Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey’s Education and Early Life

Abstract

John Aubrey (1626-1697) is well-known for his contributions to the intellectual life of the early Royal Society, prehistoric archaeology in Britain, and other scientific and antiquarian disciplines.1 His education, however, has been comparatively neglected. Since Anthony Powell's 1948 biography, there has been no full-scale study of the young Aubrey within his scholarly contexts.2 Historically, there existed a perception of Aubrey as a dilettante, an amateur with superficial knowledge of many subjects but who lacked the will, or the ability, to become master of any.3 While that tradition has been exploded by the work of Kate Bennett, Michael Hunter, Rhodri Lewis, and William Poole, more recent studies have focused on Aubrey's major scholarship, rather than its educational underpinnings.4 This paper explores those underpinnings by reconstructing his intellectual development up to his election to the Royal Society in 1663. Building on studies of university education, scientific culture, and the origins of the Royal Society by Mordechai Feingold, Robert G. Frank, Jr., Michael Hunter, and Charles Webster, it establishes a more nuanced intellectual biography and places his education within its larger context.5 Attending to the familial, social, and scholarly networks in which he moved by virtue of his class, his education, and his residence, it situates him within the contexts of Early Modern English scientific and antiquarian scholarship and amends prior assessments of the extent and nature of his education. In doing so it paints a portrait of Aubrey at the inception of his major research projects and encourages a reassessment of his approaches and contributions to individual disciplines. It also delineates the social and scholarly circles within which he moved in Civil War-era Oxford and Commonwealth London, networks that played significant roles in the foundation of the Royal Society and the conduct of scholarship in Restoration England.Wiltshire and SchoolAubrey was born at Lower Easton Pierse (now Easton Piercy) in northern Wiltshire, on 12 March 1626.6 He was the eldest child of his parents, Richard and Deborah (Lyte) Aubrey. On his father's side, he was the great-grandson of the lawyer, MP, and confidant of Queen Elizabeth, William Aubrey, and cousin to Sir John Danvers the Regicide.7 However, his grandfather Aubrey was a younger son and his father, though owning land in several counties, possessed only moderately substantial means when he married Deborah, daughter and heir of Isaac Lyte of Easton Pierse. Deborah Lyte's family were of more modest background than her husband's: yeomen and small gentry whose estates were grouped around the village of Kington St Michael, a few minutes walk from Easton Pierse.8 The farm of Broad Chalke in south Wiltshire, where Aubrey spent much of his early life, had been leased by the Brownes, Deborah's mother's family, from the Earls of Pembroke and by 1640 this lease had passed from Aubrey's great-uncle to his father.9Aubrey was born into that class of gentry who could boast of ancient descent and who had cousins in positions of wealth and power, but whose own resources were more limited. Richard Aubrey's will disposed of substantial landed property in Wiltshire, Herefordshire, and Wales, but, by his son's account, also lefthis estate encumbered with £1,800 in debt.10 Aubrey's affluence was precarious, and would gradually crumble during the course of his adult life.During his childhood, Aubrey was plagued with illness, including a potentially fatal fever and a 'sicknesse of vomiting' that lasted until he was sent to school, aged twelve.11 This may partly be responsible for the fragmentary formal schooling he was given prior to his matriculation at Oxford. In 1634, he began to study Latin grammar under Robert Latimer, rector of Leigh Delamere, near Easton Pierse, but Latimer died soon after and the young Aubrey was given over to a succession of 'dull ignorant rest-in-house teachers' before finally being sent to Blandford School in Dorset, and the care of William Sutton. …