Coulton, George Gordon

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Coulton, George Gordon

1858-1947

George Gordon Coulton was born at King's Lynn in 1858. After some early schooling at Lynn and at the lycee at St.Omer (France) he was sent to Felsted school. In 1877 he went to St.Catherine's College, Cambridge as a scholar and went down with an aegrotat degree. After a brief period as a preparatory schoolmaster he read for holy orders, was ordained deacon in 1883 and priest in the following year.However after a short period he felt himself unable to continue and accepted posts is various public schools, with a happy interval of sixteen months in a private school in Heidelberg(Germany). Overwork while at Dulwich College brought on a breakdown in 1895. On his recovery he joined a friend who ran a coaching establishment at Eastbourne where for the next thirteen years he worked happily in conditions which gave him freedom to pursue his own studies. By this time he had determined to devote his energies to the serious study of medieval life and thought, and in particular to the working of the ecclesiastical system and he began to put out such books as From St.Francis to Dante (1906) and Chaucer and His England (1908) into which he poured some of the considerable knowledge he had acquired. His growing reputation was enhanced by the appointment as Birkbeck Lecturer in ecclesiastical history conferred on him by Trinity College, Cambridge in 1910, and as a result of this he decided to migrate to Cambridge to set up as a free-lance lecturer and coach the following year. In 1919 he was elected into what was then the sole university lectureship in English, and a little later in the same year he was made a Fellow of St.John's College. From then onwards, save for the years 1940-44 when he was a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto, his life was spent in Cambridge where he produced an unending flow of works and enjoyed a growing reputation both as a scholar and as an ever-ready adviser to those who sought his aid in matters historical. Coulton received the honorary degree of D.Litt. from Durham University (1920) and of LL.D. from Edinburgh (1931) and Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario (1942). He was elected a Fellow of the British Association in 1929 and an Honorary Fellow of St.Catherine's College in 1922. He died at Cambridge in 1947.

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