Charles Parkin

Charles Parkin (1689–1765) was an English clergyman and antiquary.

Life

The son of William Parkin of London, he was born on 11 January 1689, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He went in 1708 to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and graduated B.A. 1711, M.A. 1717.^[1] Entering holy orders, he became rector of Oxburgh, Norfolk, in 1717.

Parkin died on 27 August 1765, and by his will (dated 17 June 1759) bequeathed money to his old college for the foundation of exhibitions to be held by scholars from Merchant Taylors' and from the free school at Bowes, Yorkshire, which had been founded by his uncle, William Hutchinson of Clement's Inn.

Works

He assisted Francis Blomefield, the Norfolk county historian, in describing his own and the adjoining parishes. After the death of Blomefield in 1752, who was about halfway through his third volume, Parkin undertook the completion of his unfinished History of Norfolk, and the fourth and fifth volumes of that work (in the original folio edition of five volumes, completed in 1775) are described as from his pen. According to Craven Ord, however, the last sheets were finished by a bookseller's hack, employed by Whittingham of Lynn.

Parkin also wrote:

• ‘An Answer to, or Remarks upon, Dr. Stukeley's “Origines Roystonianæ,”’ London, 1744. He engaged in a controversy with William Stukeley over the antiquity and imagery of the cell at Royston, then recently discovered.
• ‘A Reply to the … Objections brought by Dr. Stukeley,’ Norwich, 1748.
• ‘The Topography of Freebridge Hundred and Half in Norfolk, containing the History and Antiquities of the Borough of King's Lynn, and of the Towns, Villages, and Religious Buildings in that Hundred and Half … also an account … of all Rectories and Vicarages,’ London, 1762, (reprinted from vol. iv. of Blomefield and Parkin's ‘History of Norfolk’).

References

•  "Parkin, Charles". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 

Notes

1. ^ Parkin, Charles in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Parkin, Charles". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.