Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

Arthur Charles Fox-Davies (28 February 1871 – 19 May 1928) was a British expert on heraldry. His Complete Guide to Heraldry, published in 1909, has become a standard work on heraldry in England. A barrister by profession, Fox-Davies worked on several notable cases involving the peerage, and also worked as a journalist and novelist.

Biography

Arthur Charles Davies (known as Charlie) was born in Bristol, the second son of Thomas Edmond Davies (1839–1908) and his wife Maria Jane Fox, the daughter and co-heiress of alderman John Fox, JP. Fox-Davies was brought up from the early 1880s at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, where his father worked for the Coalbrookdale Iron Company and had a house called "Paradise" which became his home in much of his adult life; his grandfather, Charles Davies of Cardigan in Wales, had been an ironmonger. He added his mother's maiden name to his own by deed poll on his nineteenth birthday in 1890, thereby changing his surname from Davies to Fox-Davies. In 1894, his father took the same course for himself and the rest of the family.

Fox-Davies attended Ackworth School in Yorkshire, but was expelled in 1884 at the age of fourteen, after hitting one of the schoolmasters. He received no further formal education, but was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1901 and called to the bar in 1906. As a barrister, he practised on the South Eastern Circuit, at the Old Bailey, and at the Surrey and South London Sessions. He also prepared printed cases for peerage cases in the House of Lords.