John Allen Giles
[1] The son of William Giles and his wife Sophia, née Allen, he was born on 26 October 1808 at Southwick House, in the parish of Mark, Somerset.
[2] After a few years Giles became curate of Bampton, Oxfordshire, where he continued taking pupils, and edited and wrote a great number of books.
Samuel Wilberforce as bishop of Oxford, required him, on pain of losing his curacy, to suppress this work, and break off with another literary undertaking.
[2] In September 1846 Giles secured an introduction to André-Marie Ampère from Sainte-Beuve, and subsequently contributed amongst other works six volumes of Bede to Jacques Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina.
On 6 March 1855 Giles was tried at the Oxford spring assizes before Lord Campbell, on the charges of having entered in the marriage register book of Bampton parish church a marriage under date 3 October 1854, which took place on the 5th, having himself performed the ceremony out of canonical hours, soon after 6 a.m.; of having falsely entered that it was performed by license; and of having forged the mark of a witness who was not present.
He pleaded not guilty, but it was clear that he had committed the offence to cover the pregnancy of one of his servants, whom he married to her lover, Richard Pratt, a shoemaker's apprentice.
He did not resume clerical work until he was presented in 1867 to the living of Sutton, Surrey, which he held for seventeen years, until his death on 24 September 1884.
[2] Between 1837 and 1843 Giles published the Patres Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ, a series of thirty-four volumes, containing the works of Aldhelm, Bæda, Boniface, Lanfranc, Archbishop Thomas, John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Gilbert Foliot, and other authors.
[2] Giles contributed to Bohn's Antiquarian Library translations of Matthew Paris (1847), Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (1849), and other works.
While at Bampton, in 1850 he published Hebrew Records on the age and authenticity of the books of the Old Testament, and in 1854 Christian Records on the Age, Authorship, and Authenticity of the Books of the New Testament, in which he contended, in a preface dated 26 October 1853, that the "Gospels and Acts were not in existence before the year 150", and remarks that "the objections of ancient philosophers, Celsus, Porphyry, and others, were drowned in the tide of orthodox resentment" (see Letters of the Bishop of Oxford and Dr. J.
[9][10]In 1853 he began to work on a series called Dr. Giles's Juvenile Library, which went on appearing from time to time until 1860, and comprised a large number of school-books, First Lessons on English, Scottish, Irish, French, and Indian history, on geography, astronomy, arithmetic, &c. He contributed Poetic Treasures to Moxon's Popular Poets in 1881.
1860, he also created versions of Greek and Latin classics presented in an interlinear style, apparently based on a pedagogical approach advocated by James Hamilton (1769–1829).
