Education and a brief legal career
Rigg was born at Brentford on 28 September 1855. His father, James Harrison Rigg, was a Wesleyan minister and educationalist; his mother was Caroline Smith. He attended the City of London School and then St John’s College, Oxford. The university’s alumni register records his matriculation in October 1874 and his scholarship at the college.
He trained at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar on 17 November 1881. Joseph Foster’s contemporary Men-at-the-Bar also lists him as an editor of the Bankruptcy Act of 1883. Legal practice did not become his lasting occupation: he turned instead to writing and the study of historical documents.
Biography and documentary history
Beginning in 1885, Rigg contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, writing more than six hundred entries, many concerning judges and other legal figures. He also wrote St Anselm of Canterbury and edited Sir Thomas More’s translation of the life of Pico della Mirandola. His range extended from intellectual biography to the records of institutions.
His editions of medieval Jewish legal records included Select Pleas, Starrs, and Other Records from the Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, published for the Selden Society in 1902, and volumes of the Calendar of the Plea Rolls in 1905 and 1910.
Translating Boccaccio
Rigg’s English Decameron appeared in 1903. In his introduction he criticises John Payne’s earlier version as too archaic and stilted to convey Boccaccio’s vigour. He explains his own aim as a balance between archaic and modern English, seeking freedom and animation alongside substantial accuracy.
