Benjamin Seebohm was a wool merchant at Horton Grange, Bradford, the family having moved to England from Waldeck-Pyrmont in Germany.
[1] Frederic was the great-grandson of philanthropist and Quaker William Tuke, and the younger brother of steel manufacturer and ornithologist Henry Seebohm (1832-1895).
Before this work, the prevailing view held that primitive Anglo-Saxon society consisted of communal groups of freemen holding land in common ("the Mark").
However, due to continual aggression from native and foreign leaders, the village community was held to have degenerated over time into a more hierarchical social structure ("the Manor"), in which the tenants, originally free, became serfs.
In 1891, their daughter Juliet married renowned surgeon Sir Rickman Godlee, himself a Quaker and the son of a Middle Temple barrister.