William Searle Holdsworth

Sir William Searle Holdsworth OM KC FBA (7 May 1871 – 2 January 1944), was Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University and a legal historian, amongst whose works is the 17 volume History of English Law.

Holdsworth was born in Beckenham, Kent in 1871, the son of a well-known London solicitor, Charles Joseph Holdsworth and his wife Ellen Caroline (née Searle). He was educated at Dulwich College and in 1890 went on to win a History Exhibition from Dulwich College to New College, Oxford. He took first-class honours both in History and in Law, and second class honours in the BCL. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1896.

Holdsworth's main work, with a first edition of the first book in 1903, was A History of English Law, gradually expanded to cover everything from Ancient Britain to 1875 over his career. Holdsworth became Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London (1903 to 1908). In 1922 he became the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford. In Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1928, repr. 1972), a book version of Holdsworth's Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School, he argued that historians should pay closer attention to the novels of Charles Dickens as source material about the workings of English law and legal institutions; it contains a thoughtful and sensitive analysis of Dickens's novel Bleak House as an illuminating examination of the Chancery system. In Some Makers of English Law (Cambridge University Press, 1938), reprinting the Tagore Lectures delivered in 1937–1938 at Calcutta University, Holdsworth offered an overview of the history of English law through biographical studies of key figures in that history. Holdsworth was knighted in 1929 and was appointed as a member of the Order of Merit in 1943. He died in 1944. There are portraits of Sir William Holdsworth by Bassano in the National Portrait Gallery, and his portrait in pastels by E. Plachter can be seen in the Holdsworth Room of St John's College, Oxford.

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