John Aubrey

• 1. Introduction

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  John Aubrey was born on the 12th of March 1626 into a prosperous gentry family in Wiltshire, and he would spend much of his adult life in a state of cheerful, productive chaos. By the time he died in 1697, he had discovered one of England's most important prehistoric sites, mapped its stones, befriended the greatest minds of his age, and written hundreds of biographical sketches that no one was supposed to see. He published almost nothing. He finished almost nothing. He was officially bankrupt by the age of forty-four. And yet scholars would eventually recognise him as a pioneer in archaeology, folklore, biography, and the study of English place-names.

  How does a man who described his own memory as "not tenacious" leave such a durable mark? The answer lies somewhere in the gap between what Aubrey intended and what he actually produced: notebooks stuffed with dashes and ellipses, margins dotted with the Latin word "quaere" (meaning "go and find out"), and a habit of scribbling in the early morning while his aristocratic hosts slept off their evenings. His closest collaborator would later call him "a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed." Posterity has been considerably kinder.

• 2. The Making of a Wanderer

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  Easton Piers, in Wiltshire, was where Aubrey spent his earliest years as an only child, educated at home by a private tutor. He later described himself as "melancholy" in that solitude. His father preferred field sports to books, which drove Aubrey to study geometry in secret and to read whatever volumes came to hand, including Bacon's Essays.

  Formal schooling brought him to the grammar school at Malmesbury, where his teacher was Robert Latimer. Latimer had previously taught the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and it was at Latimer's house that Aubrey first met Hobbes, whose biography he would one day write. The encounter planted a seed. Aubrey moved on to the grammar school at Blandford Forum, then entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, only for the English Civil War to cut his studies short.

  The years that followed were formative in unexpected ways. In 1646 he became a student of the Middle Temple. He returned to Oxford in 1647 and collected books and friendships with equal enthusiasm. His father's death in 1652 left him large estates but also complicated debts, a combination that would haunt him for the rest of his life. By 1670, after losing estate after estate to lawsuits, he surrendered his last property, Easton Piers, the very place where he had been born, and was officially bankrupt.

• 3. Stones and Monuments

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  In 1649, while riding across the Wiltshire landscape, Aubrey came upon the megalithic remains at Avebury. It was a discovery he would spend decades trying to record properly. He eventually mapped and analysed the site in his principal archaeological collection, Monumenta Britannica. When Charles II wanted to see the monument in 1663, it was Aubrey he called upon to serve as guide.

  Monumenta Britannica took roughly thirty years to write, running from about 1663 to 1693. Aubrey divided it into four broad parts: a discussion of what he called "druidic" temples (primarily Avebury and Stonehenge); a survey of early towns, hillforts, and castles; a review of sepulchral monuments, roads, coins, and urns; and a set of more analytical essays. The final group included "Chronologia Architectonica", written in 1671, which attempted to trace the stylistic evolution of medieval architecture through time. Although it circulated only in manuscript, it is now regarded as a perceptive milestone in the history of architectural scholarship.

  Aubrey's name is also attached to Stonehenge, where a set of features bears the title "the Aubrey holes." There is, however, considerable doubt about whether the holes he originally observed are the ones that now carry his name. The Monumenta Britannica manuscript is held today in the Bodleian Library as MSS Top.Gen.c.24 and 25.

• 4. Brief Lives and Their Troubles

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  In 1680, Aubrey began formally assembling his collection of biographical sketches under the title "Schediasmata: Brief Lives." The word schediasmata was his own choice, meaning pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment. He presented them to the antiquary Anthony Wood in 1681, but kept adding to them until 1693, when he deposited three folio volumes in the Ashmolean Museum. They are now held in the Bodleian Library as MSS Aubrey 6-8.

  The Lives are startlingly vivid. Of John Milton, Aubrey noted: "His complexion exceeding faire - he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College." Of William Shakespeare, he wrote that his comedies would endure "as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum," the ways of mankind. He also wrote that Francis Bacon "was a Pederast," a line that caused considerable editorial anxiety in later centuries. A story about the physician William Butler describes a doctor who cured a patient of a fever by having several men hurl him from a balcony overlooking the Thames, "a matter of 20 feet," into the river, to the patient's apparent recovery.

  Aubrey's relationship with Wood grew toxic. Wood extracted and pasted pages of Aubrey's notes into his own proofs without permission. Aubrey complained in 1692 that Wood had mutilated forty pages of his manuscript. Wood was eventually prosecuted for libel, partly based on information Aubrey had supplied, and responded by describing Aubrey in memorably savage terms. The estrangement between them was never repaired. When Wood's Athenae Oxonienses finally appeared, the acknowledgment Aubrey received was the insult now quoted in nearly every account of his life.

• 5. Folklore and Place-Names

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  Aubrey's interests stretched well beyond archaeology and biography. Between 1687 and 1689 he wrote up years of accumulated notes on customs, traditions, old wives' tales, and rhymes into a collection he called Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme. It is now regarded as a foundational text in folklore studies, though the manuscript ended up outside the Bodleian: it passed into the hands of White Kennett and is now held in the British Library as Lansdowne MS 231. An edition appeared through the Folklore Society in 1881, and a more satisfactory re-editing followed in 1972.

  Aubrey also produced the Interpretation of Villare Anglicanum, whose preface is dated the 31st of October 1687. It was the first work in English dedicated entirely to the study of place-names. Aubrey compiled a list of some 5,000 names, though he managed to supply derivations for only a proportion of them. The scholar Gillian Fellows-Jensen later observed that the work was not so much unfinished as "hardly begun." Some of Aubrey's derivations are correct; others, as the source notes, are wildly wrong. The manuscript survives as Bodleian MS Aubrey 5.

  The only work Aubrey published in his own lifetime was the Miscellanies, which appeared in 1696. It gathered twenty-one short chapters on topics ranging from omens and prophecies to angelic visitation and second sight. Whatever Aubrey's personal beliefs, the Miscellanies reinforced the impression held by many readers that he was a credulous eccentric, an image his Brief Lives had already done much to encourage.

• 6. How He Actually Worked

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  Aubrey himself described the method behind Brief Lives with unusual candour. He compared his approach to that of contemporary scientists who assembled their knowledge through the patient accumulation of specimens in museums and collection cabinets. He gathered everything he could and left the sorting and verification to others, principally to Wood, and ultimately to whoever came after.

  He wrote in stolen moments, frequently in the early mornings at the houses of friends while his hosts were still sleeping. The manuscripts show it. Dashes and ellipses mark the places where dates and names eluded him. The margin note "quaere" appears repeatedly, a reminder to himself to chase down a fact he did not yet have. When he did track something down, he added it, regardless of where it fell on the page.

  This approach makes the charge of inaccuracy against Aubrey somewhat unfair. When he transcribed hearsay, he was careful to attribute his sources. A story about Thomas Chaloner's death turned out, on investigation, to belong to James Chaloner instead. Aubrey let the original anecdote stand in the text, but flagged the error in a marginal note. He also tracked down portraits, papers, and burial places, treating physical evidence as seriously as testimony. In his life of Thomas Harcourt he noted that he had personally seen the petrified kidney of the deceased, preserved by a brewer named Roydon in Southwark, and confirmed that Roydon "much values it."

• 7. Reputation and Recovery

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  For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Aubrey's reputation rested almost entirely on Brief Lives, and on a narrow reading of that work. He was seen as a charming gossip, colourful and unreliable, better suited to after-dinner conversation than serious scholarship. Only in the 1970s did the full range of his contributions begin to receive proper attention.

  The editorial history of Brief Lives reflects those shifting attitudes. A partial publication appeared in 1813. Andrew Clark edited a near-complete transcript for the Clarendon Press in 1898, though Clark quietly cut passages he considered indecent. Through the twentieth century, a series of more popular editions restored some of the excised material, including versions edited by John Collier (1931), Anthony Powell (1949), Oliver Lawson Dick (1949), Richard Barber (1975), and John Buchanan-Brown (2000). The definitive scholarly edition came from Kate Bennett in 2015, published in two volumes by Oxford, and described at the time by Michael Hunter as "the edition we have been waiting for."

  Beyond the page, Aubrey's reach has extended into theatre, radio, and television. In 1967, the director Patrick Garland created a one-man show based on Dick's edition, starring Roy Dotrice. That production became what the source describes as the most successful one-man show ever seen, with Dotrice giving over 1800 performances across forty years on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2008, a five-part Radio 4 drama by writer Nick Warburton wove Aubrey's biographical sketches together with the story of his fractious friendship with Anthony Wood. Ruth Scurr's 2015 book, John Aubrey: My Own Life, constructed a semi-fictional diary drawing directly on Aubrey's scattered surviving writings. Aubrey even appears in a 1978 Doctor Who serial, where the Fourth Doctor jokes that Druidism was founded by Aubrey in the seventeenth century as a joke, adding: "He had a great sense of humour, John Aubrey."