Charles Frost (antiquary)

Charles Frost (1781?–1862) was an English lawyer and antiquary.

Life

Born at Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, in 1781 or 1782, he was the son of Thomas Frost, a Hull solicitor He followed the same profession, and, as his father had been before him, was solicitor to the Hull Dock Company. He was elder brother to the writer and traveller Elizabeth Strutt.

Frost died at Hull, 5 September 1862, aged 80 or 81.

Works

Frost studied the handwriting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and on 2 May 1822 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 1827 he published by subscription Notices relative to the Early History of the Town and Port of Hull; .. with illustrations by Bartholomew Howlett. In it he claimed to show that the town commonly attributed to have been founded by Edward I (John Leland, William Camden and others), was expanded from an earlier habitation on the same site, named Wyke, which was separate from the place known as Myton to the west. The work was the subject of a long and flattering critique by Nicholas Harris Nicolas in the Retrospective Review for December 1827.

Another publication, also of local value, was his 'Address,’ 1831, delivered to the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society at the opening of the seventh session on 5 November 1830, in which he mentions various literary societies which had been promoted in the town during the preceding half-century, and gives brief biographical notices of most of the Hull author.