Robert Plot: Britain's 'genial father of county natural histories'

Abstract

Robert Plot (1640—1696) has deservedly been called the ‘genial father of County Natural Histories in Britain’ for his work in this Field. Like his friend John Aubrey, Plot was interested in promoting useful knowledge, emphasizing how his own work would contribute ‘to the great benefit of Trade, and advantage of the People’. Also like the famous Aubrey he was interested in the supernatural and therefore he included accounts of occult phenomena in his natural histories. His Natural History of Oxfordshire, published after a lengthy period when natural history was still experiencing some difficulty in firmly superseding the chorographic element in the field of regional study, was chiefly responsible for popularizing regional natural history. It was deliberately intended by its author to supplement the ‘Civil and Geographicall Historys’ which up to that time still managed to exert an influence on the field as a whole. These ‘Civil and Geographicall Historys’ were generally called ‘chorographies’ by most of Plot’s fellow virtuosi, a name originally derived from the Classical Greek art of chorography whose purpose, according to Ptolemy, was to treat the geography and history of a relatively small area of the Earth’s surface. This genre was practiced by W illiam Camden, John Leland and other sixteenth and early seventeenth-century men, who adapted it to their own particular purposes. Plot, however, was one of the first ‘regional writers’ to discard many of the methods and interests of the chorographers, preferring rather to scientifically investigate the natural history.