William Stukeley

Stukeley was born on 7 November 1669 at the family home in Holbeach, Lincolnshire,[2] the eldest child in a family of four boys and one girl;[3] it is possible that he was named after William of Orange, who soon after became King of England.[4]

His paternal grandfather, John Stukeley (1623–1675), was a country gentleman who possessed a small estate at Uffington, Lincolnshire and who accrued a large number of debts by the time of his death. John had two sons; the elder, Adlard, was apprenticed to the legal profession, while the younger, also called John, was initially trained as a farmer before joining Adlard in a family law firm. On 28 May 1686, John married the teenage daughter of Robert Bullen in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire; their first child was miscarried, with William being their second.[5]

In 1692, at the age of five, Stukeley began an education at Holbeach's Free School, where he learned to read and write.[6] By the age of thirteen, he was the top-rated pupil at his school.[7] As a schoolchild, he began collecting Roman coins after a hoard was found nearby and also developed interests in botany and medicine.[8]

In 1700, he was taken out of school to work in his father's legal business.[7] With his father he travelled south to London on various occasions, where he purchased many books and scientific instruments. He was nevertheless bored by his law activities, and when he requested that he be allowed to study at university, his father agreed.[9]

He began studying at Cambridge University in November 1703 as a pensioner at Benet College (now Corpus Christi College).[10] Among the classes that he took during his studies were Classics, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Divinity, Mathematics and Philosophy.[11] In his spare time, he dissected animals and searched for fossils in the gravel pits outside the town; in 1708, he dissected a hanged man.[12]

Outside of term time, he travelled to London, there taking anatomy courses with George Rolf and becoming acquainted with the poet John Gay.[13] In February 1706, his father died, with his uncle passing away three weeks later. He returned home to sort out the family's financial affairs.[14] In 1707, his mother died, leaving him in charge of his younger siblings; to pay off family debts, he sold off their furniture and let out their Holbeach home. He attracted notoriety for dissecting a local who had committed suicide.[15] In January 1709, he returned to Cambridge to defend his thesis, on the title of "Catamenia pendent a plethora".[16] By this point he was taking a growing interest in architecture, producing careful pen-drawings of medieval buildings.[17] He considered embarking on the fashionable Grand Tour of continental Europe to see the ancient ruins of Greece and Italy, but likely decided against it on financial grounds.[18]

The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, which Stukeley visited, describing it as "the greatest Antiquity we have yet seen... a very noble, rustic, sight" which could "strike an odd terror upon the spectators".[19]

In August 1709, Stukeley moved to London to further pursue medicine under doctor Richard Mead at St Thomas' Hospital.[20] In March 1710, he left the city to practise medicine in the countryside, establishing a practice in Boston, Lincolnshire.[21] He took with him a black servant, which would have been a status symbol at the time. Little is known of the time that he spent in the town,[22] although, in 1713, he was accorded the Freedom of the Town.[23]

His brother, Adlard, moved in with him, and, in Boston, was apprenticed to a local apothecary. Stukeley also formed a local botanic society that went on weekly plant-collecting trips in the local area.[24] In 1715, he produced a print of St Botolph's Church, Boston, which he dedicated to the Marquis of Lindsey.[23] Many of his travels around Lincolnshire were written up in what appears to be his first book, Iter Domesticum, although the year of its publication is not known.[25]

From 1710 until 1725, Stukeley embarked on a horseback expedition through the countryside at least once a year, taking notes on the things that he observed.[26] In 1710, for example, he first visited the prehistoric ceremonial complex, the Rollright Stones.[27] At the time, his interests were not purely antiquarian, for he also took notes on landscape gardens and other more recent constructions that he encountered.[28]

In 1712, Stukeley embarked on an extensive tour of western Britain, taking in Wales before returning to England to visit Grantham, Derby, Buxton, Chatsworth and Manchester. He later published an account of these travels in Western Britain as Iter Cimbricum.[29]

Stukeley's later biographer Stuart Piggott related that this book was "not yet the characteristic product of a field archaeologist" but rather "differs little from that which could be written by any intelligent gentleman of the period".[25]

Stukeley befriended the antiquary Maurice Johnson and joined Johnson's learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, which is still based in Spalding, Lincolnshire.[30] A 1714 letter indicates that Johnson recommended several books on British history to Stukeley, apparently at the latter's request; the suggested titles included Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, John Milton's The History of Britain, Robert Brady's An Introduction to the Old English History, Peter Heylin's Help to English History, and Richard Rowlands' A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the most noble and renowned English Nation.[31] Another letter to Johnson, this time from May 1714, reveals that Stukeley was assembling a series of chronological tables of all British kings since Brutus of Troy; following the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stukeley believed that the legendary Brutus was a real historical figure.[32]

In September 1716, he wrote an account of Richborough Castle, a Roman Saxon Shore fort in Kent. That same year, he described having made a model of the Neolithic/Bronze Age stone circle of Stonehenge.[33]

An inward view of Stonehenge from August 1722[34]

By May 1717, Stukeley had returned to London, living in Great Ormond Street.[35] Once in the city he began to circulate within its antiquarian circles.[36] At Mead's nomination, in early 1718 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, then under the presidency of the scientist Isaac Newton.[37] Stukeley befriended Newton and visited him at his home on several occasions; he was part of a coterie in the society who supported Newtonian philosophy.[38]

Stukeley lectured to the society on a "fossil crocodile or porpoise" in 1719 (a plesiosaur now on display in the Natural History Museum, London[39]), arguing that it was evidence for the Genesis flood narrative;[40][41] in February 1720, he lectured to the society on female human anatomy, illustrated with drawings of a cadaver he had autopsied.[42] Following Edmond Halley's resignation as society secretary, in November 1721, Stukeley put himself forward as a potential replacement; he unsuccessfully ran against Newton's favoured candidate, James Jurin. This upset some of Stukeley's friendships in the group and cooled his relationship with Newton for several years.[43]

Also in 1718, Stukeley joined the newly founded Society of Antiquaries of London and became its first secretary.[44] In 1721–22 he was partly instrumental in setting up the society's committee on coins. He nevertheless appears to have taken little active part in the society's business.[45] He retained his interest in medical matters, and in June 1719 took a medical doctorate in Cambridge, enabling him to join the London College of Physicians in 1720.[46]

In October 1720, he was one of the physicians who conducted an autopsy of a deceased elephant in Hans Sloane's Chelsea garden.[47] In March 1722 he gave the Goulstonian Lecture at the Royal College theatre; his topic was the human spleen. He published his lectures as On the Spleen in 1722, appending to it his "Essay Towards the Anatomy of the Elephant".[48] According to Stukeley biographer David Boyd Haycock, On the Spleen was significant as "his first major publication, and his only one in anatomy".[49]

Stukeley developed a friendship with two brothers who shared many of his antiquarian interests, Roger and Samuel Gale.[50] From his father, the former Dean of York Thomas Gale, Roger had inherited a copy of the Monumenta Britannica, a work produced by seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. He showed it to Stukeley, who produced a transcription of Aubrey's document in either 1717 or 1718.[51] Piggott suggested that it was Aubrey's manuscript that first brought Avebury to Stukeley's attention. Circa 1718, Stukeley first visited the site, accompanied by the Gale brothers.[52] In 1719, he visited again, also taking in Stonehenge before traveling to Oxford to meet Thomas Hearne, an antiquarian who was highly critical of Stukeley.[53] That summer, he spent time in Great Chesterford in Essex, where he identified a Romano-British temple from crop marks in a field.[54]

A 1776 line engraving of Stukeley, based on a 1727 illustration by I. Whood

Stukeley devoted much attention to Avebury during the 1720s.[55] The records he produced of how the monument and its various features looked at the time has been important for later archaeologists for by the early twentieth century—when the earliest sustained archaeological investigation of the site took place—many of these features had been lost.[56] He witnessed locals breaking up megaliths in the circle and although powerless to stop them it may have been this observation that led him to produce a detailed record of the site.[57]

In January 1721, Stukeley was initiated as a Freemason.[58] He suspected that Freemasonry was the "remains of the mysterys of the antients [sic]".[59] By 1723 he was the Master of the Masonic Lodge meeting at Fountain Tavern on London's Strand.[58] In July 1722, he and several friends formed the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain.[60] The group began with sixteen members before attracting new recruits over the following two years. In admitting women as well as men, the Society was unprecedented within British society at the time; the Society of Antiquaries for instance would not admit female members for another two centuries.[61] Members of the Roman Knights each took a name from the Romano-British period;[62] Stukeley's was "Chyndonax", the name of a priest listed in a Greek inscription reputedly found in a glass cinerary urn in 1598.[60] Through the society he also became close friends with Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford and Heneage Finch, 5th Earl of Winchilsea; he encouraged the latter to carry out archaeological fieldwork, as at Julliberrie's Grave in Kent.[63]

In August 1721, Stukeley and Roger Gale set forth on another tour, visiting Avebury and Stonehenge before going to Gloucester, Hereford, Ludlow, Wolverhampton, Derby, and finally reaching Grantham in October. He wrote up his notes of the journey as Iter Sabrinum.[64]

He returned to Avebury in the summer of 1722 — this time with the artists Gerard Vandergucht and John Pine, who had both become Roman Knights that year — before proceeding to Stonehenge and Silchester.[65] In September and October he embarked on another tour, this time taking in Cambridge, Boston, Lincoln, Dunstable, Leminster and Rochester, largely following Roman roads. He published a description of this tour as Iter Romanum.[66]

In 1723, he travelled from London to Newbury and Marlborough before visiting Stanton Drew stone circles, and then heading back east to Bath, Exeter and Dorchester.[67] These tours were written up as Iter Dumnoniense and Iter Septimum Antonini Aug.[68] He also wrote an account of Dorchester's Maumbury Rings in October 1723 as Of the Roman Ampitheatre at Dorchester.[69]

Stukeley's drawings such as this 1722 prospect of Kit's Coty House in Kent have provided valuable information on monuments since damaged

It was while at Avebury in 1723 that he began a draft of the History of the Temples of the Ancient Celts.[53] This work drew upon his fieldwork at both Avebury and Stonehenge as well as his field-notes from other prehistoric sites and information obtained from the 'Templa Druidum' section of Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica. The work also cited Biblical and Classical texts.[70] In the book, Stukeley discussed how prehistoric people might have erected such monuments using sledges, timber cradles, rollers and leavers.[71] He devoted much space to refuting the suggestion, made by Inigo Jones and J. Webb, that Stonehenge had been erected by the Romans, instead attributing it to the prehistoric—or as he called it, "Celtic"—period.[72] The druids are mentioned only briefly in the book, when Stukeley suggested that they might be possible creators of the stone circles.[70]

In 1724, Stukeley returned to Avebury and Stonehenge, returning via Ringwood and Romsey before heading up to Lincoln and then back down to Kent later in the year. This was the final year in which he conducted fieldwork at Avebury. In 1725, Stukeley engaged in the last of his great tours, this time with Roger Gale.[73]

This took him from Dunstable up into the Midlands, where he visited Coventry, Birmingham, Derby and Buxton before heaving west to Chester and then north for Liverpool and the Lake District; there he visited stone circles like Long Meg and Her Daughters and Castlerigg stone circle. From there, Stukeley and Gale travelled further north to Whitehaven and then Hadrian's Wall, following it along to Newcastle before heading south back to London via Durham and Doncaster.[74]

In 1726, Stukeley left London and relocated to Grantham in Lincolnshire.[75] The reasons for his decision to do so are obscure.[76] It may be that he left the city due to frustration that his antiquarian research was not being financially supported by wealthier benefactors.[77] On his move to Grantham, Stukeley resigned as secretary of the Society of Antiquaries.[78] Stukeley struggled to earn a living as a physician in Grantham;[79] he also established a Freemasonic lodge in the town, although it never appeared on the roll of the Grand Lodge of England.[80] In December 1727 he married Frances Williamson, daughter of a gentleman from Allington.[81] The couple's attempts to conceive children met with failure, and Williamson suffered two miscarriages.[82] In October 1728, Stukeley buried the second of the two unborn infants in his garden, performing a funeral ceremony that drew upon his interest in ancient Roman practices.[83] Frances subsequently bore Stukeley three further daughters.[79]

Illustration of Stukeley

Stukeley was friendly with the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who shared his interest in antiquarianism.[84] Stukeley asked his friend if he may become a cleric in the Church of England, a request which Wake granted in June 1729.[85] Wake ordained him as a deacon in Croydon on 20 July 1729. Given his intellectual pursuits, Wake saw Stukeley as a welcome recruit in the Church of England's conflict with Freethought.[86]

In October 1729, the Lord Chancellor Peter King granted Stukeley the living of All Saints in Stamford, Lincolnshire, taking up residence in the town in early 1730.[87] He enjoyed the town's medieval architecture,[88] and began to write a history of the settlement in the form of a dialogue.[89] He also enjoyed gardening while living in the town, in 1738 building a "Hermitage" in his garden, which featured niches, a stone arch and a fountain.[90]

According to Piggott, Stukeley's ordination was "the essential turning-point in his whole life".[83] His reasons for joining the clergy are not known for certain. One possibility is that he sought the steady income supplied by a Church of England living, having for a while complained about how little he earned as a doctor. Alternately, he may have believed that becoming a cleric would be a secure position from which he could pursue the unorthodox ideas he was developing.[91] His decision to join the clergy concerned friends like Robert Gale.[92] To Piggott, Stukeley sought to use his fieldwork "as ammunition in a holy war against the Deists".[93] Stukeley would write that his purpose in becoming a cleric was "to combat the deists from an unexpected quarter", describing his "resentment of that deluge of profaneness and infidelity that prevails so much at present, and threatens an utter subversion of religion in general".[87]

In 1736, he co-founded a local antiquarian and literary society, The Brazen Nose, with six other founder-members (George Lynn being one of them). It held weekly meetings at which they discussed a varied range of subjects; the first meeting involved discussions of astronomy, lunar maps, a wasp's nest, a medieval seal, and a bladder stone the size of a walnut that had been retrieved from a small dog.[94] The society eventually lapsed, and Stukeley's attempt to revive it in 1746 proved unsuccessful.[95] He also remained interested in the local discovery of antiquities; he became aware of a large, silver Romano-British dish uncovered at Risley Park, Derbyshire in 1729 and read an account of it to the Society of Antiquaries in 1736.[88] In October 1742, Stukeley was alerted to the discovery of the Royston Cave by local politician William Goodhall.[96] He wrote about the site in his 1743 book, Palaeographia Britannica No. I', in which he argued that the cave's decorated chamber was established as a hermitage for a Lady Roisia de Vere circa 1170.[97] A 1744 pamphlet was then issued by the Reverend Charles Parkin, arguing that the carvings were Anglo-Saxon in origin. Stukeley was affronted by the suggestion, and wrote his 1746 Origines Roystonianae II in response to it.[97] In 1740, he was removed as a member of the Society of Antiquaries for not renewing his membership dues.[98]

In 1740, he published Stonehenge, a book that he described as being devoted to the subject of "Patriarchal Christianity".[99] He believed that learned people would read the book to learn about stone circles and druids, and that in doing so they would encounter the ancient proto-Christian of Britain and thus recognise how similar it was to modern Anglicanism. In doing so, he believed, they would reject the ideas promoted by deism and the freethinkers.[100]

In the winter of 1737, Stukeley's wife died at the age of forty. By February 1737/38, he suggested to Samuel Gale that they live together, although this plan never came to fruition.[95] In 1739, Stukeley married the Gale brothers' sister, bringing her to live with him at Stamford. Her marriage portion of £10,000 allowed Stukeley to maintain two houses from 1740 onward; summers were spent at Stamford while winters were spent in his home in Gloucester Street, London.[101] Also in 1739, he went into business producing medicinal oils with the daughter of John Rogers, a recently deceased apothecary whose wares Stukeley had previously championed.[102]

When in London, he regularly attended meetings of the Royal Society. In December 1741, he was appointed an associate member of the Egyptian Society, a group led by Lord Sandwich as its first president.[103] Through the society, Stukeley became friends with the 2nd Duke of Montagu, regularly visiting the latter's home at Boughton House, Northamptonshire.[104] Inspired by the medieval Gothic buildings, he began designing various Gothic plans of his own. This included a Gothic bridge and a mausoleum designed for the Duke of Montagu's estate, although neither were ever built.[105]

In 1746, Stukeley drew up a very careful account of Charles I's journey from Oxford to the Scottish army camp near Newark in 1646.[106]

In late 1747, Stukeley became the rector for St George the Martyr, Queen Square, a parish in Bloomsbury, London.[107][108] He moved permanently to the city in February 1748.[109] Stukeley was a friend of Isaac Newton and wrote a memoir of his life in 1752. This is one of the earliest sources for the story of the falling apple that inspired Newton's formulation of the theory of gravitation.[110] In the 1750s, he became a regular attendee at Royal Society events.[111] However, within the group he found himself increasingly side-lined under the presidency of Martin Folkes; although the pair retained a cordial relationship, Stukeley felt that Folkes was responsible for a decline in the quality of the society and was likely upset by Folkes' mocking attitude towards Christianity.[112]

Following Sloane's death in 1753, Stukeley was selected as a trustee to help establish the British Museum, reflecting his standing in London antiquarian circles. He was also involved in the running of the Foundling Hospital, where he became acquainted with the illustrator William Hogarth.[113]

In 1753, a Late Bronze Age tool hoard was uncovered during landscaping at Kew Gardens; Stukeley was invited to come and inspect the discovery the following year, at which point he met with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, who had an interest in antiquarian matters.[114] In 1754, he was re-admitted to the Society of Antiquaries.[115] That same year, one of Stukeley's parishioners died, leaving his book collection to the Bodleian Library and Lincoln College, Oxford. Stukeley was left as one of his executors, and, in May 1755, transported the book collection to Oxford.[116] Following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Stukeley developed an active interest in the subject, presenting papers on earthquakes to the Royal Society and, in 1750, publishing Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural and Religious.[117]

In June 1747, Stukeley had received a letter from Charles Bertram, an Englishman living in Denmark. In their ensuing correspondence, Bertram claimed to possess a copy of a manuscript allegedly produced by a 14th-century monk from Winchester known as Richard of Cirencester, which in turn contained an account and map of Roman Britain.[118] Stukeley expressed caution regarding Bertram's claims, asking for detailed information regarding the original manuscript's provenance, with Bertram responding that he could not provide any because he had been sworn to secrecy by the man who supplied him with it.[119] Stukeley unsuccessfully attempted to buy the manuscript from Bertram, stating that he would deposit it in the library of the British Museum.[120] In March and again in April 1756, Stukeley read papers on Bertram's manuscript to the Society of Antiquaries of London.[121] He published these in 1757 as An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works, which reproduced the map but not the text of the original manuscript, instead consisting of Stukeley's own commentary.[122] At the time, many antiquarians regarded it as a genuine text, although a few had suspicions;[123] in 1795, Thomas Reynolds declared that Bertram's document was a forgery, although this would only be widely recognised in the 19th century.[124] This discovery damaged Stukeley's reputation among later scholars, bolstering his reputation for credulity.[123] Stukeley had similarly been taken in by another forgery, James Macpherson's Ossian poems, writing to Macpherson in praise of his alleged discovery.[125]

Stukeley also displayed a growing interest in the Roman Emperor Carausius and his coinage.[126] In 1750, he and John Kennedy saw a sketch of a silver coin that had been discovered at Silchester and donated to the King of France. Both of them misread the legend on the reverse of the coin, believing that it read "ORIVNA"; it had actually read "FORTVNA", but with the "F" largely eroded.[127] In 1751, Kennedy published his Dissertation on Oriuna, in which he claimed that Oriuna was the guardian goddess of Carausius. Stukeley disagreed, believing that Oriuna was Carausius' wife; he published this argument as Palaeographia Britannica No. III in 1752.[127]

A 1721 view of Gloucester Blackfriars by Stukeley

The last decade of Stukeley's life was — according to Piggott — "relatively uneventful".[116] He had re-joined the Society of Antiquaries but the papers presented there were increasingly treated un-seriously, while at the Royal Society, his papers were turned down and not published in its Transactions.[98] He retained his concern with the destruction of ancient monuments, in particular the pillaging of Hadrian's Wall for stone, imploring Princess Augusta to intervene and raising the issue in a November 1757 report for the Society of Antiquaries. He also raised concerns about the sturdiness of the Eleanor cross at Waltham Cross and ensured it was renovated. [128]

In 1757, Stukeley's second wife died.[116] In 1759, Stukeley purchased a cottage in the (then largely rural) area of Kentish Town, to the north of London.[129] In 1763, he published Paleographia Sacra, or Discourses on Sacred Subject as a collection of some of his Sunday sermons.[130]

In early 1765, Stukeley suffered a stroke, fell into a coma and remained in this state for three days before dying in his bed on 3 March, aged 77.[131][108] He was buried without a monument in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene's Church, East Ham, which he is said to have selected as his resting-place on a visit there during his lifetime.[132]

Stukeley placed an emphasis on measuring and recording historical sites and encouraged his various correspondents to do the same.[149] He engaged in excavation by digging in and around archaeological sites, relating that doing so was "like an anatomical dissection".[150] He recognised the principle of stratigraphy, that different layers of soil reflected different periods in the development of a site.[150]

From the 1720s, he believed that the prehistoric complex at Avebury was laid out to represent a snake with its head and tail.[151] By 1724, he was arguing that the snake was a symbol of Christ, with its shedding of skin echoing the resurrection and the circle or head representing the unity and wholeness of God.[152] Using Halley's arguments about the gradual shift in the compass over time, Stukeley calculated that Stonehenge was built in 460 BC and Avebury in 1860 BC.[153]