Philip Grierson

His father was a land surveyor and member of the Irish Land Commission who, after losing his job in 1906, ran a small farm at Clondalkin, near Dublin.

There he gained a reputation for financial acumen, and was appointed to the boards of a number of companies.

Grierson's father also built up an important collection of freshwater Snails, which now resides at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

Grierson was educated at Marlborough College, where he specialised in natural sciences.

Philip Grierson, (15 November 1910 – 15 January 2006) was a British historian and numismatist.

He was Professor of Numismatics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College for over seventy years.

During his long and extremely prolific academic career, he built the world's foremost representative collection of medieval coins, wrote very extensively on the subject, brought it to much wider attention in the historical community and filled important curatorial and teaching posts in Cambridge, Brussels and Washington DC.

Grierson was born in Dublin to Philip Henry Grierson and Roberta Ellen Jane Grierson.

He had two sisters, Janet Grierson and Aileen Grierson.

As a result, he was admitted to read medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1929.

Almost immediately, he switched to history, and was to remain with the latter subject for the rest of his life.

However, his early interest in the sciences left him with a sound knowledge of the methods and principles of metallurgy, mathematics, statistics and much more besides that would prove valuable in later years.

Grierson's performance as a student was exceptional.

Graduating with a double first, he took the Lightfoot Scholarship from the university and also won the Schuldham Plate, his college's highest academic accolade for students.

He began post-graduate studies in 1932 on the subject of Carolingian history, and his first publications were to be on the ecclesiastical history of the Early Middle Ages.

After being offered a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1934, he saw no need to submit his PhD research; he received an honorary PhD from the university in 1971.

Grierson also had teaching responsibilities within the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, which appointed him assistant lecturer in 1938 and full lecturer in 1945.

Grierson went on to hold a number of important posts in college: he was college librarian from 1944 to 1969, and president (second in line to the master) from 1966 to 1976.

He remained an active member of the fellowship, and was present at the interview for the master who would be sworn in shortly after Grierson's own death.

Outside of university, he served as director of the Royal Historical Society (1945–1955), and president of the Royal Numismatic Society (1961–1966).

Grierson's academic career eventually spread beyond Cambridge when, in 1947, he was invited to take up the vacant, part-time chair of numismatics at Brussels, which he held in addition to his Cambridge posts until his retirement in 1981.

Grierson spent parts of the Easter and Christmas vacation in Brussels every year, along with more occasional visits.

For many years already Grierson's interests had encompassed the medieval Low Countries, and he had a number of friends in Belgium, not least the great Carolingian scholar François-Louis Ganshof.

He was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA) in 1949, and as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1958.

He was also a member of the Italian Numismatic Society.

Grierson's growing interest in numismatics soon brought him into contact with the coin room at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and he was appointed Honorary Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals in 1949, and served as a syndic of the museum until 1958.

Under his influence, the department of coins and medals in the Fitzwilliam became one of the most active and productive research departments in the museum.

It contains a room named in his honour, which houses Philip's collection.

He remained an almost daily visitor to the coin room, adding new specimens to his collection and meeting visitors, until very shortly before his death.

Work in the United States began in 1953, when Grierson was one of the founding instructors at the American Numismatic Society's annual summer school.

He returned the following year, and in 1955 was invited to become honorary adviser and curator at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington DC, managed by the trustees of Harvard University.

He gave the Ford Lectures at Oxford during the 1956/57 academic year.

He was awarded the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1958.

He became reader in numismatics in 1959, and made Professor of Numismatics in 1971.

He came to share and later lead teaching on the general introduction to European history, running through the history of continental Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century.

The following Keeper of Coins and Medals, Dr Mark Blackburn, first came to the department in 1982 as part of the Medieval European Coinage project to publish Philip's burgeoning collection.

It was pure chance that first drew Grierson's attention to numismatics.

His brief was to use the centre's considerable resources to build up the world's finest collection of Byzantine coinage and publish it – a task which, by the time he left the post in 1997, he had completed admirably (despite once accidentally dropping a tray of gold coins down a lift shaft).

The Catalogue of Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection remains the standard reference work for Byzantine coinage.

At the height of his productivity, therefore, Grierson would spend the Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms each year in Cambridge, Christmas and Easter in Brussels and two months of the summer vacation in Washington and at Cornell University.