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entirely to the investigation of fieldworks and entitled Monumenta Britannica, which developed into the most original and enterprising study of British prehistoric remains in the seventeenth century. Aubrey was the first person to seriously assert that these remains—stone circles, barrows, and hill-forts–—were the work of the ancient Britons. Previously learned opinion had assigned them variously to the Romans, the Saxons, or the Danes. Aubrey’s belief that stone monuments were raised by the ancient Britons was thus a conceptual breakthrough. By observation and by information from correspondents, he gathered details of stone circles, megaliths, barrows, tumuli, hill-forts, camps, ramparts, and ditches from all over the British Isles, and it gradually became clear to him that a common primitive culture had once covered the whole region. Moreover, since their monuments lay in so many places beyond the perimeter of Roman, Saxon, or Danish occupations, they must antedate any of those settlements.

In compiling Monumenta Britannica Aubrey was assembling the first book in English that could be seriously regarded as an archaeological treatise. His concern was principally with the field monuments themselves. He described them in great detail, measured them, and often provided competent sketches as illustrations; he looked closely at the material remains of a vanished culture, made comparisons with similar structures to determine that there were definite categories of monuments, and tried by observations and reflection to deduce the function of stone circles, standing stones, mounds, and earthworks.

A further section of Monumenta Britannica was devoted to notes on Roman remains in Britain, based on Aubrey’s own investigations or on reports from correspondents. Besides familiar details of Verulamium, York, Colchester, Chester, and other well-known sites, there was a wealth of information about Roman discoveries in London, many of them the result of the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. The most rewarding result of Aubrey’s considerable familiarity with Roman Britain was the map he drew of the southwest region, showing the Roman and British settlements, camps, and hill-forts and the roads and tracks connecting them.

John Aubrey was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1663. Soon afterward he presented a paper on Avebury, the first occasion on which an antiquarian subject was discussed at the society. In fact, since no similar paper had been offered to the society of antiquaries of london earlier in the century, Aubrey was effectively the first to present a true archaeological paper in England.

His wandering life after his bankruptcy in 1671 and the gradual dispersal of his private library thereafter affected his ability to work consistently; the perennial disorder of his manuscript collections grew worse. All he ever brought to publication were his Miscellanies in 1695. After 1667 Aubrey collaborated for many years with Anthony Wood, the Oxford antiquary, in accumulating biographical details of notable Englishmen and of Oxford writers in particular for Wood’s monumental biographical register, Athenae Oxoniences, published in 1691 and 1692. Aubrey’s own collection of biographical sketches became the chief vehicle of his fame in the twentieth century under the title of Brief Lives. Aubrey wrote several other works, all of which remained in manuscript during his lifetime. Monumenta Britannica has never been printed in its entirety, the confused and overwritten condition of the manuscript being the main obstacle to its publication. In the last phase of his life Aubrey became closely associated with the younger generation of antiquaries then emerging in Oxford. The benefits of Aubrey’s work began to appear in public and his papers were consulted by those scholars who Oxford antiquary Edmund Gibson recruited to revise and enlarge william camden’s Britannica in the 1690s. The eighteenth-century antiquary william stukeley used Aubrey’s remarks on stone circles to develop his own elaborate theories about them.

Graham Parry