1834 -1924
A prolific English antiquarian, Sabine Baring-Gould produced over 1200 volumes of text (in addition to doing work as an Anglican Priest, an archeologist, and as president of the Royal Institution of Cornwall).
Sabine Baring-Gould was mostly self-educated in his younger years; he went on to Cambridge University, and then completed his masters at Clare College. After the death of his father, he inherited the Lew Trenchard estates, toward which he devoted much of his attention via remodeling and restoration.
Baring-Gould oversaw the initial excavation of what is now the Dartmoor National Park, in England; through the continued historical and prehistorical exploration of the area, much of the stonework (standing stones, circle formations) has been dated back to the transition from the Neolithic Era to the Bronze Age. It has been determined that great forests were felled and the land was cultivated for farming, the results of which are the present day swamplands (moors). The geology of the park is notable in part for its negative gravity anomaly, which is associated with the porous plutonic granite formations that lie below the surface of the park.
One of Baring-Gould’s principal interests in literature was transcribing collections of folk tales and songs, and making records of otherwise oral traditions. In addition to works on subjects such as mythology, saints, werewolves, balladry, sermons, curiosities, outlaws, and ghosts, he wrote novels of his own construction, as well as many local histories and biographies.
More Baring-Gould:
The Sabine Bearing-Gould Appreciation Society
You can read his Lives of the Saints (1914) below, from the collection of the University of Toronto.
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