Lapsley, Gaillard Thomas (1871-1949), American constitutional historian

G. T. Lapsley was born in New York in 1871 and originally studied law, graduating from Harvard in 1893. He became an authority on medieval constitutional history and was elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1904. He was successively Lecturer, Tutor and Reader until 1937, when ill-health and the advent of war prompted his return to the United States. He died there in 1949. Although The County Palatine of Durham, published in 1900, was his only book, a selection of his articles was published posthumously in a volume entitled Crown, Community and Parliament in the Later Middle Ages. In addition to his interest in medieval history, Lapsley was widely read in English and French literature and a close friend of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and served as Wharton's literary executor.

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