John Aubrey Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John Aubrey was born in 1626 in Wiltshire, England, into a provincial gentry family whose fortunes and preoccupations set the frame for his life as an observant gentleman-scholar. The rhythms of estate life, the long shadow of local history, and a childhood within sight of ancient earthworks shaped his curiosity early. He grew up amid the disruptions of the English Civil War, when normal patterns of study and patronage were unsettled, and this instability helped turn him from conventional elite pathways to the autodidactic habits that made him one of the most inquisitive minds of his century. He matriculated at Oxford, where he read widely rather than narrowly, and later entered the Middle Temple to study law. The law did not claim him; observation did. He never married, and the absence of a household of his own freed him for a lifetime of collecting, walking, measuring, annotating, and remembering.

Formation in a Time of Upheaval
The 1640s and 1650s formed Aubrey amid war, political reconfiguration, and new experiments in knowledge. Oxford, alternating between a royal stronghold and a center of learning, exposed him to a large mix of scholars, clerics, and virtuosi. In this setting he first met figures who would anchor his intellectual world. Chief among them was Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, whose company he greatly prized. Aubrey admired the clarity and boldness of Hobbes and later wrote his life with a frank, anecdotal intimacy that remains indispensable. He also encountered William Petty, whose bent for measurement and social arithmetic resonated with Aubrey's own taste for the concrete. The cast around him widened over time to include experimenters, architects, and collectors, and he developed the habit of noting what they did, what they said, and what they remembered.

Scholar, Collector, and the Royal Society
After the Restoration, Aubrey moved comfortably within the circle that gave rise to the Royal Society. He was associated with its program and was elected a Fellow. He conversed there with Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren, men whose pursuits bridged mechanics, chemistry, architecture, and instrument-making. Aubrey did not specialize in a single discipline; rather, he cultivated a method: gather particulars, prefer observation to hypothesis, and write down what witnesses say, distinguishing hearsay from personal sight. With Elias Ashmole he shared antiquarian interests and a collector's sensibility, and with John Evelyn he exchanged the kind of notes and curiosities that threaded London's learned salons and Oxford's colleges. He maintained correspondence with fellow antiquaries such as Anthony Wood and later with the Welsh scholar Edward Lhwyd, extending his reach into manuscripts, inscriptions, and natural history.

Antiquarian Fieldwork and the Ancient Monuments
Aubrey is remembered as a pioneering recorder of Britain's prehistoric monuments. Walking the chalk downs of Wiltshire, he carefully described Avebury, then largely unknown to scholars beyond its vicinity, and he set out a description of Stonehenge that was attentive to layout, measurement, and context. He argued against earlier claims that Stonehenge was a Roman work, disputing in particular the interpretation associated with Inigo Jones, and ascribed the great circles to a more ancient, indigenous ritual culture. At Stonehenge he marked a ring of pits around the central setting; these were later called the Aubrey holes in acknowledgement of his careful plan. His manuscript Monumenta Britannica assembled these and other observations, with maps, drawings, and notes that combined surveyor's craft and antiquary's eye. Although much of this remained in manuscript during his lifetime, it set a model for field recording that later archaeologists refined.

Topography and Natural History
Aubrey ranged beyond single sites to whole counties. He gathered materials for the natural history and antiquities of Wiltshire, interlacing geological notes, folklore, parish histories, coin finds, and the habits of plants and animals. He also compiled a great survey of Surrey. Where others prized polished narratives, he built layered files: place-names, epitaphs, charters, lists of rectors, odd customs, and physical descriptions of earthworks and churches. The result, though often unfinished, gave future scholars a quarry of references grounded in local testimony. His approach modeled what the Royal Society called for in its queries: faithful reporting, acknowledged sources, and the use of maps and measurements. Long after his death, his materials on Wiltshire and Surrey were brought to print, and their value has been confirmed by the many cases where his note is the earliest surviving record of a site, inscription, or tradition.

Brief Lives and the Craft of Biography
Aubrey's most famous literary achievement is the series known as Brief Lives. These character sketches, composed over years, are not formal biographies but minute-books of persons, drawn from conversations, letters, and the testimony of those who knew them. He wrote lively, compact accounts of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and William Petty, among others. He recorded both the public works and the small traits that cling to memory: voices, faces, oddities of temper, domestic habits, the manner of study, the look of a room. The method was radical in its candor. He sifted gossip from fact as best he could, often labeling doubtful reports as such, and thereby mapped a space between chronicle and memoir. In doing so he invented a recognizably modern biographical voice, alert to the texture of a life rather than only its great events.

Collaboration and Tension with Fellow Antiquaries
Aubrey's energy made him a natural collaborator, and he provided a wealth of material to Anthony Wood for the Athenae Oxonienses and other projects. The exchange was fruitful but sometimes fraught. Aubrey wanted his contributions to be used but also credited, and he worried about the fate of delicate character sketches in print. When controversies touched Wood's publications, Aubrey felt the chill of association and withdrew at times into the relative safety of manuscript circulation. With Ashmole he shared both curiosity and the practical business of locating charters and tokens of the past; with Evelyn he exchanged notes that braided natural history and civic observation. Though he admired many of his contemporaries, he kept a clear eye for their failings and their prejudices, a tone that gives his Lives their particular mixture of sympathy and sharpness.

Means, Patronage, and Personal Character
Aubrey began life with land but did not end it with much. Lawsuits, debts, and the soft attrition of a gentleman's obligations reduced his estates. He relied increasingly on the hospitality of friends, the kindness of patrons, and the sale or pledge of manuscripts. Yet the precariousness did not sour his temperament. His pages show a person sociable, self-deprecating, and constantly inquisitive, easily delighted by a new inscription or a fresh anecdote. He was gentle in manner and eclectic in taste, able to listen to a parish clerk as attentively as to a peer of the realm. He valued accuracy but prized witness even more, trusting that an accumulation of particulars would, in time, yield understanding. This faith in particulars guided him alike in measuring stones, noting a folk charm, or recording the look of a poet's eyes. He remained unmarried, and his friendships and scholarly exchanges became the main architecture of his daily life.

Publications in Life and After
In his lifetime Aubrey published little. The exception was Miscellanies (1696), a small book of preternatural curiosities that gathered stories of apparitions, dreams, second sight, and other phenomena then much discussed. Its lightness should not mislead: it reflects his broader habit of collecting reports and sorting them by credibility without foreclosing judgment. Most of his major works circulated as manuscripts, lent, copied, or filed in college libraries and private collections. After his death these papers were gradually edited and published. The Brief Lives appeared in selections and then in fuller form, quickly establishing their author as a singular voice. His surveys of Surrey and Wiltshire were printed from his materials, and Monumenta Britannica, though long a manuscript treasure, has come to be recognized as a foundation text in the archaeology of Britain's prehistoric monuments.

Legacy
Aubrey died in 1697, leaving no grand folio to summarize his career but rather a dispersed archive of notes, plans, sketches, and character portraits. Out of that archive has grown a reputation that spans several fields. Archaeologists honor him as an early fieldworker whose plan of Stonehenge, with the features later called the Aubrey holes, and his account of Avebury preserve evidence lost to later quarrying and neglect. Biographers read him as a pioneer of the intimate life-sketch, capturing Hobbes, Milton, Wren, Boyle, Hooke, Petty, and others in a living register. Topographers and local historians turn to him for first notice of small facts that would otherwise have vanished. His friendships and encounters in the Royal Society connect him to the experimental turn of the Restoration era; his collaboration and disputes with Anthony Wood show the tensions inherent in turning oral knowledge into print. Above all, his work embodies the conviction that the past survives in particulars: in a circle of stones on the downs, in a parish custom, in the remembered manner of a philosopher's speech. Through his patient accumulation of those particulars, John Aubrey gave later generations not just information, but ways of seeing.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Nature - Faith - Legacy & Remembrance - Mortality.