John Aubrey: My Own Life (47 page)

A banker
⁵
in Lombard Street assured me that most tradesmen are ruined for want of skill in arithmetic. For the merchants sell to them by wholesale and the retailers (through ignorance) over shoot themselves and do not make their money again.

. . .

14 April

William Brouncker
⁶
, President of the Royal Society for about fifteen years, was buried today in the vault he had built in St Katharine’s, near the Tower of London (the vault is eight foot long, four foot broad, and about four foot high). He died on 4th of this month. He was governor of St Katharine’s and shortly before his death he gave the church a fine organ. He told me he lived in Oxford when it was a garrison for our late King, but was not of the University. Instead he addicted himself to the study of mathematics, at which he was a great artist.

. . .

Sir William Petty’s
⁷
thirty-two questions for the trial of mineral water have been printed in the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions
. I will include them all in my Natural History of Wiltshire, where I take notice of the springs in that county:

1. How much heavier is it than brandy?
   
2. How much common water will extinguish its taste?
   
3. What quantity of salt upon its evaporation?
   
4. How much sugar, allum, vitriol, nitre will dissolve in a pint of it?
   
5. Whether any animalculae will breed in it, and in how long time?
   
6. Whether fish, viz. trout, eels, etc. will live in it, and how long?
   
7. Whether it will hinder or promote the curdling of milk, and fermentation of liquors, etc.?
   
8. Whether soap will mingle with it?
   
9. Whether it will extract the dissolvable parts of herbs, roots, seeds, etc. more or less than other waters, i.e. whether it be a more powerful menstruum?
   
10. How galles will change its colour?
    
11. How it will change the colour of syrup of violets?
    
12. How it differs from other waters in receiving colours, cochineal, saffron, violets, etc.?
    
13. How it boils dry peas?
    
14. How it colours fresh beef, or other flesh in boiling?
    
15. How it washes hands, beards, linen, etc.?
    
16. How it extracts malt in brewing?
    
17. How it quenches thirst, with meat or otherwise?
    
18. Whether it purges; in what quantity, time, and with what symptoms?
    
19. Whether it promotes urine, sweat, or sleep?
    
20. In what time it passes, and how afterwards?
    
21. Whether it sharpens or flattens the appetite to meat?
    
22. Whether it vomits, causes coughs, etc.?
    
23. Whether it swell the belly, legs; and how, in what time and quantity, etc.?
    
24. How it affects sucking children, and (if tried) the foetus in the womb?
    
25. Whether it damps or excites venereal disease?
    
26. How blood let while the waters are drunk looks, and how it changes?
    
27. In what degrees it changes, in different degrees of evaporation, and brewed?
    
28. Whether it breaks away by eructation and downwards?
    
29. Whether it kills the asparagus in the urine?
    
30. What quantity may be taken at a time impure?
    
31. Whether a sprig of mint or willow grows equally as out of other waters?
    
32. In what time they putrefy and stink?
    

. . .

August

I am beset
⁸
by the fear that my two volumes of notes on the antiquities of Wiltshire, which I sent to Mr Wood via his friend Mr Allan, have been lost, since I hear that Mr Allan has now died of smallpox! Last week my Natural History of Wiltshire reached Mr Paschall, but when it arrived the box was all broken to splinters and it had been months in transit. Thus we see how manuscripts are apt to be lost!

. . .

12 August

This evening I was eyewitness to one of my ever-honoured friend Mr Edmund Wylde’s experiments. Just before we sat down to dinner this evening, he sowed in an earthen porringer of prepared earth seeds of parsley, purslane, balm, etc. The porringer was then set on a chafing dish of coals and by the time we had finished dinner (about an hour and a half later) the seeds had sprung up visibly: nineteen or twenty young plants. More appeared afterwards, their leaves as big as pinheads. We drew out some of them with pliers and found the roots were about half an inch long. The dish was put out in the garden overnight. It is raining very hard now. Quaere: if the plants will survive?

. . .

Mr Paschall has written
⁹
me a long and generous letter about my Idea of Education, which he has read through carefully. He thinks that it might be wise to make no mention of particular schools and universities, particularly not of their defects. He urges me to give some thought to educational proposals for the first nine or thirteen years, whereas at present my scheme only covers education after these years. He is particularly concerned that I should add a scheme for moral, legal and religious education.

. . .

The great stone
¹⁰
at Avebury has fallen and broken into two or three pieces (it was but two foot deep in the earth!). The attorney Walter Sloper of Winterbourne Monkton (the next village north of Avebury) has let me know this. I must go to Avebury and see it if I can.

. . .

23 October

I dined tonight with Mr Wood, who came up to London last Friday (17 October). He paid for our meal.

. . .

I have asked my friend
¹¹
Mr Paschall to be sure to send some berries of the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury to my mother this Christmas. (The old tree was cut down in the late wars, but by grafting and inoculation it was preserved for the country.) Mr Paschall tells me that recently labourers at Glastonbury found a manuscript indicating treasure nearby, and a search was carried out. A man who obtained stone from a renter of the abbey found gold in it. The gold came from chimney stones, where it was perhaps hidden at the time of the Dissolution.

. . .

November

Dr Plot has printed a small treatise on the origin of springs,
De Origine Fontium
, which he has dedicated to Mr Ashmole. He has finished his natural history of Staffordshire and I hope he will turn now to Wiltshire. I asked him to undertake this work in 1675, and offered him all my papers and assistance to this end. But Dr Plot says he is too busy at the museum and will not meddle any more in work of this kind unless for his native county of Kent. He urges me to finish and publish the work on Wiltshire I began almost thirty years ago. I fear that if I do not do this myself, my papers will perish or be sold in an auction, or somebody else will put their name to my work.

. . .

17 December

I related
¹²
to the Royal Society Colonel John Windham’s observation about the height of the barometer in Salisbury Cathedral. That steeple is 404 foot high; the weather door is 4,280 inches and at that height the mercury subsides 42/100 of an inch.

. . .

Anno 1685

January

Mr Wood tells me
¹³
he has lately heard that most, if not all, of the library at Wilton House is to be sold. I remember the books I read in that library, especially Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of the Psalms. No one knows that library better than my friend Christopher Wase, who was a tutor at Wilton. I must ask him for more information about it.

. . .

2 February

On this day the King suffered a sudden apoplectic fit.

. . .

6 February

On this day the King died at Whitehall Palace. His brother James, the Roman Catholic Duke of York, has succeeded him.

. . .

14 February

The dead King’s body was buried today in Westminster Abbey, without any manner of pomp. James II of England is our new King.

. . .

St George’s Day

Today I saw the coronation of King James II. I watched the procession. After the King was crowned, according to ancient custom, the peers went to the throne to kiss him. The crown was nearly kissed off his head. An earl set it right, but as the King left the abbey for Westminster Hall, the crown tottered extremely.

Just as the King
¹⁴
came into Westminster Hall, the canopy of golden cloth carried over his head by the wardens of the Cinq Ports was torn by a puff of wind (it was a windy day). I saw the cloth hang down very lamentably. Perhaps this is an ill omen. Storm clouds of religious strife are gathering.

. . .

St Mark’s Day

Tonight stately fireworks
¹⁵
were prepared on the banks of the Thames to celebrate the coronation of the King. But they all took fire together and the flames were so dreadful that several of the spectators leaped into the river, preferring to be drowned than burnt.

. . .

King James has ordered the trial of Titus Oates on charges of perjury.

. . .

May

Titus Oates has come
¹⁶
before Judge Jeffreys and been found guilty of false testimony, on account of which many innocent Roman Catholics were arrested and some executed. He has been sentenced to be stripped of his clerical habit, to be pilloried in Palace Yard, to be led round Westminster Hall with an inscription declaring his infamy over his head, to be pilloried again in front of the Royal Exchange, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and, after an interval of two days, to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. If, against all probability, he survives this punishment, he is to be kept a prisoner for life, brought forth from his dungeon five times a year and exposed on the pillory in different parts of London.

. . .

My honoured friend Sir James Long has promised to send me cloth for a new suit and four cheeses from Draycot. Wiltshire is good for cloth and cheese.

. . .

June

I have nearly finished
¹⁷
my revisions to my Natural History of Wiltshire. It is now fifteen years since I left Wiltshire, but I spent so long travelling between north and south Wiltshire on the road from Easton Pierse to Broad Chalke that I have a strong enough image of it in my mind to make some additions to my old notes even at this distance. My discourse on Wiltshire is like the portrait of Dr Kettell of Trinity College that Mr Edward Bathurst (one of Ralph Bathurst’s brothers) painted some years after his death. It was not done from life, but it did well resemble him. If I had had the leisure I would have willingly searched the whole county for natural remarks.

I hope hereafter my work will be an incitement to some ingenious and public-spirited young Wiltshire man to polish and complete what I have delivered rough-hewn, for I have not leisure to heighten my style. I will dedicate my Natural History of Wiltshire to my patron Lord Pembroke. He is hard in his bargaining but as just a paymaster as lives.

. . .

I need to move
¹⁸
my mother from Bridgwater, where she has been living of late, back to Broad Chalke, and will need to spend time helping her settle. Mr Paschall and his wife will be sad at parting from her. They have been good neighbours and friends to her in Bridgwater.

. . .

There is a hill
¹⁹
in Wiltshire under which three streams rise: one runs to Sarum, then on to Christ Church and into the French sea; another runs to Marlborough and on to Reading, where it runs into the Thames; and a third runs to Calne and on until it disgorges into the Avon which runs to Bristol.

It seems to me
²⁰
that the city of Bristol very well deserves the pains of some antiquary (Gloucester too). I think the best-built churches of any city in England are in Bristol, excepting the London churches that have been built since the Great Conflagration. Bristol had a great many religious houses in the old days; the Priory of Augustine is a very good building, especially the gatehouse. I think Bristol is the second city in England both for greatness and trade, and yet is not so much as mentioned in
Antonini Itinerario
.