| John Aubrey's Brief Lives is one of the strangest booksif indeed this collection of notes, excerpts, gossip and dry facts can be called a bookto have achieved literary fame. Their author was equally strange, in his way: a gentleman with a learned turn of mind, yet little formal education, a lover of books and manuscripts, yet almost penniless, a would-be scholar who loved worldly company as much as that of serious men, who spent the last twenty years of his life living in other people's houses, on the run from his creditors. |
| Aubrey's own life is best told in his own words, and the various jottings about himself which occur in his manuscripts are given as the first entry in the text. But a short outline of his career will help to set the scene. He was born in 1626, eldest son of a Wiltshire squire whose estates were fairly heavily encumbered with debt. He was given a good 'grammar education', but his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, and although he returned to Oxford in 1646, and also tried to study at the Middle Temple at the same time, he never took a degree or was called to the bar. Instead, at the end of 1648, he had to return home to help his father manage his estates during his illness. His father died four years later, and Aubrey was faced with fairly considerable debts. Handicapped by these and a subsequent series of lawsuits, over property in Wales and over an action brought by a lady whom he had once hoped to marry, his affairs went from bad to worse, ending in bankruptcy in the early 1670s. Aubrey put it all down to a bad horoscope at birth, evaded his creditors, and settled down to enjoy 'a happy delitescency' or concealment, with the aid of his friends. This sociable, rootless existence suited him well, though it did not help him to complete any of the various antiquarian projects to which he now turned his hand. |
| Aubrey's chief interest was in the antiquarian tradition of Leland and Camden, the collection of items which we should now classify as archaeology, topography and local history. His most ambitious scheme was to have been called Monumenta Britannica, and the parts that he completed include a fine study of Avebury and Stonehenge, while he came nearest to finishing his Natural History of Wiltshire, which covered much the same range of subjects. His only published work was the Miscellanies of 1696, a book of superstitions and strange happenings, which are really a kind of scholar's gossip, the fruits of a lifetime's interest in mere curiosities as well as more serious matters: it did his reputation no good at all. |
| He worked at these topics as well as various other ingenious and equally incomplete projects, until his death in 1697. He lived mostly in |
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