William Greenwell

Archaeology

His family estate included the site of the ancient Roman fort Longovicium. As a child he and his brother Frank would scoop out soil covering the camp, leading to his interest in archaeology. He was a founding member of the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club in 1846, and later that year toured Germany and Italy. In August 1852 he presented a paper at an Archaeological Institute there. In March 1864, he excavated fourteen barrows at Danes Graves a site of the Arras Culture of the British Iron Age and was subsequently criticised by William Harrison-Broadley for his poor excavation technique. In 1868, Greenwell excavated 76 inhumation burials from the Anglian cemetery at Uncleby. Greenwell undertook a large-scale excavation of 53 barrows at Danes Graves with John Robert Mortimer between 1897–98. Greenwell is also noted for his work on the Grimes Graves along with his treatises on electrum coinage of Cyzicus, and cataloguing of the Late Bronze Age finds from Heathery Burn Cave.

One of his students was Augustus Pitt Rivers, who received his first instruction in excavation from Greenwell at a site in the Yorkshire Wolds. Greenwell's view of archaeology as a serious scholarly process of assembling evidence on periods which lacked written records, contrasted to what he called the "ignorant and greedy spirit of mere curiosity-hunting", would influence Pitt Rivers' own approach.

Greenwell's enormous collection of antiquities, many of which date from the Neolithic or Bronze Age period in Britain, is now in the British Museum. This was thanks to the generosity of J. P. Morgan, who bought them for £10,000. In 1895, he sold his collections of flint implements to Dr W. Allan Sturge, formerly of Nice. His earliest collection of note was Greek coins, which he eventually sold to a Mr. Warren of Boston, Massachusetts, with Warren later donating it to the Boston Museum. His collection of carved stones is in the museum of Durham Cathedral, and is described by them as "one of the most complete and comprehensive collections of early medieval stone sculpture in the country".

With the money made from selling his collections he was able to repurchase his ancestral home, Greenwell Ford, which he left to his nephew, judge Sir Francis John Greenwell.

Career

Greenwell held the perpetual curacy of Ovingham with Mickley from 1847 to 1850. He then briefly served Robert Isaac Wilberforce as curate at Burton Agnes, Yorkshire, before becoming assistant to William George Henderson, principal of Hatfield Hall, Durham. In 1852 he was appointed principal of Neville Hall, a hostel for students at Newcastle College of Medicine, with whom he worked among the town's cholera victims in 1853.

Greenwell was appointed canon at Durham Cathedral from 1854 to his death, and became known as Canon Greenwell. He was also chaplain and censor at Bishop Cosin's Hall from 1855-1863. From 1863 to 1908, Greenwell was librarian of Durham Cathedral, where he continued the work of cataloguing the holdings begun by Joseph Stevenson. Greenwell was president of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham from 1865 to his death, and vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle from 1890 until his death. In 1868, he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1870, later chairing the Durham ward petty sessions, and was elected an alderman in 1904.

He was awarded the Medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1898. He died, unmarried, at North Bailey, Durham, on 27 January 1918, and was buried at Lanchester.

Personal

Known in Durham as 'The Canon', he had a reputation for being bluff and plain-spoken. Greenwell was a Liberal in politics, and in religion a Tractarian who in later life retreated to more conservative high-churchmanship. His fishing and hunting skills developed in early childhood on the River Browney and he remained a keen angler to his ninety-eighth year. As an outdoorsman keen on angling and shooting, his sporting instincts made him naturally sympathetic to poachers. When a poacher was brought for trial in Durham both the police and the defendant, with differing motives, would inquire whether Greenwell would be on the bench. He is known as originator of "Greenwell's Glory", used in fly fishing.

In 2022, Kit Cawthorn, at Durham University, founded The William Greenwell Fly Fishing Society, named after The Canon. It is a "thriving, inclusive society".