reading

All lives, even the long-lived, are brief when measured against the march of time. John Aubrey (1626–97) congratulated himself on coming from ‘a longaevous race’.^fn1 His mother and three of his four grandparents lived well into old age and told him treasured tales of the olden days. Aubrey’s maternal grandfather still wore an Elizabethan doublet and hose and remembered seeing Sir Philip Sidney composing poetry on horseback on Salisbury Plain. From childhood, Aubrey felt himself inclined to antiquities, or the collection of facts and artifacts that would otherwise be lost to ‘the teeth of time’.^fn2 He believed that antiquaries, like poets, are born and not made: some people, in every generation, are naturally drawn towards treasuring the past and salvaging what they can of it for posterity.

Aubrey’s life coincided with the most tumultuous social and constitutional crises England has experienced yet. He was born a gentleman in Wiltshire. He lived through England’s Civil War, which began in 1642 while he was a student at Oxford. He was twenty-two when Charles I was executed. He saw Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, and Richard Cromwell’s brief succession. He witnessed the Restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II, who lost his throne in 1688, and the Glorious Revolution that replaced him with William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II. Aubrey died in 1697, ten years before England and Scotland joined their parliaments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Aubrey was seventy-one when he died: a decent age to have reached in the 17th century and today. Like all of us fortunate not to be taken in youth, he became more concerned about the brevity of life as he aged. He began ‘to consider that we are all mortal men, and that we must not lose TIME’.^fn3 He noticed that ‘my candle burns low’ and feared that ‘heartbreaking cares will shorten my life’. To his friend and literary collaborator Anthony Wood he wrote, ‘God blesse you & me in this in-&-out-world’.^fn4

The story of the collaboration between Aubrey and Wood is at the heart of Brief Lives. They first met in Oxford in 1667 when Aubrey was browsing books on a bookseller’s stand outside All Souls College. He came across William Fulman’s history of Oxford University, Notitia Academiae Oxoniensis (1665), and was mistakenly told the author was Anthony Wood who could be found in Merton College. Aubrey sought Wood out and they talked about their shared passion for antiquities in the Meremaid Tavern. Wood was six years younger than Aubrey, but both had witnessed the destruction of war-torn England: the old buildings, monuments and manuscripts wantonly destroyed by Puritan fanatics. Aubrey offered to help Wood collect information for the book he had been researching for the last six years on the history of Oxford. Until Wood’s death in 1695, aged sixty-two, they exchanged letters, manuscripts, books and a wealth of biographical information about their contemporaries and predecessors. Wood would send Aubrey lists of Wikipedia-type questions: Where was so-and-so born? When did he die? Where is he buried? What books and pamphlets did he write? And Aubrey would find the answers.

United by their love of antiquities, Aubrey and Wood were very different men. Aubrey had a genius for friendship and a vast circle of acquaintance which included wealthy patrons, like the Pembroke family; early founders of the Royal Society, like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle; distinguished writers, painters, architects, statesmen, politicians, lawyers, bishops, booksellers, tradesmen, shopkeepers etc. Aubrey seems to have had the ability to make friends with anyone and everyone. Wood, in contrast, was irascible and reclusive; he seldom left Oxford. He fell out even with his closest relatives, even with Aubrey. And yet their friendship endured for three decades. Wood brooding and obsessively working at the centre of the city of learning represented something of irreplaceable value to Aubrey: a still point in this fleeting world. Aubrey saw Wood as a ‘candid historian’, to whom worldly fripperies – money, sex, power – meant nothing, whose only concern was the truth.^fn5

Aubrey modestly hoped that the help he was giving Wood would earn him an acknowledgement in print and in this way his name would live on after his death ‘like an unprofitable elder or ewe-tree on some noble structure’.^fn6 Fortunately for Aubrey and for us he began another project, in tandem with the work he was doing for Wood, which grew into a noble structure of his own: the paper monument that is Brief Lives. Aubrey had long been interested in biography when he was asked to write the life of his fellow Wiltshire-man, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose views on religion and state power were perilous in times of constitutional change. Hobbes had good reason to fear that accounts of his life would be censored and distorted, so he asked good-natured Aubrey, whom he had first met aged eight, to help him. Aubrey, out of friendship and admiration for the older man, agreed. He fulfilled his promise in 1680 after Hobbes’s death. ‘My hand now being-in’ for this kind of writing, he decided, while smoking a pipe of tobacco in his chamber one Sunday afternoon, to scribble a page or two on some other eminent men. Before long he had made an index of fifty-five Lives, but the list of those he wanted to include kept growing. He wrote to Wood, ‘I fancy myselfe all along discourseing with you; alledgeing those of my relations and acquaintance (as either you know or have heard of), so that you make me to renew my acquaintance with my old and deceased friends, and to rejuvenescere [grow young again], as it were, which is the pleasure of old men.’^fn7

Aubrey did not envisage that his Brief Lives would be published – certainly not in his lifetime, almost certainly never. He thought he was compiling an archive in which future generations would be able to find valuable information that would otherwise be lost. He did not presume to know what use posterity might make of the biographical remnants he salvaged. He was concerned with accuracy like a scrupulous modern-day journalist, but he was also patiently insistent that controversial components of his work should not be cited until after his death. Aubrey thought that some of what he had written and shared with Wood was unsuitable for publication until the author and his subjects were rotten in the ground, ‘like medlars’.^fn8 There were things he had written that he feared could cut his throat. With his eye fixed on the future, he tried to steer a steady path between gathering information, which might turn out to be the sometimes scurrilous source of truth, and due respect for the damage gossip can do.

For all his caution, Aubrey became embroiled in a scandal when Wood printed a story he had sent him about the Earl of Clarendon accepting bribes under the Restoration. Clarendon’s son prosecuted Wood and the offending pages were publicly burnt. Wood was fined £40 and temporarily expelled from the university in July 1693. The friendship between Aubrey and Wood was almost destroyed, caught, as many subsequent friendships have been, in the crosscurrents of hearsay, truth and print. Aubrey had entrusted his manuscripts to Wood, who destroyed forty-four pages of the second of the three volumes of Brief Lives. Aubrey wrote, ‘I thought you so deare a friend that I might have entrusted my life in your hands: and now your unkindenes doth almost break my heart.’^fn9 But such was Aubrey’s talent for friendship and generosity of spirit that by August 1695 he was collaborating with Wood again. After Wood’s death later that year, Aubrey wrote, ‘I am extremely sorrowful for the death of my deare Friende and old correspondent Mr Anthony Wood: who (though his spleen used to make him chagrin and to chide me), yet we could not be asunder, and he would always see me at my Lodgeing, with his darke Lanthorne, which should be a Relick.’^fn10

The Brief Lives are mostly lives of seventeenth-century men: eminent writers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, astrologers, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, dignitaries of the state and the Church of England. There are a few female lives that command their own biography: women married to or fathered by famous men, outstandingly beautiful, or simply ‘wondrous wanton’. And there are many more ordinary or unnamed women, caught between the lines – mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, mistresses, whores. Theirs are lives lived amidst the intense social turmoil of civil war, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. They encompass discoveries that changed the future, such as the circulation of blood, and magical spells and folklore from the distant past. Aubrey was proud of the fact that he did not ‘disdain to learn from ignorant old women’.^fn11 When he was seeking information to pass on to the future about eminent men, it was often women’s voices and experiences he recorded.

Generous almost to a fault towards his wide circle of scholarly friends, Aubrey was an unusually self-effacing person. He saw himself as a whetstone for other people’s talents, doubted the power of his own mind, doubted even the quality of his distinctive prose, and claimed gratitude to others as his own greatest virtue. In one respect, however, he was completely confident of making an important and original historical contribution – he knew he was inventing the modern genre of biography. He cursed the classical tradition of high-style panegyrics and selective eulogies: ‘Pox take your orators and poets, they spoile lives & histories.’^fn12 A Life, he insisted, is a small history in which detail is all. He realised that while political regimes stand or fall, the minutiae of particular human lives matter most. Contemporaries criticised him for being ‘too minute’ or trivial, but Aubrey was convinced that ‘a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull’.^fn13

He was right. The fine details Aubrey recorded are essential for the study of his subjects and a spur to subsequent biographers. The detail that the philosopher Hobbes, when young, had such black hair his schoolmates called him Crow is irrelevant to his theory of the State, but delightful to know. The fact that Sir Walter Raleigh spoke to his dying day with a broad Devonshire accent is trivial, but potent enough to change for ever our image of the famous courtier. Aubrey specialised in such rich details, he knew they would be lost if he did not collect them. The words ‘according to Aubrey’ or ‘Aubrey says’ resound down the centuries to the present day, where they still appear in the introductions to new books on Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren. He wanted to get at the truth: ‘the naked and plaine trueth, which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheeke’.^fn14

Aubrey stayed strictly within the frame of the story, anecdote or incident he found revealing of a Life. He made no attempt to interpret definitively, still less judge or account for, the Lives he wrote. He set out more modestly to record some true things about each of them. Which is why he saw himself more as a collector than a writer. ‘Now what shall I say, or doe with these pretty collections?’ he asked Wood, as old age encroached.^fn15 Aubrey was frightened his unpublished manuscripts would be dissipated and lost after his death, so he thought to put them in the new Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, alongside Elias Ashmole’s cabinet of curiosities and rarities. There are more than four hundred Lives in the manuscripts Aubrey eventually deposited in the Ashmolean, some several pages long, others only a few lines. Like all collectors, Aubrey expressed personal taste and sensibility in what he chose to include and exclude from his Lives. But beyond this, he did not impose himself strongly on his subjects.

Over time Aubrey’s editors have dealt variously with the Brief Lives: like visitors to a museum they bring the expectations and capabilities of their own era and experience to bear on Aubrey’s collections. Kate Bennett’s 2015 edition painstakingly presents the Brief Lives as Aubrey himself arranged them, complete with all his significant revisions, corrections and gaps for information he had lost or still hoped to find.^fn16 Oliver Lawson Dick, whose Aubrey’s Brief Lives was first published in 1949, added extracts from Aubrey’s many other manuscript collections into his edition of Brief Lives, and cut out anything he considered unimportant, especially Aubrey’s hesitations and changes of mind. He put the Lives in alphabetical order and provided brief introductions of his own to each of them. The result is a flamboyant, streamlined version of Aubrey’s intricate paper museum. I think Aubrey would have felt about it as authors today feel about movies made from their books: that it is related to, but radically different from, what he originally intended. Lawson Dick carried Aubrey’s name to a wide twentieth-century audience and helped inspire the Patrick Garland play, starring Roy Dotrice, through which audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have come to know Brief Lives.^fn17 Aubrey, who only hoped that his name would live on like an ‘unprofitable’ tree on the ramparts of someone else’s noble building, would have been delighted.

^fn1 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Aubrey 6, fol. 12, printed in Two Antiquaries: a selection from the correspondence of John Aubrey and Anthony Wood, Balme, M., ed., (Edinburgh: Durham Academic Press, 2001), p. 92.

^fn3 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Aubrey 12, fol. 8, Two Antiquaries, p. 104.

^fn4 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Ballard 14, fol. 142, Two Antiquaries, p. 127.

^fn7 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Aubrey 6, fol. 12, Two Antiquaries, p. 92.

^fn8 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Aubrey 6, fol. 12, Two Antiquaries, p. 92.

^fn9 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Ballard 14, fol. 155, Two Antiquaries, p. 148.

^fn10 See Aubrey’s letter to Thomas Tanner, MS Tanner 24, fol. 108, Two Antiquaries, p. 158.

^fn11 See Aubrey’s letter to Robert Boyle, Correspondence of Robert Boyle 1636–1691, Hunter, M., Clericuzio, A. and Principe, L. M., eds, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 111–12.

^fn12 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Wood F39, fol. 340, Two Antiquaries, p. 91.

^fn13 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Wood F39, fol. 340, Two Antiquaries, p. 91.

^fn14 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Aubrey 6, fol. 12, Two Antiquaries, p. 92.

^fn15 See Aubrey’s letter to Anthony Wood, MS Wood F39, fol. 392, Two Antiquaries, p. 114.

^fn16 John Aubrey: Brief Lives with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers, Bennett, K., ed., 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

^fn17 Brief Lives by John Aubrey: a play in two acts for one player, Patrick Garland (London: Faber, 1967).

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.		A page of Aubrey’s manuscript
II.		A page of Aubrey’s manuscript
III.		Easton Piers as it was at the time of Aubrey’s birth
IV.		Easton Piers after its rebuilding by his father
V.		Easton Piers, northern elevation
VI.		Sir James Long and John Aubrey Hawking
VII.		Anthony Wood
VIII.		Sir Henry Lee
IX.		George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland
X.		George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury
XI.		Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland
XII.		Ben Jonson
XII.		Thomas Hobbes
XIV.		Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset
XV.		Venetia Digby
XVI.		Sir Kenelm Digby
XVII.		Sir John Suckling
XVIII.		James Harrington
XIX.		Samuel Butler
XX.		Richard Lovelace
XXI.		Abraham Cowley
XXII.		Andrew Marvell
XXIII.		Sir Walter Raleigh
XXIV.		Sir Philip Sidney
XXV.		Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
XXVI.		The Hon. Robert Boyle
XXVII.		William Penn
XXVIII.		John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

FOREWORD

THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL used in this edition has been taken from the following sources:—

I.	MS. Aubrey 1.	The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire.
II.	MS. Aubrey 2.	The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire.
III.	MS. Aubrey 3.	An Essay Towards a Description of the North Division of Wiltshire.
IV.	MS. Aubrey 4.	A Perambulation of Surrey.
V.	MS. Aubrey 5.	An Interpretation of Villare Anglicanum.
VI.	MS. Aubrey 6.	The Minutes of Lives: Part One.
VII.	MS. Aubrey 7.	The Minutes of Lives: Part Two.
VIII.	MS. Aubrey 8.	The Minutes of Lives: Part Three: including An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers.
IX.	MS. Aubrey 9.	The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes.
X.	MS. Aubrey 10.	An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen.
XI.	MS. Aubrey 12.	Letters to John Aubrey: 1644–1695: A-N.
XII.	MS. Aubrey 13.	Letters to John Aubrey: 1644–1695: O-W.
XIII.	MS. Aubrey 14.	Monumenta Britannica: Parts One and Two.
XIV.	MS. Aubrey 15.	Monumenta Britannica: Parts Three and Four.
XV.	MS. Aubrey 16.	Chronologia Architectonica.
XVI.	MS. Aubrey 17.	Designatio de Easton-Piers in Com: Wilts.
XVII.	MS. Aubrey 19.	Medical Recipes, in English.
XVIII.	MS. Aubrey 21.	The Countrey Revell and Miscellaneous Papers.
XIX.	MS. Aubrey 23.	A Collection of Genitures Well Attested.
XX.	MS. Aubrey 24.	An Astrological Treatise, with additional recipes and incantations.
XXI.	MS. Aubrey 26.	Faber Fortunae.
XXII.	MS. Aubrey 28.	A Letter by Thomas Hobbes, with notes by John Aubrey.
XXIII.	MS. Wood E.4	Letters from Thomas Hobbes to Aubrey.
XXIV.	MS. Wood F.39.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXV.	MS. Wood F.40.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXVI.	MS. Wood F.46.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXVII.	MS. Wood F.49.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXVIII.	MS. Wood F.51.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXIX.	MS. Ballard 14.	Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
XXX.	MS. Ashmolean 1814.	Letters from Aubrey to Edward Llwyd.
XXXI.	MS. Ashmolean 1829.	Letters from Aubrey to Edward Llwyd.
XXXII.	MS. Ashmolean 1830.	Letters from Aubrey to Edward Llwyd.
XXXIII.	MS. Rawlinson D.26.	The Journal of Anthony Wood.
XXXIV.	MS. Rawlinson D.727.	Genealogical and Heraldic Papers, including fair copies of three of Aubrey’s Lives.
XXXV.	MS. Rawlinson J.F.6.	The Accidents of John Aubrey.
XXXVI.	MS. Tanner 22.	Letters to Thomas Tanner: 1698.
XXXVII.	MS. Tanner 23.	Letters to Thomas Tanner: 1697.
XXXVIII.	MS. Tanner 24.	Letters from Aubrey to Tanner: 1696.
XXXIX.	MS. Tanner 25.	Letters from Aubrey to Tanner: 1695.
XL.	MS. Tanner 102.	The Journal of Anthony Wood.
XLI.	MS. Tanner 456.	Letters between Aubrey and Wood.
XLII.	Ashmole 1672.	Pamphlets collected and annotated by John Aubrey.
XLIII.	Ashmole 1722.	Plott’s “Oxfordshire,” annotated by John Aubrey.
XLIV.		“Festivious Notes” by Edmund Gayton, first published 1654.
XLV.		“Britannia” by William Camden, first published 1586.
XLVI.		“Merry Drollery, Complete, or A Collection of Joviall Poems, Merry Songs, Witty Drolleries, intermixed with Pleasant Catches Collected by W.N. C.B. R.S. J.G. Lovers of Wit,” published in 1670.
XLVII.		“Wit Restored, or severall select poems not formerly publish’t”: 1658.
XLVIII.–L.		“Monasticon” by Sir William Dugdale, first published in three volumes in 1655, 1661 and 1673.
In the Library of the Royal Society, Burlington House, London:
LI.		The Natural History of Wiltshire.
In the Library of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Devizes:
LII.		Letters from Aubrey to Anthony Wood.
In the Library of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall
LIII.		The Diary of Robert Hooke.
In the Library of the British Museum, London:
LIV.	MS. Lansdowne 231.	Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme.
LV.		“Miscellanies Collected by J. Aubrey, Esq. London.” Printed 1696.
LVI.		“Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects,” including five letters to John Aubrey and his Introduction to the Survey and Natural History of the North-Division of the County of Wiltshire, edited by Dr. Rawlinson: 1714.
LVII.–LXI.		“The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey. Begun in the year 1673 by John Aubrey, Esq. F.R.S. and continued to the present time by Dr. Rawlinson.” Printed 1718–19, in five volumes.
LXII		“Miscellanies Collected by J. Aubrey, Esq. London.” Reprinted with additions and alterations, 1721.
LXIII.–LXIV.		“Athenae Oxoniensis” by Anthony a Wood. First published, in two volumes, in 1691 and 1692.
LXV.–LXVI.		“Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis” by Anthony a Wood. First published in 1674.

The passages from the above volumes that have been included in this edition, have been selected upon the following plan:—

1. Any life that has nothing of intrinsic value to offer has been discarded. The four hundred and twenty-six lives, which Aubrey wrote, vary so considerably in length (one consists of two words, another of twenty-three thousand) that many of them are of no interest whatsoever, consisting either of extracts from books or of mere lists of dates and facts. All that Aubrey has to say of John Holywood, for instance, is Dr. Pell is positive that his name was Holybushe.

2. In the one hundred and thirty-four lives that have been selected, many sentences have been rejected. For Aubrey starts one life as follows: James Harrington, Esq; the son of … Harrington of … in the Countie of …, by …, daughter of Sir … Samuel, was borne at … (Sir … Samuel’s house in Northamptonshire) anno … All sentences like this, which display nothing more than Aubrey’s ignorance of a date or a place or the title of a book, have been omitted.

3. The imperfections of Aubrey’s copy have been amended in the way that he intended they should be. A choice has been made between the alternative words he jotted down, and the several versions of his favourite stories, which he repeated sometimes as many as seven times, have been collated and a single version produced. As an instance, the two-page life of William and Philip Herbert was assembled from eleven different manuscripts; and this whole edition has been built up, like a jig-saw, until the disconnected pieces have at last resolved themselves into a complete picture.

4. All notes, quotation marks and other distractions to continuous reading have been excluded from the text, and each life has been prefaced with a paragraph, written by the editor, outlining those facts about the subject which Aubrey has ignored. These are always included in square brackets [].

5. Wherever a Latin quotation in the text is not self-explanatory, its translation has been given in square brackets. The word “pounds” has also been substituted throughout for the Latin “libri.”

6. Aubrey’s many mistakes have been left uncorrected, except in the case of two gross misquotations of famous poems. On the few occasions when Aubrey has not only left a gap to be filled in later, but has also given the reference from which the fact can be obtained, that fact has been supplied. For instance, in the life of Sir William Petty Aubrey says: Anno Domini … happened that memorable accident and experiment of the reviving Nan Green, which is to be ascribed and attributed to Dr. William Petty, as the first discoverer of life in her, and author of saving her. Vide and insert the material passages in the Tryal, and anatomicall experiment of Nan Green at Oxon: vide the narrative. In the face of such clear instructions, I have felt justified in including seven lines describing the incident from Anthony Wood’s “Journal.” Nowhere else has such an insertion been made, but on a few occasions the word “some” has been introduced to make good the omission of a figure; and in one place a word which Aubrey uses elsewhere, denigrating, has been inserted in the life of William Camden to complete a sentence.

7. Aubrey’s original spelling has been retained throughout, except that merely artificial tricks of writing (y^t for that, w^ch for which,

for mm) have been neglected. Aubrey’s use of capital letters has also been followed. Wherever possible, his original punctuation has been given, and italics have been used, when necessary, to clarify the meaning.

8. In “The Life and Times of John Aubrey,” however, italics have been used merely to distinguish those passages which occur in Aubrey’s own handwriting in the manuscripts.

9. Aubrey’s use of sign language has been abandoned, and wherever possible this form of shorthand has been translated into words.

10. Lastly, there comes the vexed question of obscenity. In the seventeenth century sex had not yet been singled out as the sin par excellence, it was merely one among many failings, and Aubrey no more thought of concealing it, than he dreamt of avoiding the mention of gluttony or drunkenness. After judging his work, therefore, by its general tendency and not by particular details, it has been decided not to bowdlerise it in the slightest degree, but to print it as it was written, without emphasis and without concealment.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN AUBREY

NOT LONG AFTER John Aubrey’s death, a wise man warned us against treating books like members of the nobility: that is, against learning their titles and bragging afterwards of acquaintance with them. Yet this has been peculiarly Aubrey’s fate; for his reputation is founded almost entirely upon hearsay and the piecemeal quotation of his work by other writers.

The reason for the extraordinary neglect of this man of genius is not hard to find and the fault, it must be admitted, is entirely his own. For Aubrey’s love of life was so intense, his curiosity so promiscuous and so insatiable, that he proved quite incapable of completing any work he undertook. Each one was started in a most businesslike and practical fashion, but before long the original plan was always buried beneath the flood of digressions and notes, of horoscopes, letters and stories, which his restless mind seemed powerless to control.

Having decided to write a life, Aubrey selected a page in one of his notebooks and jotted down as quickly as possible everything that he could remember about the character concerned: his friends, his appearance, his actions, his books and his sayings. Any facts or dates that did not occur to him on the spur of the moment were left blank, and as Aubrey was so extremely sociable that he was usually suffering from a hangover when he came to put pen to paper, the number of these omissions was often very large. In the first flush of composition, too, his mind raced so far beyond his pen that he frequently resorted to a sort of involved shorthand and made use of signs instead of words.

He then read over what he had just written and put in any stories that he thought were even vaguely relevant, wrote alternatives to words and phrases, inserted queries, numbered words, sentences and paragraphs for transposition, disarranged everything.

Any facts that occurred to him later were jotted down quite at random, in the margin if there was still room, otherwise on another page or in the middle of another life, often in a different volume, sometimes even in a letter to a friend. And there the text was left, for he rarely made a fair copy of anything that he had written because, as he confessed, he wanted patience to go thorough Knotty Studies.

Even the optimistic author despaired at last of ever reducing his life’s work to a manageable shape. Considering therefore that if I should not finish and publish what I had begun, he wrote, My Papers might either perish, or be sold in an Auction, and some body else (as is not uncommon) put his name to my Paines: and not knowing any one that would undertake this Design whilst I live, I have tumultuarily stitcht up what I have many yeares since collected: I hope, hereafter it may be an Incitement to some Ingeniose and publick-spirited young Man, to polish and compleat, what I have delivered rough hewen: For I have not leisure to heighten my Stile Accepting this clear mandate and electing myself the Ingeniose and publick-spirited young Man, I have taken Aubrey at his word, and using his manuscripts as if they were my own notes, I have constructed the following book: with the important reservation that I have nowhere departed from the original text, although I have ruthlessly rearranged it.

Of this behaviour Aubrey would have thoroughly approved, for he purposely left his manuscripts in note form. I know here be several Tautologies, he wrote to Anthony Wood, when he sent him what the latter rightly called “the foul draught of Mr. Hobbs life,” but I putt them downe thus here, that upon reviewe I should judge where such or such a thing would most aptly stand, and his considered opinion was that First Draughts ought to be as rude as those of Paynters, for he that in his first essay will be curious in refining will certainly be unhappy in inventing.

The present book, in the editor’s opinion, approximates as nearly as possible to Aubrey’s original intention. During the preparation of this edition, moreover, so much new information about Aubrey himself has come to light, that it is now possible to give a full account of his life. For when he came to write his own biography, Aubrey was overcome by a modesty, which is quite inexplicable when one considers the care with which he preserved even the smallest trivialities about other people. But the three pages on which he did finally jot down a few bare facts about himself were accompanied nonetheless by the instruction, To be interposed as a sheet of wast paper only in the binding of a booke.

He was borne, he says, (longaevous, healthy kindred) at Easton Pierse, a Hamlet in the Parish of Kington Saint Michael, in the Hundred of Malmesbury in the Countie of Wilts, his mother’s (daughter and heir of Mr. Isaac Lyte) inheritance, March the 12 (St. Gregorie’s day) A.D. 1625, about Sun-riseing, being very weake and like to dye that he was Christned before morning prayer.

His father, Richard Aubrey, was of the Aubrey’s of Herefordshire, a family which had built up a considerable estate on the foundations laid by William Aubrey, Doctor of Lawes, a man of some importance at the Court of Queen Elizabeth, who loved him and was wont to call him ‘her little Doctor.’ He was one of the Delegates for the try all of Mary, Queen of Scots, according to John Aubrey, and was a great Stickler for the saving of her life, which kindnesse was remembred by King James att his comeing-in to England, who asked after him, and probably would have made him Lord Keeper, but he dyed a little before that good opportunity happened. His Majestie sent for his sonnes, and knighted the two eldest, and invited them to Court, which they modestly and perhaps prudently declined. They preferred a Country life. And in the country the family stayed, slowly enlarging its estates by good management and strategic marriages, until within a generation the Aubreys had so firmly established their place amongst the richer gentry of England that Aubrey’s father was three times fined “for not taking the Order of Knighthood at the Coronation of King Charles I.” But one less agreeable legacy descended from this worthy to his children: He engrossed all the witt of the family, said his great-grandson sadly, so that none descended from him can pretend to any.

John Aubrey was born during one of the Golden Ages of history, when there had been a long serene Calme of Peace, and Men minded nothing but peace and Luxury. The English Renaissance was at its height, and despite the squalor and the dirt and the barbarity that surrounded the material side of life (and which the modern world, mistaking comfort for civilisation, is too apt to overemphasise) the art of living reached its peak in England during the early years of Charles l’s reign. When Erasmus had described, a century before, the things upon which the various nations prided themselves, the Scots their nobility and logical sense, the French their breeding, he said of the English that they “particularly challenge to themselves Beauty, Music and Feasting.” And upon these specifically human virtues the nation still prided itself. For it was an aristocratic age, which had no admiration for the Little Man, and its inhabitants were not ashamed to admit that there were many excellencies which were not universally attainable. And loneliness, the plague of modern civilisation (with all its attendant discontents) had still not subdued the mediæval gregariousness of the English people.

But though a true aristocracy existed, it was soundly based on worth, and the social classes, though clearly marked and unquestioningly accepted, were very fluid. Aubrey, besides noting with approval both John Gadbury’s saying that the Heavens are the best Heraulds and Ben Jonson’s remark the most worthy men have been rokked in mean Cradles, added on his own account Poets and Bravos have Punkes to their Mothers. For the rewards for ability were unlimited, no matter how humble one’s circumstances might have been: The father of Richard Neile, ArchBishop of Yorke, was a Tallow-Chandler in Westminster: and the newly ennobled were so little ashamed of their mean origins that Aubrey falls severely upon Lord Burghley for his absurd pride. The true name is Sitsilt, he says, and is an ancient Monmouthshire family but now come to be about the degree of yeomanry. ’Tis strange that they should be so vaine as to leave off an old British name for a Romancy one, which I beleeve Mr. Verstegen did putt into their heads, telling his Lordship, in his Booke, that they were derived from the ancient Roman Cecilii.

The reasons for this sudden blossoming of the spirit were largely religious. The power of the Church had only recently been broken and had not yet been replaced by the tyranny of the State, and the consequent feeling of freedom and infinite opportunity made it a blessed time to live. For the destruction of the Church of Rome brought with it a release from the burden of sin which had weighed down the English spirit in the past, and life became, for a few short generations, not a thing to be put up with, but a gift to be enjoyed with zest. Even more important, the Puritans were still only a religious sect, and their prejudices, so soon to become the accepted opinions of the middle classes, were still looked upon as fanatic delusions; nor had they yet infected the whole nation with their pernicious idea of the seriousness of work, which has ever since distorted the idea of recreation into mere idleness or games. In the Stuart Century the great mass of the nation still followed Aristotle’s rule that “the first principle of all action is leisure,” and leisure to the seventeenth-century man was not relaxation, but another form of activity. For the simultaneous discovery of the New Learning and the New World had so fired the imagination that there had emerged a whole society of full grown men and women, to whom Milton could justly say: “Lords and Commons of England—Consider what nation it is whereof ye are: a nation not slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity can soar to.” And it was into this world that John Aubrey was born.

I think I have heard my mother say I had an Ague shortly after I was borne, says Aubrey, taking up his own life again. 1629: about 3 or 4 years old, I had a grievous Ague: I can remember it. I gott not strength till I was 11 or 12 yeares old; but had sickenesse of vomiting (the Belly-ake: paine in the side) for 12 houres every fortnight for several yeares, then about monethly, then quarterly, and at last once in halfe a yeare. About 12 it ceased. This Sicknesse nipt my strength in the bud.

1633: 8 yeares old, I had an Issue (naturall) in the coronall suture of my head, which continued running till 21. 1634: October: I had a violent Fever that was like to have carried me off. ’Twas the most dangerous sicknesse that ever I had. About 1639 (or 1640) I had the Measills, but that was nothing: I was hardly Sick.

This catalogue of illnesses marks perhaps the sharpest difference between Aubrey’s time and our own. For death was everywhere, and the dozen or so children born to every marriage kept it firmly before each man’s eyes: it being as unusual then for a child to live, as it is now for one to die. Ten children in one Grave! a dreadful Sight! lament the tombs,

Could Beauty, Youth, or Innocence
Their frail Possessors save
From Death, sweet Babe, a sure Defence
Thoud’st had, and not been hurryed hence
Into the silent Grave.

But mortal Creatures, borne to dye,
To Nature must submit:
When that commands, all must comply,
No Parts can sheild from Destiny,
We then the Stage must quitt.

To a generation which was ever conscious that man was, as Marcus Aurelius had said, “a pigmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave,” there seemed to be some strange comfort in the fact that all nature shared the same doom:

Like to the Damask Rose you see,
Or like the Blossome on the Tree,
Or like the dainty Flower of May,
Or like the Morning of the Day,
Or like the Sun, or like the Shade,
Or like the Gourd which Jonas had,
Even so is Man, whose Thread is spun,
Drawn out, and cutt, and so is done.
The Rose withers, the Blossom blasteth,
The Flower fades, the Morning hasteth,
The Sun setts, the Shadow flies,
The Gourd consumes, and Man he dies.

Out of this constant grief there arose at last the very glorification of death. “What a noble animal is man, splendid in ashes, pompous in the grave,” intones Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir Walter Raleigh exults “It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness and acknowledge it.” This praise of death even made men gloat over the corruption that was only too evident in the shallow graves and gibbetted felons of the time. It is still accounted undecent for Widows to marry within a yeare (I thinke), John Aubrey says, because in that time the husbands body may be presumed to be rotten. And in what other century could a man have written of his own child:

Christopher Michell’s Sonn lyeth here, Richard Michell was his Name,
His Father’s Love was so to him, he caus’d to write the same:
He was but 4 Yeares 5 Moneths old, and then was buryed here,
And of his Body the Wormes did find a Dish of dainty chere.

But it was not only in childhood that death threatened. The law, not yet having learnt to distinguish between crime and sin, punished both with the utmost savagery, for in the absence of a police force or any method of detection, the few wrongdoers who were caught had to suffer a painful and public death as a sufficient discouragement to others. “The Court doth award that you be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution and there shall be hanged by the neck, and, being alive, shall be cut down and your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cutt off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty: and the Lord have mercy on your soul!” The most educated and sensitive men were onlookers at these dreadful spectacles: even the kindly Aubrey reports, I did see Mr. Chr. Love beheaded on Tower-hill in a delicate cleare day, although he seems to have had some doubts about the ceremony, for he added, about half an hour after his Head was struck off, the Clouds gathered blacker and blacker, and all that night and till next noon such terrible Claps of Thunder lightning and Tempest as if the Machine of the World had been dissolving. Aubrey never deceived himself, however, as to the real reason for his interest in these exhibitions. Ah! ’tis the best lechery to see ’em suffer Correction, observes one of the characters in his play. Your London Aldermen take great Lechery to see the poor wretches whipt at the Court at Bridewell. Were it not for the Law there were no living, he decided. Some would take delight in killing of men.

The abscence of any sure method of redressing private wrongs, the law being so cumbersome and so corrupt, led to the continuation of the personal feud in the unlighted and unpatrolled streets. Capt. Yarrington dyed at London about March last, Aubrey noted. The cause of his death was a Beating and throwne into a Tub of Water. Furthermore, the sword was still a part of everyday dress and this made men, when they were in drink, verie apt to doe bloudy Mischiefes. However, we soon become indifferent to the lethal weapons of our own times, and there is no reason to think that the danger of stabbing worried the men of the seventeenth century any more than the prospect of a motoring accident troubles us. In fact, the attitude was remarkably similar. Edmund Wyld, Esq. had the misfortune to kill a man in London, upon a great provocation, about A.D. 1644, Aubrey reports, and he himself, despite all his benevolence, was three times in Danger of Expiration in this way. Memorandum, he jotted down, St. John’s night, 1673, in danger of being run through with a sword at Mr. Burges’ chamber in the Middle Temple. Quaere the yeare that I lay at Mris. Neve’s, he continued, for that time I was in great danger of being killed by a drunkard in the street opposite Grayes-Inn gate—a gentleman whom I never sawe before, but (Deo Gratias) one of his companions hindred his thrust. On the third occasion, though, there was no doubt as to the identity of the culprit. Danger of being killed by William, Earl of Pembroke, then Lord Herbert, at the Election of Sir William Salkeld for New Sarum. Aubrey reported bluntly, and ever afterwards his writing took on a peculiarly spiteful tone at any mention of the Herberts. But sometimes even this violence had good results: After Dr. Lamb was killed in the streets by the Apprentices of London, Aubrey mentions, the City was fined 10,000 pounds which payd for the Building of the Banquetting house.

Far more worrying than this occasional violence were the continual outbreaks of the plague in the early years of the century, when the Black Death of the Middle Ages flared into a dying fury before destroying itself finally in the Great Plague of 1665. At the time, there was no reason to suppose that this disaster was the last visit of the scourge that had lain upon the country for so long, and as late as 1680 we find Aubrey making this ominous note: Mr. Fabian Philips sayes the winter 1625 before the Plague was such a mild winter as this: quod N.B.

As the mediæval plague finally consumed itself with its own violence: At Petersham the Plague made so great a Destruction, that there survived only five of the Inhabitants: its place was taken by a new pestilence, syphilis, which had been brought back from the New World by Columbus’ crew to rage with dreadful fury in the fresh soil of Europe. For the first outbreak of the disease was so violent, its progress was so rapid and the symptoms so revolting, that even the lepers refused to live beside its victims.

Small-pox, too, raged throughout the land with a dreadful regularity. , says Aubrey complacently,

Introduction

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN AUBREY