44 Facts About John Aubrey

John Aubrey was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer.

John Aubrey is perhaps best known as the author of the Brief Lives, his collection of short biographical pieces.

John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist, who recorded numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England, and who is particularly noted for his systematic examination of the Avebury henge monument.

John Aubrey was a pioneer folklorist, collecting together a miscellany of material on customs, traditions and beliefs under the title "Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme".

John Aubrey set out to compile county histories of both Wiltshire and Surrey, although both projects remained unfinished.

John Aubrey had wider interests in applied mathematics and astronomy, and was friendly with many of the greatest scientists of the day.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks largely to the popularity of Brief Lives, John Aubrey was regarded as little more than an entertaining but quirky, eccentric and credulous gossip.

John Aubrey published little in his lifetime, and many of his most important manuscripts remain unpublished, or published only in partial form.

John Aubrey's father was not intellectual, preferring field sports to learning.

John Aubrey read such books as came his way, including Bacon's Essays, and studied geometry in secret.

John Aubrey entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were interrupted by the English Civil War.

John Aubrey spent a pleasant time at Trinity in 1647, making friends among his Oxford contemporaries, and collecting books.

John Aubrey was to show Avebury to Charles II at the King's request in 1663.

John Aubrey's father died in 1652, leaving Aubrey large estates, but with them some complicated debts.

John Aubrey said his memory was "not tenacious" by 17th-century standards but from the early 1640s he kept thorough notes of observations in natural philosophy, his friends' ideas, and antiquities.

John Aubrey began to write "Lives" of scientists in the 1650s.

John 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.

John Aubrey drank the King's health in Interregnum Herefordshire, but with equal enthusiasm attended meetings in London of the republican Rota Club.

In 1663, John Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society.

John Aubrey lost estate after estate due to lawsuits, until 1670 when he parted with his last piece of property and ancestral home, Easton Piers.

In 1667, he had made the acquaintance of Anthony Wood at Oxford, and when Wood began to gather materials for his Athenae Oxonienses, John Aubrey offered to collect information for him.

John 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.

John 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 of their portraits and papers.

In most cases, John Aubrey simply wrote what he had seen, or heard.

John Aubrey let the initial story stand in his text, while highlighting the error in a marginal note.

In 1680, John Aubrey began work on his collection of biographical sketches, which he entitled "Schediasmata: Brief Lives".

John 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, John Aubrey complained bitterly that Wood had mutilated forty pages of his manuscript, perhaps for fear of a libel case.

At somewhat greater length, John Aubrey wrote a life of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, entitled "The Life of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury": this is Bodleian MS John Aubrey 9.

John Aubrey began work on compiling material for a natural historical and antiquarian study of Wiltshire in 1656.

John Aubrey chose to divide the work into two separate projects, on the antiquities and the natural history of the county respectively.

The work on the antiquities was closely modelled on Dugdale, and was largely finished by 1671: John Aubrey deposited his draft in the Ashmolean Museum in two manuscript volumes.

In 1693 John Aubrey asked his brother William John Aubrey and Thomas Tanner to bring the project to completion, but despite their best intentions they failed to do so.

The Royal Society's copy, which includes material that John Aubrey afterwards removed from his own manuscript, is Royal Society MS 92.

In 1673, the royal cosmographer and cartographer John Ogilby, planning a national atlas and chorography of Britain, licensed Aubrey to undertake a survey of Surrey.

John Aubrey carried out the work, but in the event Ogilby's project was curtailed, and he did not use the material.

John Aubrey continued to add to his manuscript until 1692.

John Aubrey compiled a list of some 5,000 place-names, but managed to provide derivations for only a relatively small proportion of them: many are correct, but some are wildly wrong.

John Aubrey's papers included "Architectonica Sacra"; and "Erin Is God".

John Aubrey's "Adversaria Physica" was a scientific commonplace book, which by 1692 amounted to a folio "an inch thick".

John Aubrey wrote two plays, both comedies intended for Thomas Shadwell.

John Aubrey scholars have sometimes seen the production as over-emphasising its subject's eccentricities and lack of organisation, to the detriment of a wider appreciation of his contributions to scholarship.

John Aubrey had a great sense of humour, John Aubrey.

In 2008, John Aubrey's Brief Lives was a five-part drama serial on Radio 4.