Thomas Frederick Tout (28 September 1855 – 23 October 1929) was a British historian of the medieval period. He was one of the founders of the Historical Association in 1906.
Early life
Born in London, he was a pupil of St Olave's Grammar School, still then at Southwark, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and a fellow of Pembroke, but failing to obtain permanent fellowships at All Souls (1879) and Lincoln, his first academic post was at St David's University College, Lampeter (now the University of Wales, Lampeter), where his job title was 'Professor of English and Modern Languages'.
While at Lampeter, Tout commenced his prolific production of articles for the Dictionary of National Biography, including the entry on the theologian Rowland Williams. He learned Welsh, wrote and lectured on Welsh history, and contributed many of the Welsh articles to the DNG, including some on modern as well as medieval figures. His descendants have said that this famous outpouring of influential biographical ur-essays was due to no more than the sheer poverty of a young married academic needing cash for words. However, this does not do justice either to the value of Tout's entries or to the role it played in his own development as a writer. Tout also had a flair for writing textbooks and he not only covered English medieval history but was also able to offer concise views of the Middle Ages on the Continent. Some of these texts had a very long life in the schools. It seems that the historical importance of the priceless Lampeter Tract Collection, mostly collected by members of the Bowdler family and held in the college's Founders' Library, was not fully recognised at Lampeter until T. F. Tout arrived at the college. With his friend, C. H. Firth, who was an external examiner for St David's for a number of years, Tout rescued the collection from neglect, arranging for seventy-two volumes to be rebound, rearranging the contents of some, and bringing together, for example, all the Civil War and Commonwealth newspapers scattered throughout the collection, into four volumes arranged in chronological order. Tout was the most distinguished member of the Lampeter staff at this time, and was soon styled professor of history.
Professor of History
In 1890, Tout left Lampeter and became professor of history at Owens College, Manchester (a constituent college of the Victoria University), where he stayed until 1925 (this changed to the University of Manchester in 1903). In 1894 he failed to gain the chair at Glasgow. Tout was, with James Tait, one of the two leading figures of the 'Manchester History School', and is best known for his 6-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, whose influence still remains and was for 40 years magisterial in the shaping of late medieval English History scholarship. Concentrating, through close study of the Crown's administrative records, on how changes of government-method reflected changes in the nature of power and politics, the work stood the test of 19th-century constitutional history and mid-20th-century socio-political emphasis with very few fundamental criticisms of Tout's methods and conclusions. Other works included The Political History of England, 1216–1377 (1905) and The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (1914), comprising the Ford Lectures at Oxford University in 1913. Tout published a heavily revised second edition in 1926. Tout was also prolific in writing short, sharp articles about the significance of particular documents he had found, most of which still stand up impressively. He was president of the Royal Historical Society from 1925 to 1929. He was a member of the Chetham Society, and served as a member of Council from 1907 to 1929.
Tout served from 1919 to 1921 as the first chairman of the Central Organisation of Military Education Committees of the Universities and University Colleges, what is now the Council of Military Education Committees of the Universities of the United Kingdom (COMEC).