[2] Born in London, he was a pupil of St. Olave's Grammar School, still then at Southwark, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and a fellow of Pembroke, but failing to obtain permanent fellowships at All Souls (1879) and Lincoln, his first academic post was at St David's University College, Lampeter (now the University of Wales, Lampeter), where his job title was 'Professor of English and Modern Languages'.

While at Lampeter, Tout commenced his prolific production of articles for the Dictionary of National Biography,[3] including the entry on the theologian Rowland Williams.

His descendants have said that this famous outpouring of influential biographical ur-essays was due to no more than the sheer poverty of a young married academic needing cash for words.

Tout also had a flair for writing textbooks and he not only covered English medieval history but was also able to offer concise views of the Middle Ages on the Continent.

Tout introduced original research into the undergraduate programme, culminating in the production of a Final Year thesis based on primary sources.

[7] This horrified Oxbridge, where college tutors had little research capacity of their own and saw the undergraduate as an embryonic future gentleman, liberal connoisseur, widely read, and mainstay of country and empire in politics, commerce, army, land or church, not an apprentice to dusty, centuries-old archives, wherein no more than 1 in 100 could find even an innocuous career.

Tout's ally C. H. Firth fought a bitter campaign to persuade Oxford to follow Manchester and introduce scientific study of sources into the History programme, but failed; there was failure too, at Cambridge.

Other universities, however, followed Tout, and Oxbridge, but very slowly, had to face up to the fact, and fundamental changes to the selection of college fellows across all disciplines ensued.

In collaboration with Henry Guppy, librarian of the John Rylands Library, archival resources for medieval England were obtained so that they could be studied without travels to other parts of the country.