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Derek Parker, John Aubrey - Slightly Foxed Issue 28

Folliries and Misinformations

‘My head’, John Aubrey once said, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof are to be valued.’

No doubt at all about that, even if, as he admitted, he ‘set things down tumultuarily, as if tumbled out of a Sack’. Indeed, his lack of discipline is perhaps the chief reason why the collection of his biographical notes, known as Brief Lives, survives as one of the most delightful of all books about life in seventeenth-century England and the personalities who lived it.

Aubrey was born in 1626, and happily for us never needed to work. The son of a debt-ridden Wiltshire squire, he squandered what money he saved from the wreck of his inheritance on good living and women (‘several love and law-suits’, he noted for the year 1656) and was finally bankrupted by Joane Sumner, who he planned to marry but who instead sued him, and won. From then on he ‘enjoyed a happy delitescency’, trading on his cheerfulness, good humour and generous talent for friendship to become a permanent guest, moving from one amiable friend’s or patron’s house to another, carrying with him on horseback his ‘dust basket’ crammed with up to two quires of folio paper covered with random notes.

His wit was equal to paying for his keep as a guest in the houses of his patrons. Almost every day he must have come down to dinner with another good anecdote, and it is not surprising that he never ran out of refuges, or that his hosts often plied him with liquor to draw out more and more dangerously libellous stories, with the result that when he rose early in the morning, as was his habit, to write up his notes, he was often (‘sot that I am’) suffering from a hangover, which led to some of the more obvious inaccuracies. (To do him justice, he often later corrected them.)

He began collecting other people�

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‘My head’, John Aubrey once said, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof are to be valued.’

No doubt at all about that, even if, as he admitted, he ‘set things down tumultuarily, as if tumbled out of a Sack’. Indeed, his lack of discipline is perhaps the chief reason why the collection of his biographical notes, known as Brief Lives, survives as one of the most delightful of all books about life in seventeenth-century England and the personalities who lived it. Aubrey was born in 1626, and happily for us never needed to work. The son of a debt-ridden Wiltshire squire, he squandered what money he saved from the wreck of his inheritance on good living and women (‘several love and law-suits’, he noted for the year 1656) and was finally bankrupted by Joane Sumner, who he planned to marry but who instead sued him, and won. From then on he ‘enjoyed a happy delitescency’, trading on his cheerfulness, good humour and generous talent for friendship to become a permanent guest, moving from one amiable friend’s or patron’s house to another, carrying with him on horseback his ‘dust basket’ crammed with up to two quires of folio paper covered with random notes. His wit was equal to paying for his keep as a guest in the houses of his patrons. Almost every day he must have come down to dinner with another good anecdote, and it is not surprising that he never ran out of refuges, or that his hosts often plied him with liquor to draw out more and more dangerously libellous stories, with the result that when he rose early in the morning, as was his habit, to write up his notes, he was often (‘sot that I am’) suffering from a hangover, which led to some of the more obvious inaccuracies. (To do him justice, he often later corrected them.) He began collecting other people’s memories almost in childhood: ‘When a boy’ (he wrote of himself, in the third person) ‘he did ever love to converse with old men, as living histories.’ He was incapable of not giving a good yarn its head, and happy irrelevancies make their way into everything he wrote, however seriously he set out to compose a sober memoir. He simply could not apply himself to organizing his material – as his friend Anthony à Wood reports, ‘he was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed. And being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his letters with folliries and misinformations, which would sometimes guid him into the paths of errour.’ Aubrey never intended to publish more than one or two of these witty sketches of the great, the good and the not-so-good worthies of his time; they started out as notes collected for a volume of biographies of Oxford men to be written by Wood. He interviewed every prominent man he came across – indeed Wood suggested he would probably one day break his neck rushing downstairs to waylay a departing celebrity. Falling out with his friend, he attempted to weld his notes together into substantial biographical essays; but form and discipline steadfastly eluded him. He called his ‘Lives’ Schediasmata – ‘pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment’, and they are all the better for that, though many of them were unfit for publication until the death of their subject: ‘the truth, the naked and plain truth: which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and afford many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheek’. Many a young virgin will, I suspect, join the present writer in gratitude that Wood did no such thing – and that Aubrey himself did not believe he should reach for a fig leaf when he came across a good piece of gossip. Himself a lover of the ladies (writing of someone who was ‘debauched ad omnia’, he added, ‘we have all been young’), he was always interested in the love-life of those men whose lives he noted, and it was with approval if not envy that he recorded the story of Sir Walter Raleigh ‘getting up one of the maids of honour up against a tree in a wood’. She at first attempted to defend her honour with ‘Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter!’ but at last was driven ‘as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher’ to cry out in ecstasy ‘Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter!’ He wrote of great men without fear or favour – of Francis Bacon’s ‘Ganymedes and favourites’; of the President of Trinity, Ralph Kettell, who abhorred long hair, and at dinner-time ‘would bring a pair of scissors in his muff, and woe be to them that sat on the outside of the table’. He was responsible for many of the spurious stories of the famous which ended up in more respectable biographies – that Shakespeare was a butcher’s boy, for instance, and that Ben Jonson ‘killed Mr Marlowe, the poet, coming from the Green Curtain playhouse’. As a book, Brief Lives was, then, a sort of accident. Aubrey’s notes were first edited and published in 1898 by the Reverend Andrew Clark – and his is still the most complete edition, though he was rather free with Victorian fig leaves. Later selections have happily removed these. Of his other work, more than a few diverting pages survive. He always took an interest in the young – in his Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen he quoted with approval the view of one contemporary that foreign travel was excellent for young men, provided they avoided ‘the frippery of France, especially Paris’ which ‘would too much allure them to vanity and make them disrelish their more serious and useful studies’. Germany would be perfectly safe, and indeed an admirable corrective for young men who ‘are nowentered into the dangerous time of temptation of love, which by staying at home they would infallibly fall into – lawful or unlawful – but being kept in action, body and mind, in a strange country they will not be at leisure to be attacked by Cupid’. On the other hand he approved of the attitude of the Cambridge baronet Sir William Platers, who was not only ‘a great admirer and lover of handsome women, and kept several’ but ‘took care to provide sound and agreeable females’ for his son. He attacked the ‘tyrannical beating and dispiriting of children from which many tender and ingenious do never recover again’. He admits himself to waking from dreams of the fear and trembling he had suffered during his earliest years under the lash of the ill-natured William Sutton of Blandford School in Dorset. Rather than suffer so, he wrote, ‘a child of mine should never learn the Latin tongue, but be content with that of his mother’. Riding about the country from one host’s house to another, he magpied inveterately, stuffing into his pocket with equal care notes of probable, possible and highly questionable facts and fallacies, which happily survived in an enormous mass of manuscripts ending up in the Ashmolean, the British Museum or private hands. He was always furious at the cavalier way in which most of his contemporaries treated old manuscripts. The rector of his local church, for instance, used the records of Malmesbury Abbey to stuff up the bungholesof his barrels of home-brewed ale, and Aubrey’s schoolmasters – indeed, most people he knew – used old manuscripts to cover the outside of their books; he saw the local glover wrapping gloves in paper covered with sixteenth-century calligraphy (so went the MS of Hamlet?). ‘In my grandfather’s days,’ he said, ‘the manuscripts flew about like butterflies.’ He did his best to save some of them, and took great care of his own. Though he is best known for Brief Lives, he was not solely interested in gossip: his chief concern was in antiquarian research. A devoted follower of Camden and Leland, he conceived the idea of writing a huge book which he would call Monumenta Britannica, and which would deal with the topography, archaeology and local history of the whole of England. He left only voluminous notes for it, and in his lifetime published, in 1696, only Miscellanies, a strange, crack-brained book of superstitions and curiosities. No one thought well of it. His notes on local history and topography are as fragmentary and undisciplined as his biographical notes – though he travelled far to assemble them. In the margins of his text he often scribbles the Latin word quaere – ‘go and find out’; and he almost always did – though the resulting observations and generalizations are questionable, while at the same time making his conclusions irresistibly entertaining. Readers in the Vale of Gloucester, for instance, may or may not agree that in general they – referred to, incidentally, as ‘the Aborigines’ – are ‘phlegmatic, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit. . . melancholy, contemplative and malicious, generally apt to be fanatics’. The happy denizens of Hereford, on the other hand, are ‘of a brisk spirit, clear voices, speak quick, move quick . . . longaevous, not covetous and stingy, but hospitable, quick-witted, nimble, quick upon the catch’. However unreliable, it all makes for reading as entertaining as his conversation must have been – and the old gossip was absolutely right when he remarked: ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgotten, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down!’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Derek Parker 2010


About the contributor

Derek Parker and his wife retired to Australia in 2002, where they and their two fox terriers enjoy life in Sydney. Derek regularly broadcasts on the city’s 24-hour classical music station, now streamed to the world on the Net – you might catch him at 2MBS.com.

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