by John Aubrey
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.
Easton Piers as it was at the time of Aubrey’s birth
Easton Piers after its rebuilding by his father
From the paintings by John Aubrey in the Bodleian Library
Easton Piers from the north after its rebuilding
Sir James Long and John Aubrey hawking
From the paintings by John Aubrey in the Bodleian Library
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
Tho
ud’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. The Small-Pox is usually in all great Towns, says Aubrey complacently, but it is observed at Taunton in Somersetshire, and at Sherburne in Dorsetshire, that at the one of them every Seventh Year, and at the other every Ninth Year comes a Small-Pox, which the Physitians cannot master.
Nor was it from disease alone that death threatened, for Aubrey mentions that George Villiers’ mother, the Countesse of Bucks, died of a dropsi and Phisick. For the medical profession, with neither knowledge nor traditions, was groping its way so unsurely from quackery towards enlightenment that many people must have come, like Robert Boyle, to “apprehend more from the physician that the disease.”
The majority of even the most eminent practitioners were still amateurs, like Fish, M.D., or so called, who practised Physick and Astrologie, and had a good practise in both, in Convent Garden London, and each jealously guarded the secrets of his cures from his rivals, so that no advance in the science was possible. And perhaps they were wise to conceal their methods after all, for William Harvey sadly confessed to Aubrey that after his Booke of the Circulation of the Blood came-out, he fell mightily in his Practize, and ’twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.
In each generation, therefore, the doctors started from scratch again and, pursuing their own strange remedies, dealt death indiscriminately until they stumbled by chance on a treatment that did less harm than good, and then they concealed the secret until they were able to take it with them to the grave, unless they had previously managed to sell it for a good profit, like that “ki
nswoman of Sir A. King’s which,” Robert Hooke noted in his Diary, “had a certain cure for a Leprosy or Scaled head. Shee had £100 per annum of St. Bartholomews hospitall to which she promised to Leave the Receipt.”
Very few men were so scientific as Dr. Jacquinto, Physician to Queen Anne, James I’s consort, who went into the Marshes of Essex, where they putt their sheep to cure them of the Rott, where he lived sometime purposely, to goe after the sheep, and observe what plants they did eat: and of those Herbes he made his Medicine for the Consumption, which did great Cures. The great majority still depended largely on magic for their treatments, and dreams and prayers were considered far more valuable than any research. Dr. Napier, for instance, who was no Doctor, but a divine (rector Lindfordiensis) and practised Physick, when a Patient, or Quaerent came to him, presently went to his Closet to Pray: It appears by his Papers, says Aubrey, that he did converse with the Angel Raphael, who told him if the Patient were curable or incurable; and the popularity of this treatment is proved by the fact that his Knees were horny with frequent Praying.
That visionary prescriptions were not always to be relied on, however, is shown by a gentlewoman of Aubrey’s acquaintance, who had a beloved Daughter, who had been a long time III, and received no benefit from her Physitians. She dream’d that a Friend of hers deceased, told her, that if she gave her Daughter a Drench of Yewgh pounded, she would recover. She gave her the Drench and it killed her, whereupon she grew almost distracted. Her Chamber Maid to Complement her, and to mitigate her Grief, said surely that could not Kill her; she would adventure to take the same her self; she did so and died also. This was about the Year 1670 or 1671, Aubrey concludes, I knew the Family. Sometimes, though, this indiscriminate dosing did bear unexpected fruit for medical science: A woman (I thinke in Italy) endeavoured to poyson her Husband (who was a Dropsicall Man) by boyling a Toade in his Potage; which cured him: and this was the occasion of finding out the Medicine. Not altogether unexpectedly all the same, for the therapeutic value of frogs had long been known and Aubrey himself has noted down a proven remedy To cure the Thrush. Take a living Frog, he says, and hold it in a Cloth, that it does not go down into the Childs Mouth; and putt the Head into the Childs Mouth till it is dead; and then take another Frog. It was little wonder, after treatments like this, if the patients reacted strangely too, like Oliver Cromwell, when he was so dangerously ill in Scotland of a kind of calenture or high Fever, that he pistolled one or two of his Commanders that came to visit him in his delirious rage.