Canon Charles Wilmer Foster, FSA, FRHistS (1866–1935) was an English clergyman, antiquarian, historian and archivist.
[1][4] After studying at the Leeds Clergy School,[1] he was ordained a priest and appointed to a curacy at St Michael's, Coventry, in 1889.
[7] After his appointment as vicar of Timberland, Foster began a project to preserve, sort and list the records of the diocese and cathedral of Lincoln.
[8] Foster's work involved editing documents about the church in 16th- and 17th-century Lincolnshire, and also the county and diocese's medieval records, the latter of which became his focus in the 1920s.
What followed was a careful and scholarly series of editions of these documents, three volumes of which were published before he died, and a further seven were continued thereafter by Kathleen Major, all under the title Registrum Antiquissimum, the name given to a 13th-century cartulary in the collection.
Foster also published genealogical records; he continued to produce his calendar of Lincolnshire wills, and wrote a history of Aisthorpe and Thorpe-in-the-Fallows.
But it should also be remembered that he saved innumerable documents from destruction or decay ... through him the records which illustrate [Lincolnshire's] past have become part of the fabric of English history".