity of materials, edited as well as possible, but always with a time-limit in view rather than perfection in minutiae. And perhaps he gained as much ground for his subject by quiet sapping as Furnivall took by storm.
[Autobiography in A Student's Pastime, 1896 (with list of publications); notices in Englische Studien, December 1912, and elsewhere; private information.]
K. S.