J. A. (John Allen) Giles

Born in Somerset in 1808, John Allen Giles was an English historian, clergyman, and teacher with a strong reputation as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and early English history. He studied at Charterhouse and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he later became a fellow.

Giles is chiefly remembered for editing and translating important historical works, including versions of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His writing and editorial work aimed to make difficult older texts more accessible to nineteenth-century readers, and he also wrote on educational, antiquarian, and ecclesiastical subjects.

He also served as headmaster of the City of London School in the late 1830s. Giles died in 1884, but his name remains closely tied to the study of early Britain and to the Victorian effort to recover and republish foundational English historical sources.