A John Aubrey A to Z

The LRB Diary for 2026, available now, is a tribute to Brief Lives by the 17th-century polymath John Aubrey (1626-97). It includes 55 excerpts from LRB pieces that, like Aubrey’s biographical sketches, may describe a life better in a single anecdote than is often achieved by an exhaustive catalogue of facts.

‘There are few persons,’ Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ In the hope of gesturing towards that ‘everything’, here’s a very partial A to Z.

Antiquarianism: John Aubrey’s primary vocation was defined by Francis Bacon as ‘when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.’ Ruth Scurr writes in her introduction to John Aubrey: My Own Life that ‘Aubrey frequently likened his own activities to rescues after shipwreck.’

Bankruptcy: Aubrey inherited the house he was born in at the age of 26, but the estate was laden with debts that had overwhelmed him by his mid-forties.

Civil Wars: Aubrey ‘was born a year after the accession of Charles I’, Powell writes; ‘the Civil Wars broke out while he was an undergraduate at Oxford; he was in his thirties at the time of the Restoration; and he died in the latter half of the reign of William III.’ Wikipedia (an Aubreyish resource) describes him as an ‘apolitical Royalist’. William Poole, the editor of his correspondence, calls him ‘politically tone-deaf’.

Druids: Aubrey ‘invented prehistory’, Rosemary Hill says in an LRB podcast about Aubrey, William Stukeley and Stonehenge. He was the first English antiquary to speculate about what came before the Romans, alighting on the word ‘Druid’ to describe the civilisation that created Avebury, Stonehenge and other ‘temples’ – thanks to a reference in William Camden’s Britannia to Kerrig y Druid, ‘druid stones’ in Wales. But Aubrey only intended it as a ‘placeholder’, until he could work out who these people really were; it was Stukeley who took the idea of the Druids and ran with it, mostly in the wrong directions.

Easton Pierse: Aubrey’s childhood home, near Chippenham in Wiltshire, which he was heartbroken to lose. He produced a series of drawings, some a record of what he was leaving behind, some of a spectacular Italianate villa that never existed.

Folklore: in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, Aubrey gathered material on English beliefs, customs and traditions, such as the ‘wanton sport’ known as ‘moulding of cocklebread’: ‘young wenches … gett upon a Table-board, and then gather-up their knees & their coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with their Buttocks as if they were kneading of Dowgh with their Arses.’

Great Fire of London: the fire looms as large in Aubrey’s life and writings as it did in Samuel Pepys’s. It was devastating for the book trade and the Royal Society, two of the things Aubrey cared most about; on the other hand, many Roman remains were discovered among the ruins.

Hobbes, Thomas: the subject of Aubrey’s first and longest Life commissioned it himself. Hobbes was from Malmesbury, up the road from Aubrey’s birthplace, and they met for the first time when Aubrey was an eight-year-old schoolboy: ‘this worthy, learned man … was then pleased to take notice of me, and the next day visited my relations.’

‘Idea of the Education of a young Gentleman, An’: according to Powell, Aubrey considered his contribution to educational theory ‘his best and most important work, and the one that was most likely to bring him credit and fame’. Alongside the classics, mathematics, English, accountancy and drawing, ‘shorthand … was to be a potential subject, as were oratory, law, swimming, cookery, cards, chess, dancing, and also “to know about timber”.’

Jonathan’s Coffee House: Aubrey, who relied on the hospitality of friends after being made homeless, also ‘lived in coffee houses’, Adam Smyth writes in the LRB. Jonathan’s, later the first meeting place of the London Stock Exchange, was where Aubrey regularly met his friend Robert Hooke.

King Charles II: when the king, who had spent an afternoon at Stonehenge during his flight from the Battle of Worcester, got wind of Aubrey’s claim that Avebury ‘doth exceed Stonehenge as a Cathedral does a Parish Church’, he asked for a private tour of the site. As they stood on Silbury Hill, he encouraged Aubrey to dig for treasure, a suggestion Aubrey politely ignored, while endeavouring to overcome his nervous stammer.

Lives: Aubrey wrote more than four hundred biographical sketches, prioritising hard-won anecdotes over exhaustive catalogues of facts. Some of Aubrey’s Lives are briefer than others: Abraham Wheelocke, Cambridge University’s first professor of Arabic, excluded from most published editions of Brief Lives, gets only two words: ‘simple man’.

Miscellanies: the title of the only work that Aubrey managed to publish in his lifetime could be applied to everything he wrote. It consists of short chapters on such subjects as ‘Omens, Dreams, Apparitions, Voices, Converse with Angels and Spirits, Corpse Candles in Wales, Oracles, Extasie, Glances of Love and Envy, Second Sighted Men in Scotland, and the Discovery of Two Murders by Apparition.’ It was considered a ‘mad book’ even at the time.

Newton, Isaac: a notable omission from the Lives, presumably because Aubrey took Hooke’s side in their feud. After Hooke claimed credit for certain proofs that Newton relied on for his law of universal gravitation, Newton removed all references to Hooke from the published version of the Principia. (Whether he also removed Hooke’s portrait from the Royal Society’s collection remains a matter of controversy.)

Oral history: the key to Aubrey’s research methods was his readiness to speak to anyone he met – highborn or low, young or old, male or female. He created a nonthreatening persona to encourage profitable conversation, and would record whatever his interlocutors told him, however apparently trivial. Old wives’ tales were especially valued: ‘In the old ignorant times before woomen were Readers,’ Aubrey writes in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ‘ye history was handed downe from mother to daughter, &c.’

Popish Plot: anti-Catholic hysteria peaked in 1678 with the Popish Plot, a fictitious but widely believed conspiracy in which it was alleged that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles II. Aubrey, as ever, had a foot in both camps: ‘At a time when [he] was considering becoming a Jesuit novice to flee his debtors,’ Kate Bennett has written, ‘he was spending Christmas with the Catholic-hating [Israel] Tonge,’ one of the two men who made the whole thing up.

Quaere: ‘His notes are full of gaps where it was not possible to remember or find a particular piece of information,’ Scurr writes. ‘The imperative word quaere, meaning enquire or query, recurs like a refrain.’

Royal Society: Aubrey was elected in 1662, two years after the Royal Society was founded, and frequented its weekly meetings for the rest of his life. Other fellows included Pepys, Hobbes, Hooke, Newton, Edmond Halley, John Evelyn and Christopher Wren. Aubrey presented papers on archaeology (including his discovery of the ‘Aubrey holes’ at Stonehenge, the chalk pits that are still named after him), architecture and much else.

Sumner, Joan: ‘In 1665,’ Powell writes, Aubrey ‘became involved in what was perhaps the worst fiasco of his career, combining as it did, in the maximum degree, his endemic vexations at law and in love.’ He hoped that marrying Joan Sumner would rescue his finances. She ended up suing him for trying to defraud her of her dowry, and though he won the case his legal expenses contributed to his financial ruin.

Topography: ‘I have oftentimes wished for a mappe of England coloured according to the colours of the earth,’ Aubrey wrote in his Naturall Historie of Wiltshire. His unfinished surveys of Wiltshire and later Surrey (‘There are stranger things to be seen in the world than there are between London and Stanes’) are characteristically digressive and accompanied by beautiful drawings of landscapes and architecture.

University of Oxford: Aubrey’s studies were interrupted by the Civil Wars. He returned to Trinity College in 1647 and was a frequent visitor for the rest of his life. He died of a stroke there in 1697, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen. Aubrey spent thirty years collecting information for his fellow antiquary Anthony Wood’s biographical history of Oxford University, out of which Aubrey’s own Lives emerged.

‘Villare Anglicanum, Interpretation of’: Aubrey’s most unfinished work – ‘hardly begun’, as Gillian Fellows-Jensen observes – is a glossary of English place-names.

Wood, Anthony: ‘There could be a guileless enthusiasm to Aubrey that meant he was often betrayed,’ Adam Smyth writes. ‘When Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses was published in 1691, there was no mention of Aubrey’s decades of labour, although Wood carefully cites his more socially eminent contributors.’ Wood’s characterisation of Aubrey – ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased’ – defined his reputation for centuries; Patrick Garland’s 1967 play Brief Lives was a kind of fulfilment of it. But Aubrey has had the last laugh.

X-rated: ‘He loved a wench well,’ Aubrey writes of Walter Raleigh, ‘and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood (’twas his first Lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearfull of her Honour, and modest, she cryed, sweet Sir Walter, what doe you me ask? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter.’

Yew: if he was to be remembered at all, Aubrey imagined that it would only be by association, ‘like an unprofitable yew, growing on the ramparts of some noble structure’.

Zeitgeist: as Kate Bennett writes in the introduction to her edition of Brief Lives, ‘we may be able to hear, through him, the 17th century talking to and about itself.’