Skeat, WALTER WILLIAM, a learned Early English scholar, was born in London, November 21, 1835, and educated at King's College School and Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating as fourteenth wrangler in 1858. He became Fellow of his college in 1860, and four years later Mathematical Lecturer there; filled for some time curacies at East Dereham and Godalming; in 1878 was elected the first Elrington and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, and re-elected to a Christ's College fellowship in 1883. He was the first director of the Dialect Society (established 1873), and he has contributed, by his exhaustive labours on Langland and Chaucer, and innumerable editions of Early English works, more than any scholar of his time to a sound knowledge of Middle English and English philology generally.
His most important books are the following: Piers Plowman, in its three texts (5 parts, 1867-85; re-issued by the Clarendon Press, 2 vols. 1886); The Lay of Havelok the Dane (1868); Barbour's Bruce (3 parts, 1870-77); Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (1872), &c., all edited for the Early English Text Society; an edition of Chatterton's Poems (2 vols. 1875); Chaucer's Minor Poems (1888); school editions, for the Clarendon Press series, of several of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a portion of Piers Plowman, and two volumes of Specimens of earlier English literature; the Kingis Quair (1884), for the Scottish Text Society; A Mæso-Gothic Glossary (1868); his great Etymological English Dictionary (1882), and its admirable abridgment, the Concise Etymological Dictionary (1882); and Principles of English Etymology (1887-91); his great edition of Chaucer (6 vols., Clar. Press, 1894-95) and his Student's Chaucer (1898); and A Student's Pastime (1896). See his own bibliography of fifty-two works in Notes and Queries, September 1892.