I enclose Dr.
Grierson’s obit from the Manchester Guardian.
Follibus Fanaticus
Neil McKendrick
Wednesday January 18, 2006
The Guardian
Professor Philip
Grierson, who has died aged 95, was that very
rare combination - a world-class collector and a world-class scholar of coins. With
his death, the
Fitzwilliam Museum has lost one of its leading benefactors and Gonville and
Caius College,
Cambridge, has lost one of the last surviving
ornaments of the great and dying tradition of the bachelor fellow resident in college.
Grierson was born in Dublin, where
his surveyor father was a member of the Irish land commission. Philip was educated at
Marlborough college, Wiltshire, went to
Cambridge in 1929 and stayed for the rest of
his life. At
Caius, he was, in turn, junior fellow, college lecturer and director of studies in
history, librarian, professorial fellow, president, life fellow and, finally,
senior fellow.
From
his austere set of rooms overlooking the market place, into which he moved in the mid-1930s, he produced an unrivalled flow of numismatic scholarship and entertained more undergraduates than almost any other member of
his college. Scholars revered him for
his learning and research; colleagues liked him for
his encyclopaedic knowledge and sense of fun; and students, who were in awe of
his longevity and
his academic reputation, loved him because he shared their taste in food, films,
music and literature.
Pizza, puddings and sausages were the kind of food he liked; populist films were
his favourite fare; science fiction was
his preferred literary diet. A
library of more than 2,000 videos attracted an endless stream of students to
his rooms;
his liking for horror films almost equalled
his liking for science fiction.
He played squash well into
his 80s and finally gave up so as not to hurt the feelings of the soundly beaten undergraduates, some 60 years
his junior.
Yet this was the
man who formed the finest representative
collection of
medieval European coins in the world, some 20,000 specimens, which he has bequeathed to the
Fitzwilliam. Estimates of their value vary but "between £5m and £10m" was Grierson's own, formed by prudent
buying over 60 years, essentially from
his salary as a university teacher.
His collection had a decisive effect on the direction of
his research. He went up to
Caius destined to read medicine, but immediately switched to
history and did so well that he was awarded the Schuldham Plate, which is given to the leading college graduand chosen from all subjects. Although
his earliest research
had, rather surprisingly, been on ecclesiastical
history and he
had won the
Lightfoot prize in theology,
his work soon began to move decisively towards the use of coins as a major historical source.
Indeed,
his academic reputation as a
medieval historian rests on coins and their interpretation. He showed historians how little they understood of this fundamental historical source, and equally showed numismatists how little they knew of the world from which their coins have come. If
his contribution to
history has been large,
his contribution to
numismatics has been unique...However, since non-numismatists tend to disparage such
collections as no more than a higher form of stamp collecting, it is worth pointing out how important the evidence provided by the coinage of past societies can be in the
hands of a master.
A single example might suffice to underline Grierson's inspired use of numismatic evidence dramatically to resolve a major historical controversy. This was that which raged over the historian Henri Pirenne's long-standing explanation of the survival of
gold coinage in the
west until the early 9th century and its replacement by silver for the next 500 years. For Pirenne, the disappearance of gold was the last
act of the decline of
Rome in the
west, and its cause was the depredations of Islam. In 1960,
Grierson published a recondite article on the monetary reforms of Caliph Abd al Malik and their financial consequences, which showed that they included a decisive shift in the relative value of silver and gold in the
Islamic world, bringing about the flight of silver to the
west and gold to the east. In doing so, he illuminated a major factor in the rise of monometallism that endured for five centuries in western Christendom.
Such
work demanded a
rare combination of skills involving mathematics, statistics, metallurgical analysis and an enviable range of languages and detailed historical knowledge. He never married.
· Philip
Grierson,
numismatist and academic, born November 15 1910; died January 15 2006
