Sir Charles Harding Firth FBA (16 March 1857 – 19 February 1936) was a British historian.
[1] Esmond de Beer wrote that Firth "knew the men and women of the seventeenth century much as a man knows his friends and acquaintances, not only as characters but also in the whole moral and intellectual world in which they lived.
Firth was a great friend and ally of T. F. Tout, who was professionalising the History undergraduate programme at Manchester University, especially by introducing a key element of individual study of original sources and production of a thesis.
Firth's attempts to do likewise at Oxford brought him into bitter conflict with the college fellows, who had little research expertise of their own and saw no reason why their undergraduates should be made to acquire such arcane, even artisan, skills, given their likely careers.
They saw Firth as a power-seeker for the university professoriate as against the role of the colleges as proven finishing-schools for the country and empire's future establishment.