Charles Harding Firth was born in 1857, and educated at Clifton College and Balliol, where he obtained a first in History. After lecturing at Firth College (later the University of Sheffield), he returned to Oxford, becoming Regius Professor of Modern History, from 1904 to 1925. An advocate for the use of original documents in teaching and research, he published numerous articles on ballads as historical sources and built up a large collection of sheets dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. As well as the ballads, Firth also collected a magnificent personal library comprising works on history, English language and literature, early printed texts and bibliography. Many of these books as well as manuscripts and further ballads are now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Charles Harding Firth died in 1936.