John Aubrey (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697) was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He was a pioneer archaeologist, who recorded (often for the first time) numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England, and who is particularly noted for his systematic examination of the Avebury henge monument. The Aubrey holes at Stonehenge are named after him, although there is considerable doubt as to whether the holes that he observed are those that currently bear the name. He was also a pioneer folklorist, collecting together a miscellany of material on customs, traditions and beliefs under the title "Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme". He set out to compile county histories of both Wiltshire and Surrey, although both projects remained unfinished. His "Interpretation of Villare Anglicanum" (also unfinished) was the first attempt to compile a full-length study of English place-names. He had wider interests in applied mathematics and astronomy, and was friendly with many of the greatest scientists of the day.
Aubrey was the author of Brief Lives, a collection of short biographical pieces. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks largely to the popularity of Brief Lives, Aubrey was regarded as little more than an entertaining but quirky, eccentric and credulous gossip. Only in the 1970s did the full breadth and innovation of his scholarship begin to be more widely appreciated. He published little in his lifetime, and many of his most important manuscripts (for the most part preserved in the Bodleian Library) remain unpublished, or published only in partial form.
Early life
Aubrey was born at Easton Piers or Percy (now Easton Piercy), near Kington St Michael, Wiltshire, to a long-established and affluent gentry family with roots in the Welsh Marches.Fox 2008. His maternal grandfather, Isaac Lyte, lived at Lytes Cary Manor, Somerset, now owned by the National Trust. Richard Aubrey, his father, owned lands in Wiltshire and Herefordshire. For many years an only child, he was educated at home with a private tutor, he was "melancholy" in his solitude. His father was not intellectual, preferring field sports (hunting) to learning. Aubrey read such books as came his way, including Bacon's Essays, and studied geometry in secret.
Aubrey was educated at the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer. (Latimer had numbered the philosopher Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and Aubrey first met Hobbes, whose biography he would later write, at Latimer's house.) He then studied at the grammar school at Blandford Forum, Dorset.
Aubrey entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were interrupted by the English Civil War. His earliest antiquarian work dates from this period in Oxford. In 1646 he became a student of the Middle Temple. He spent a pleasant time at Trinity in 1647, making friends among his Oxford contemporaries, and collecting books. He spent much of his time in the country.
In 1649, Aubrey discovered the megalithic remains at Avebury, which he later mapped and discussed in his important antiquarian work Monumenta Britannica. He was to show Avebury to Charles II at the King's request in 1663. His father died in 1652, leaving Aubrey large estates, but with them some complicated debts.
Career
Aubrey said his memory was "not tenacious" by 17th-century standards but from the early 1640s he kept thorough (if haphazard) notes of observations in natural philosophy, his friends' ideas, and antiquities. He began to write "Lives" of scientists in the 1650s.
In 1659, Aubrey was recruited to contribute to a collaborative county history of Wiltshire, leading to his unfinished collections on the antiquities and the natural history of the county. His erstwhile friend and fellow-antiquary Anthony Wood predicted that he would one day break his neck while running downstairs in haste to interview some retreating guest or other. Aubrey was an apolitical Royalist, who enjoyed the innovations characteristic of the Interregnum period while deploring the rupture in traditions and the destruction of ancient buildings brought about by civil war and religious change. He drank the King's health in Interregnum Herefordshire, but with equal enthusiasm attended meetings in London of the republican Rota Club.
In 1663, Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society. He lost estate after estate due to lawsuits, until 1670 when he parted with his last piece of property and ancestral home, Easton Piers. By this time he was officially bankrupt. From this time he was dependent on the hospitality of his numerous friends; in particular, Sir James Long, 2nd Baronet, and his wife Lady Dorothy of Draycot House, Wiltshire.
In 1667, Aubrey had made the acquaintance of Anthony Wood at Oxford, and when Wood began to gather materials for his Athenae Oxonienses, Aubrey offered to collect information for him. From time to time he forwarded memoranda in a uniquely casual, epistolary style, and in 1680 he began to promise the work Minutes for Lives, which Wood was to use at his discretion.
Death
Aubrey died of an apoplexy while travelling, in June 1697, aged 71, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford.
Biographical methods
Aubrey approached the work of the biographer much as his contemporary scientists had begun to approach the work of empirical research by the assembly of vast museums and small collection cabinets. Collating as much information as he could, he left the task of verification largely to Wood, and thereafter to posterity. As a hanger-on in great houses, he had little time and little inclination for systematic work, and he wrote the "Lives" in the early morning while his hosts were sleeping off the effects of the night before. These texts were, as Aubrey entitled them, Schediasmata, "pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment". Time after time, he leaves marks of omission in the form of dashes and ellipses for dates and facts, inserting fresh information whenever it is presented to him. The margins of his notebooks are dotted with notes-to-self, most frequently the Latin "quaere". This exhortation, to "go and find out" is often followed. In his life of Thomas Harcourt, Aubrey notes that one Roydon, a brewer living in Southwark, was reputed to be in possession of Harcourt's petrified kidney: "I have seen it", he writes approvingly; "he much values it".
Aubrey himself valued the evidence of his own eyes above all, and he took great pains to ensure that, where possible, he noted not only the final resting places of people, but also of their portraits and papers. Though his work has frequently been accused of inaccuracy, this charge is misguided. In most cases, Aubrey simply wrote what he had seen, or heard. When transcribing hearsay, he displays a careful approach to the ascription of sources. For example, in his life of Thomas Chaloner (who, Aubrey notes, was himself fond of spreading rumours in the concourse of Westminster Hall, coming back after lunch to find them changed), he recorded an inaccurate and bawdy anecdote about Chaloner's death, but subsequently found it to be in fact about James Chaloner. Aubrey let the initial story stand in his text, while highlighting the error in a marginal note.
Works
Brief Lives
In 1680, Aubrey began work on his collection of biographical sketches, which he entitled "Schediasmata: Brief Lives". He presented them to Anthony Wood in 1681 but continued to work on them until 1693, when he deposited his manuscripts (in three folio volumes) in the Ashmolean Museum: they are now in the Bodleian Library, as MSS Aubrey 6–8.
As private, manuscript texts, the "Lives" were able to contain the richly controversial material which is their chief interest today, and Aubrey's chief contribution to the formation of modern biographical writing. When he allowed Anthony Wood to use the texts, however, he entered the caveat that much of the content of the Lives was "not fitt to be let flie abroad" while the subjects and the author were still living.
Aubrey's relationship with Wood was to become increasingly fraught. Aubrey asked Wood to be "my index expurgatorius": a reference to the Church's list of banned books, which Wood seems to have taken not as a warning, but as a licence to simply extract pages of notes to paste into his own proofs. In 1692, Aubrey complained bitterly that Wood had mutilated forty pages of his manuscript, perhaps for fear of a libel case. Wood was eventually prosecuted for insinuations against the judicial integrity of the school of Clarendon. One of the two statements called in question was founded on information provided by Aubrey and this may explain the estrangement between the two antiquaries and the ungrateful account that Wood gives of Aubrey's character. It is now famous: "a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased. And being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters sent to A. W. with folliries and misinformations, which would sometimes guid him into the paths of errour".The relationship between the two men is explored in Balme 2001.
A large part of the "Lives" was published in 1813 as Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. A near-complete transcript, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, Between the Years 1669 and 1696, was edited for the Clarendon Press in 1898 by the Rev. Andrew Clark. This remained the standard edition for scholarly use for many years, but (from a modern perspective) was flawed by the number of excisions Clark had made in the interests of "decency". In the 20th century, a number of more popular editions appeared, which often included the expurgated passages, but were in other respects far more selective: these included versions edited by John Collier (under the title The Scandal and Credulities of John Aubrey; 1931), Anthony Powell (1949), Oliver Lawson Dick (1949), Richard Barber (1975), and John Buchanan-Brown (2000; with an introduction by Michael Hunter). The most scholarly and complete edition, and now the standard edition for reference purposes, is Kate Bennett (ed.), Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers (2 volumes, Oxford, 2015), which was described on publication by Michael Hunter as "the edition we have been waiting for".Hunter 2015
The "Lives" present a number of difficult editorial problems as to what should be included or excluded, and how best to present the material.Bennett 2000. A controversial book for its time, "Lives" bluntly mocked the scandalous lives of eminent figures. For instance, Aubrey wrote of John Milton: "His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College." He wrote of William Butler: "The Dr. lying at the Savoy in London, next the water side where was a balcony look't into the Thames, a patient came to him that was grievously tormented with an ague. The Dr. orders a boat to be in readiness under his window, and discoursed with the patient (a gent) in the balcony, when on a signal given, 2 or 3 lusty fellows came behind the gent, and threw him a matter of 20 feet into the Thames. This surprise absolutely cured him." Of Ben Jonson: "He lies buried in the north aisle in the path of square stone … with this inscription only on him, in a pavement square of blue marble about 14" square; O RARE BEN JONSON." Of William Shakespeare: "His comedies will remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum [the ways of mankind]. Now our present writers reflect so much on particular persons and coxcombeities that twenty years hence they will not be understood." Aubrey also wrote of Francis Bacon that "he was a Pederast."Oliver Lawson Dick, ed. Aubrey's Brief Lives. Edited from the Original Manuscripts, 1949, s.v. "Francis Bacon, Viscount of St. Albans" p. 11.