(John) Horace Round(1854-1928) was a historian and genealogist of the English medieval period. He translated the Domesday Book for Essex into contemporary English. As an expert in the history of the British peerage he was appointed Honorary Historical Adviser to the Crown.
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Round was born on 22 February 1854 in Hove, England. His parents were John Round, (died 1887) and Laura, the daughter of the poet Horatio Smith (died 1864). He was born on 22 February 1854 and his birth place, 15 Brunswick Terrace in Hove, has a blue plaque.[1]
He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first class degree in Modern History.
Though a native of Sussex, he had many interests in Essex, and was both deputy lieutenant and a lord of the manor in that county. A relative owned Colchester Castle[2], and his grandfather John had been a Member of Parliament in Essex.[1]
His family history appears in Burke’s Landed Gentry, a publication he regularly criticised for its inaccuracies, although there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the entry for his family. He never married.
He contributed to many publications (most notably The Complete Peerage, The Dictionary of National Biography (first edition) and The Victoria County History (VCH)) and was the author of several significant works. His translation and discussion of the Essex Domesday (VCH, Essex, vol. 1) is widely regarded as a masterpiece, and is of national significance; this contrasts with his books, where he often indulged in castigating his contemporaries. He pursued disputes with other academics vigorously, and on more than one occasion, the level of acrimony was sufficiently high that the editor was forced to close correspondence on the subject.[3] These disputes in a normally gentle academic area honed his analytic skills.[4] He was recognised as a leading authority on medieval and later genealogy and was awarded an honorary LLD by the University of Edinburgh in February 1905.[3]
He advised the Court of Claims and Committee for Privileges of the House of Lords on matters concerning the coronation of King Edward VII. His book on this topic, The King’s Serjeants and Officers of State, with their Coronation Services was published in 1911, the year of King George V’s coronation. An expert in British peerage history and law, he was appointed Honorary Historical Adviser to the Crown in peerage cases in 1914 (a post from which he resigned in 1922).
Round contracted a chronic illness some time after coming down from Oxford, and his handwriting progressively deteriorated over the years.[2] He died on 24 June 1928 in Hove. A memoir by his friend and colleague William Page was included in a posthumously published volume of writings.[3] and a biography by W. Raymond Powell was published in 2001. Both contain full bibliographies of Round's work. At the time of his death, he had more than sixty contributions to Essex Archaeology and History awaiting publication.[3] His most recent posthumous papers appeared in about 2003 in the Transactions of the Essex Archaeology and History Society, and in 2004 in Foundations [5].
Correspondence between Round and various other historians is available in the archives at Senate House Library[6]. Additional papers are in the Essex Record Office, West Sussex Record Office, Warwickshire Record Office, Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service, British Library, Bodleian Library, Edinburgh University Library, Glasgow University Library, Manchester University Library, Reading University Library, Yale University Library, Colchester Library, Sussex Archaeological Society and the National Archives.[7]