John Aubrey
English writer and antiquarian (1626–1697)
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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his lifetime, and many of his most important manuscripts (for the most part preserved in the Bodleian Library) remain unpublished, or published only in partial form.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. 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.
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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.
In popular culture
In 1967, English director Patrick Garland created a one-man show, Brief Lives, based on Dick's edition of Aubrey's work. Starring Roy Dotrice, it became the most successful one-man production ever seen, with Dotrice giving over 1800 performances across forty years on both sides of the Atlantic. For many, the play became an essential means of understanding a "vanished time" and one version of it. Aubrey scholars, however, have sometimes seen the production as overemphasising its subject's eccentricities and lack of organisation, to the detriment of a wider appreciation of his contributions to scholarship.
In the Doctor Who serial The Stones of Blood (1978) - which features a Neolithic stone circle - the Fourth Doctor quips, "I always thought that Druidism was founded by John Aubrey in the seventeenth century as a joke. He had a great sense of humour, John Aubrey."
In 2008, Aubrey's Brief Lives was a five-part drama serial on Radio 4. Writer Nick Warburton intertwined some of Aubrey's biographical sketches with the story of the turbulent friendship between Aubrey and Anthony Wood. Abigail le Fleming produced and directed.
In 2015, Ruth Scurr published John Aubrey: My Own Life, a semi-fictional "diary" or "autobiography" of Aubrey, which draws heavily on Aubrey's own surviving scattered writings (with minor adaptation and modernisation), but is essentially an artificial construction by Scurr.