After the Restoration Dugdale published the second volume of Monasticon, and wrote a history of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s in London. Supported by the new chancellor, Clarendon, and the new archbishop of Canterbury, Sheldon, Dugdale went on to complete the unfinished works of his first patron, Spelman, who had died in 1641. These included Spelman’s glossary of words and terms in Anglo-Saxon and Norman law.

Dugdale wrote a history of the law, lawyers, and the Inns of Court entitled Origines Juridiciales (1666) and the Baronage of England (1676) a genealogical history of the English aristocracy since Saxon times. Most of Dugdale’s work involved the recovery of historic material about the great institutions of the Middle Ages, and it was a significant achievement given the number of old records and their state of neglect and disorder. He did benefit from the work of other scholars, such as Dodsworth and Archer, and he often published composite antiquarian studies. However in the seventeenth century antiquarian research was cooperative, and Dugdale became the center of such work as an advisor on archival searches. He was unusual among his contemporaries in that he did write up and publish most of his work, even if it took over twenty years to do it. He wanted above all else to ensure that the record of the past was preserved and that it was “straight.” Dugdale was a typical late-Renaissance historiographer who reconstructed a manuscript-based past. He was seen as old fashioned by Restoration scientific antiquarianism.

In 1662 he wrote the History of Imbanking and Drayning of Diverse Fennes, a departure from his usual patient and methodical documentary research. This Dutch-inspired engineering project, which changed parts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire from swamps to fertile agricultural land, exposed Dugdale to geology and natural history and the history of technology—to the kind of ideas and areas of study that were to be the foundation of restored King Charles II’s Royal Society, the new antiquarianism.

Some of Dugdale’s works were contentious, especially the Monasticon. The Reformation tended to make anything about Britain’s Roman Catholic past unpopular, and the book was much criticized when it was first published. His book on the drainage of the fens was seen as a political apology, an attempt to disguise and justify the great wealth the project engendered for some. He greatly encouraged other antiquarians such as Anthony Wood of Oxford and his son-in-law, Elias Ashmole, and Dugdale did encourage and help john aubrey, who disliked archival research. However, he remained unimpressed by Aubrey’s multidisciplinary antiquarianism, his new ideas about fieldwork, and his speculation on the origins of avebury and Stonehenge. Dugdale was knighted in 1677.

Tim Murray