SESIONES DE MEDIDA

While collecting information about topography and natural history undoubtedly served utilitarian purposes, it also fed an interest in antiquarianism and the historical past. These subjects were part o f an older humanistic tradition that was neither diminished by the new science nor by any attem pt to apply a dispassionate approach to natural history.^'^'^ Rather, the very combination o f ‘things’ with ‘persons & actions’, though disavowed by authors such as Plot, allowed for an appreciation o f the way in which the former had been utilised and understood both in the recent past and in antiquity. Each period possessed an intellectual, political, and emotional importance. For Plot, rustic customs and superstitions presented a ‘straw-man’ against which the antiquity and authority o f the Anglican Church could be established. This task, though ongoing since the onset o f the Reformation, was undoubtedly made all the m ore pertinent by the restoration o f the episcopate. As he noted in regard to Saxon ‘Well-worship’ at St. Clement in Oxford,

[this] was believed to be so effectual in curing divers distempers, and thereupon held to be o f so great Sanctity, that there tiiey made vows, and brought their alms and offerings; a custom, though com m on enough in those days, yet always forbidden by our Anglican Council..

Likewise, at Brewood and Bilbrook in Staffordshire, the decking o f healing wells with flowers and boughs on Saints’ days, though ‘now observed only for decency and customs sake...[and] innocent enough’ could be traced back to the practices o f the ancient Britons and Saxons, these having been ‘strictly prohibited by our Anglican

Councills as long agoe as King Edgar^}^^

For Aubrey the Middle Ages represented a kind o f golden age that had been ended by the religious extremism and iconoclasm o f the Reformation and by the violence o f the

Plot, Staffordshire, p. 109

164 xhis issue is addressed by Hunter in ‘The Early Royal Society and the Shape of Knowledge’, in idem (ed.). Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p.l75 and p.l96; cf. Lorraine Daston, ‘The Factual Sensibility’, ISIS, Volume 79, (1988), pp. 452-466

165 Plot, Offord-Shire, p.50 166 Plot, Staffordshire, p.318

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Civil Wars; a period, as he put it, o f ‘fanatique rage’.^^^ Perhaps for this reason his attitude towards country cures and beliefs was milder than that o f earlier Protestant polemicists. Unlike them he was n ot interested in the condem nation o f Romish superstitions, bu t in the survival o f ancient customs and beliefs. He hoped, as he wrote in his ‘Perambulation o f Surrey’, to ‘strike some truth’ out o f the ‘fabulous Traditions’ o f local r u s t i c s . L i k e Thomas Browne (whose Ume Buriall and Pseudodoxia Epidemica

influenced Restoration antiquarians), Aubrey believed that these truths would consist largely o f fables and legends that were begun by the learned and retained by the ignorant. For, as he p u t it, ‘the height o f Antiquity ends in Fable: and the depth o f Ignorance discends to Credulity’.

Aubrey’s w ork is replete with attempts to tie contemporary beliefs with those described by Pliny, Ovid, and Homer. He linked the use o f honeyed wine as a base for herbal medicines (something which was as common among élites as it was am ong rustics) to Pliny’s 'Natural History; O vid’s Metamorphoses were cited in relation to the belief that particular environments produced cunning or avaricious people; and Homeric legend was m entioned in relation to the belief among Surrey sextons that small white flowers grew spontaneously on ground where a corpse was buried.

This tendency to look for vestiges o f the past in rustic beliefs reached its peak in Aubrey’s 'Rimaines o f Gentilisme and Judaïsme^ a text which, though written from the mid to late 1680s, remained in manuscript (albeit one circulated among his friends) until it was pubhshed in a bastardised form first by Henry Ellis as part o f his edition o f Brand’s

Observations on popular antiquities (1813) and then, in 1881, by James B r i t t e n . T h e

section o f Aubrey’s text which deals with medical recipes consists primarily o f extracts from Pliny’s Natural History and Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica. These are correlated in places with examples o f their present day use either by Wiltshire country folk or by people w ho had written to him. The use by Mr Dennys o f Poole in Dorsetshire o f a

Hunter, Aubrey, p.l86; Quoted in fW , p.l66

*<58 Bodleian MS Aubrey 4, f.88v. For an example of a polemical work see Walter Bailey, A

Briefe Discours of Certain Bathes orMedidnall Waters in the Countie ofWarwicke (1587), pp.5-6

*69 Bodleian MS Aubrey 1, f.l32v

*70 Bodleian MS Aubrey 1, f.l49r; ibid., f.l49r; John Aubrey, The Natural Histoy and Antiquities

of the Couny of Surrey, (ed.) J.L. Nevinson, (Dorking: Kohler and Coombes, 1975; orig. 1718-

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spell to cure the bite o f a mad dog is recorded as never having failed. B.G. Cramer, a G erm an scholar w ho copied some o f Aubrey’s papers for the Royal Society, noted on the manuscript o f ‘Remaines’, that as with Pliny, w om en and children in his native county also placed the teeth they had lost by a mouse’s nest in the hope that they would be given iron replacements.

M ore notable still is the attention that Aubrey paid both to the social and political function o f superstition and its place, along with that o f ‘gentilisme’ in general, in early Christianity. The early part o f the text (particularly that titled ‘Ecclesiastica’) is full o f citations from Ovid, Homer, Horace, and Pliny, that point to the incorporation by the early Church o f pagan prayers and rites into its liturgy and sacraments. While the use o f holy wafers is traced to a m ention in Horace’s Epodon^ images and icons are linked to m entions o f idolatry in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Holy words - the basis, as we have seen, o f a num ber o f medical charms and spells - are described in the context o f book twent)'- eight o f Pliny’s Natural History.

However obnoxious this may have been to Aubrey (and there is no indication that it was), superstition was, given the ‘Ecceliasticall politie o f those times’, an ideal way o f maintaining control over the vulgar. For as he put it, ‘Nulla res efficacius multitudinem regit quam superstitio’, ‘nothing rules the mob more efficiently than superstition.’^^'* W hether or not Aubrey believed that superstition had its place in contemporary society is a difficult question to answer. While on the one hand he wrote o f the ‘lecherie in Eyeing: and imposing on the Credulous’*^^ and o f the ‘Piae Fraudes’ involved in all ‘Priest­ craft’*^^, on the other he believed that superstition, if removed, would simply be replaced by ‘Athéisme, and (consequently) Libertinisme’.*^^ This, as we shall see in the

A full provenance is provided in John Aubrey, Three Prose Works., (ed.) John Buchanan- Brown, (Sussex: Fontwell, 1972), pp.401-8. The original MS is kept as BE Landsdowne 231 ff.101-243

Pemaines of Gentilisme and Judaïsme in Three Prose Works, (ed.) Buchanan-Brown, pp.260-61.

Both the wording of this spell (‘Rebus Rubus Epitepscum*) and the instructions for its use are similar to that of the spell use by Henry Fowler. Again, no source is given.; ibid. p.265

Remaines, (ed.) Buchanan-Brown, p. 164; ibid, pp. 156-7

Remaines, (ed.) Buchanan-Brown, p. 132; Hunter, Aubry, p.210, fn.l. Though Aubrey cites

Numa Pompilius, the quotation was from Curtius.

*■75 R,S. MS 92 (B. Cramer’s manuscript copy of Aubrey’s Mémoires of Naturall Remarques of the County of Wilts), p.366

176 Quoted in the introduction to Three Prose Works, (ed.) Buchanan-Brown, p.xxxiv.

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following chapter, was really a question o f how the episcopate should present itself to late seventeenth-century society.

N otable among those who read Aubrey’s manuscript were Jo hn Evelyn and John Toland. Though also engaged (as can be seen from his commonplace books) with the task o f extracting pagan and early Christian superstitions from literary sources, Evelyn was critical o f any role that they might have in contemporary Christianity.^^® Toland, on the other hand, posited, in his Pantheisticon (1720), a two-religion theory in which a simple monotheistic religion served the wise whilst a gaudy, superstitious religion catered for the vulgar.^^^

’"^8 For example BL Evelyn MS 54(1), f.7 where he deals with the idolatry of the worshippers of Baal.

Hunter, Aubrey^ p,220 suggests that Aubrey’s Hypothesis Ethicorum <0“ Scala Religionis though now lost, would most likely have favoured a single, rationalist form of piety.

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