Our past is a foreign country – a fabled place called England, first memorialised by the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey. As Ruth Scurr declares at the start of her book about him, “Aubrey loved England.” In retrospect, however, that love seems wistfully elegiac. His England was soon swallowed up by a Britain that bragged about being great, or absorbed into a kingdom that pretended to be united; now its quirky character is being expunged by the babble of multiculturalism. Already during Aubrey’s lifetime, Scurr argues, the English “were losing assuredness of their identity to a degree not repeated until the end of the 20th century”.
In a country convulsed by religious disputes and political strife, Aubrey set out to rescue fragments of a patrimony that was crumbling or being casually vandalised. He collected petrified cockle shells and dug up Roman coins; he salvaged medieval manuscripts that had been put to use as lining for pastry dishes, and transcribed Latin inscriptions that were being pulverised into scouring powder.
The history he unearthed stretched backwards into myth. Aubrey’s England was still infested by goblins and fairies, and he likened the standing stones at Avebury to the missiles deployed by primeval giants in their war against pre-Christian gods. Although he thought of himself as a scientific researcher and reported his findings to the recently-formed Royal Society, in his quest for knowledge he did not “disdain to learn from ignorant old women”. He interviewed village crones and documented rustic remedies – a mixture of boar’s fat and cumin seeds that burglars fed to watchdogs to stop them barking, or a cure for chilblains that dosed the lumps with the blood of a black cat.
As well as preserving archaeological relics, Aubrey revered organisms that had roots in the English earth. He marvelled at a great oak that, scarred by lightning, had healed and resumed its growth in a spiral. At Glastonbury a thorn bush flowered in winter: it had sprouted, according to legend, from a staff thrust into the ground by Joseph of Arimathea who, it is said, brought the Holy Grail to Roman Britain. Less sanctimoniously, Aubrey sang the praises of turnips nurtured by the grey dirt of Wiltshire. He thought it “a kind of ingratitude” not to care about the plants and vegetables that form a longer-lasting background to our busy, animate existence, and he wondered if our souls metamorphosed into the trees and flowers that surround our graves.
Despite this anatomy of the English landscape, Aubrey is best remembered for Brief Lives in which he recorded the foibles of his more illustrious or notorious contemporaries. Self-deprecating to a fault, he seems not to have considered his own life worth recording. At best, he thought that his name might live on by association, “like an unprofitable yew growing on the ramparts of some noble structure”. Convinced that he deserves a biography, Scurr has coaxed Aubrey to compose his own: her book is an artful anthology of his diary entries, filled out with explanatory pastiches written by Scurr herself. Even so, Aubrey is upstaged by his curios or by his showier acquaintances. His single venture abroad, a trip to France, is left blank because Scurr lacks sources from which to reconstruct it, and his amatory upsets and financial woes are also glossed over. Anthony Powell, who edited Brief Lives in the 1940s, saw Aubrey as an embryonic novelist, and paid tribute to his speculative gossip in A Dance to the Music of Time. Scurr, however, is a historian with academic scruples, and she hinders her genre-bending enterprise by refusing to make things up.
Aubrey will always remain elusive, because he willed himself to disappear or to decay. He predicted that his papers would be dispersed as forgetfully as the oak leaves inscribed by the Cumaean sibyl, which according to Virgil were scattered by the wind. Hesitant about publishing his indiscreet Lives, Aubrey proposed a moratorium of 30 years, by which time both he and his subjects, “like medlars”, would have rotted.
This obsession with the past and its tendency to decay turned Aubrey into England’s taxidermist, and Scurr’s narrative abounds in ghoulish stories about corpses and recipes for their preservation. A wounded soldier who is stripped and left for dead after a Civil War battle saves himself by using a nearby cadaver as an eiderdown during the frigid winter night. An anatomist uses “a partially pickled dead body” as a teaching aid. A cleric exhumed after the Great Fire of London is found lying “in liquor, like boiled brawn”, and a 15th-century bishop, his coffin cracked open when the roof of St Paul’s collapsed, turns out to be “uncorrupted except for the ears and genitals”: examining the stiff remains, Aubrey probes a hole in the chest to scrutinise the dried lungs.
In 1697, Aubrey wrote out an epitaph that he hoped would be carved on to “a stone of white marble about the bigness of a royal sheet of paper” – a modest monument, since the page he specified was only two feet square. But when he died a few weeks later, he was written off in the Oxford parish records as a “stranger” and hastily stowed in an unmarked grave. As Scurr puts it in her farewell to him, he would have preferred to rest in a barrow – a mound humped over a communal burial site – at home in Wiltshire. Aubrey viewed England as a convivial cemetery, and this gregarious man expected death posthumously to enlarge his circle of friends and acquaintances.
John Aubrey: My Own Life is published by Chatto & Windus, £25. Click here to buy it for £20
