Philip Grierson

Philip Grierson, FBA (15 November 1910 – 15 January 2006) was a British historian and numismatist, emeritus professor of numismatics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College for over seventy years. During his long and extremely prolific academic career, he built the world's foremost representative collection of medieval coins, wrote very extensively on the subject, brought it to much wider attention in the historical community and filled important curatorial and teaching posts in Cambridge, Brussels and Washington DC.

Grierson was born in Dublin to Philip Henry Grierson and Roberta Ellen Jane Grierson. He had two sisters, Janet Grierson and Aileen Grierson . His father was a land surveyor and member of the Irish Land Commission who, after losing his job in 1906, ran a small farm at Clondalkin, near Dublin. There he gained a reputation for financial acumen, and was appointed to the boards of a number of companies. Grierson's father also built up an important collection of freshwater snails, which now resides at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

Grierson was educated at Marlborough College, where he specialised in natural sciences. As a result, he was admitted to read medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1929. Almost immediately, he switched to history, and was to remain with the latter subject for the rest of his life. However, his early interest in the sciences left him with a sound knowledge of the methods and principles of metallurgy, mathematics, statistics and much more besides that would prove valuable in later years.

Grierson's performance as a student was exceptional. Graduating with a double first, he took the Lightfoot Scholarship from the university and also won the Schuldham Plate, his college's highest academic accolade for students. He began graduate studies in 1932 on the subject of Carolingian history, and his first publications were to be on the ecclesiastical history of the early Middle Ages.

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