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Henry Englefield

British antiquarian

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ5720855
Source-derived summary

Sir Henry Charles Englefield, 7th Baronet FRS FRSE FSA FLS (1752 – 21 March 1822) was an English antiquary and astronomer.

Life

He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Englefield, 6th Baronet (d. 1780) and his second wife, Catherine, daughter of Sir Charles Buck, 3rd Baronet. His father, who was the son of Henry Englefield, of Whiteknights Park at Earley near Reading, had in 1728 succeeded to the title and the Engelfield estates at Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, so that he inherited both Whiteknights and Wootton Bassett on the death of his father, 25 May 1780. They were descended from the Englefield family of Englefield House in Berkshire.

In 1778 aged 26 Englefield was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. For many years he was vice-president of the latter, and succeeded George Townshend, Earl of Leicester as president. Owing, however, to his being a Catholic, objection was taken to his re-election; another factor was his opposition to the 1797 election to the Society of the architect James Wyatt. He was replaced by the Earl of Aberdeen. Under his direction the society produced between 1797 and 1813 a series of engravings of English cathedrals, to which he contributed dissertations on Durham, Gloucester, and Exeter.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Henry Englefield” as british antiquarian. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1752, 1822, 1780, 1728—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1752-01-01. The account is most persuasive where Henry, Englefield and British can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as british antiquarian. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5720855. VIAF identifies the subject as 37121435. The Library of Congress control number is n87916095. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1752, 1822, 1780 and 1728.

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The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Henry Englefield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.