85 Facts About William Stukeley

William Stukeley published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime.

William Stukeley visited them repeatedly, undertaking fieldwork to determine their dimensions.

In 1726, William Stukeley relocated to Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he married.

William Stukeley was a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who encouraged him to use his antiquarian studies to combat the growth of deism and freethought in Britain.

William Stukeley further argued that the druids had erected the stone circles as part of serpentine monuments symbolising the Trinity.

William Stukeley was the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock and Ronald Hutton.

William Stukeley's paternal grandfather, John Stukeley, was a country gentleman who possessed a small estate at Uffington, Lincolnshire and who accrued a large number of debts by the time of his death.

In 1692, at the age of five, William Stukeley began an education at Holbeach's Free School, where he learned to read and write.

William Stukeley was nevertheless bored by his law activities, and when he requested that he be allowed to study at university, his father agreed.

William Stukeley returned home to sort out the family's financial affairs.

William Stukeley attracted notoriety for dissecting a local who had committed suicide.

William Stukeley considered embarking on the fashionable Grand Tour of continental Europe to see the ancient ruins of Greece and Italy, but likely decided against it on financial grounds.

William Stukeley took with him a black servant, which would have been a status symbol at the time.

William Stukeley formed a local botanic society that went on weekly plant-collecting trips in the local area.

From 1710 until 1725, William Stukeley embarked on a horseback expedition through the countryside at least once a year, taking notes on the things that he observed.

In 1712, William Stukeley embarked on an extensive tour of western Britain, taking in Wales before returning to England to visit Grantham, Derby, Buxton, Chatsworth and Manchester.

William Stukeley later published an account of these travels in Western Britain as Iter Cimbricum.

William Stukeley befriended the antiquary Maurice Johnson and joined Johnson's learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, which is still based in Spalding, Lincolnshire.

William Stukeley befriended Newton and visited him at his home on several occasions; he was part of a coterie in the society who supported Newtonian philosophy.

Also in 1718, William Stukeley joined the newly founded Society of Antiquaries of London and became its first secretary.

William Stukeley nevertheless appears to have taken little active part in the society's business.

William Stukeley published his lectures as On the Spleen in 1722, appending to it his "Essay Towards the Anatomy of the Elephant".

William Stukeley developed a friendship with two brothers who shared many of his antiquarian interests, Roger and Samuel Gale.

William Stukeley showed it to Stukeley, who produced a transcription of Aubrey's document in either 1717 or 1718.

Circa 1718, William Stukeley first visited the site, accompanied by the Gale brothers.

William Stukeley suspected that Freemasonry was the "remains of the mysterys of the antients [sic]".

William Stukeley wrote up his notes of the journey as Iter Sabrinum.

William Stukeley published a description of this tour as Iter Romanum.

The druids are mentioned only briefly in the book, when William Stukeley suggested that they might be possible creators of the stone circles.

In 1724, William Stukeley returned to Avebury and Stonehenge, returning via Ringwood and Romsey before heading up to Lincoln and then back down to Kent later in the year.

In 1725, William Stukeley engaged in the last of his great tours, this time with Roger Gale.

In 1726, William Stukeley left London and relocated to Grantham in Lincolnshire.

On his move to Grantham, William Stukeley resigned as secretary of the Society of Antiquaries.

William Stukeley struggled to earn a living as a physician in Grantham; he established a Freemasonic lodge in the town, although it never appeared on the roll of the Grand Lodge of England.

Stukeley was friendly with the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who shared his interest in antiquarianism.

William Stukeley enjoyed the town's medieval architecture, and began to write a history of the settlement in the form of a dialogue.

William Stukeley enjoyed gardening while living in the town, in 1738 building a "Hermitage" in his garden, which featured niches, a stone arch and a fountain.

William Stukeley would write that his purpose in becoming a cleric was "to combat the deists from an unexpected quarter", describing his "resentment of that deluge of profaneness and infidelity that prevails so much at present, and threatens an utter subversion of religion in general".

William Stukeley remained interested in the local discovery of antiquities; he became aware of a large, silver Romano-British dish uncovered at Risley Park, Derbyshire in 1729 and read an account of it to the Society of Antiquaries in 1736.

William Stukeley was affronted by the suggestion, and wrote his 1746 Origines Roystonianae II in response to it.

William Stukeley believed that learned people would read the book to learn about stone circles and druids, and that in doing so they would encounter the ancient proto-Christian of Britain and thus recognise how similar it was to modern Anglicanism.

In 1739, William Stukeley married the Gale brothers' sister, bringing her to live with him at Stamford.

Also in 1739, he went into business producing medicinal oils with the daughter of John Rogers, a recently deceased apothecary whose wares William Stukeley had previously championed.

In 1746, William Stukeley drew up a very careful account of Charles I's journey from Oxford to the Scottish army camp near Newark in 1646.

In late 1747, William Stukeley became the rector for St George the Martyr, Queen Square, a parish in Bloomsbury, London.

William Stukeley was a friend of Isaac Newton and wrote a memoir of his life in 1752.

However, within the group he found himself increasingly sidelined under the presidency of Martin Folkes; although the pair retained a cordial relationship, William Stukeley felt that Folkes was responsible for a decline in the quality of the society and was likely upset by Folkes' mocking attitude towards Christianity.

William Stukeley was involved in the running of the Foundling Hospital, where he became acquainted with the illustrator William Hogarth.

That same year, one of William Stukeley's parishioners died, leaving his book collection to the Bodleian Library and Lincoln College, Oxford.

William Stukeley expressed caution regarding Bertram's claims, asking for detailed information regarding the original manuscript's provenance, with Bertram responding that he could not provide any because he had been sworn to secrecy by the man who supplied him with it.

William Stukeley unsuccessfully attempted to buy the manuscript from Bertram, stating that he would deposit it in the library of the British Museum.

William Stukeley published these in 1757 as An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works, which reproduced the map but not the text of the original manuscript, instead consisting of Stukeley's own commentary.

William Stukeley had similarly been taken in by another forgery, James Macpherson's Ossian poems, writing to Macpherson in praise of his alleged discovery.

William Stukeley displayed a growing interest in the Roman Emperor Carausius and his coinage.

William Stukeley disagreed, believing that Oriuna was Carausius' wife; he published this argument as Palaeographia Britannica No III in 1752.

William Stukeley had re-joined the Society of Antiquaries but the papers presented there were increasingly treated un-seriously, while at the Royal Society, his papers were turned down and not published in its Transactions.

William Stukeley raised concerns about the sturdiness of the Eleanor cross at Waltham Cross and ensured it was renovated.

In 1759, William Stukeley purchased a cottage in the area of Kentish Town, to the north of London.

William Stukeley was buried without a monument in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene's Church, East Ham, which he is said to have selected as his resting-place on a visit there during his lifetime.

William Stukeley believed that the druids were part of "an oriental colony" of Phoenicians who had settled in Britain between the end of Noah's flood and the time of Abraham.

William Stukeley stated that the druids were "of Abraham's religion intirely [sic]" and that, although never having encountered divine revelation, had concluded through their own reasoning that God existed as a Trinity.

William Stukeley believed that the leader of the Phoenician druids had been Hercules, who had landed in western Britain and created the Boscawen-Un circle in Cornwall.

The idea that Hercules had arrived in south-west Britain was not original to William Stukeley, having been adopted from Aylett Sammes' Britannia Antiqua Illustrata from 1676.

William Stukeley believed that, because of Britain's isolated location, the druids had preserved the ancient monotheistic religion and that "the true religion has chiefly, since the repeopling of mankind after the flood, subsisted in our land".

William Stukeley believed that ancient humans had venerated the components of the cosmos, such as the heavenly bodies and the four elements, and that they recognised the numbers and musical harmonies from which the cosmos had been created.

William Stukeley thought that Britons should emulate the ancient Romans.

William Stukeley believed that God had created the Roman Empire to prepare for the arrival of Jesus and to assist in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe.

William Stukeley criticised Britons who favoured archaeological remains encountered abroad during the Grand Tour, claiming that they were neglecting their own national heritage and adopting continental habits and vices such as effeminacy.

William Stukeley placed an emphasis on measuring and recording historical sites and encouraged his various correspondents to do the same.

William Stukeley engaged in excavation by digging in and around archaeological sites, relating that doing so was "like an anatomical dissection".

William Stukeley recognised the principle of stratigraphy, that different layers of soil reflected different periods in the development of a site.

William Stukeley regarded the antiquary as displaying a "charm and pleasant oddness" as well as a "cheerfulness and disarming ingenuousness".

Piggott noted that in later life, William Stukeley became "self-opinionated" and "dogmatic".

William Stukeley had an enthusiasm for gardening, and was fond of both city and countryside, enjoying the ability of traveling between the two.

William Stukeley suffered from gout, having his first attack of the disease in 1709.

William Stukeley is unrepresentative and yet representative: individual, eccentric, an 'original' but with all his characteristics no more than a slight exaggeration of those of his fellow antiquaries.

William Stukeley is almost a corporate sum of his contemporaries, with all their achievements and their intellectual crotchets concentrated and magnified in one man.

However, by the 1750s, some of William Stukeley's contemporaries were criticising the accuracy of some of his plans, and some were accusing his interpretations of being speculative.

In 1889, Augustus Pitt Rivers noted, in his presidential address to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, that William Stukeley's name "has been handed down to us chiefly as an example of what to avoid in archaeology".

The first edition of Piggott's biography of William Stukeley was published in 1950, with a revised edition released in 1985.

William Stukeley noted that the antiquarian's plan of Avebury, "though failing by modern standards of accuracy, was nevertheless a very much better achievement than anything that had been produced before".

Piggott referred to the "varying quality" of William Stukeley's work, believing there to have been a "lamentable decline in his later life".

William Stukeley believed that Stukeley had moved from a "neutral empiricism to an often wildly speculative religious interpretation" of prehistoric archaeology.

William Stukeley was the first person to identify the Stonehenge Avenue and Stonehenge Cursus, giving these features the names by which they are now known.

Haycock noted that, along with Macpherson and Thomas Gray, William Stukeley "helped create the principal historical and literary foundations for the 'Druidical revival' that flourished in the last decades of the eighteenth century".