John Aubrey: My Own Life (6 page)

. . .

At home I am often alone. I watch the joiners, carpenters and stonemasons when they are hard at work rebuilding the manor house next door. Sometimes they give me scraps of their materials and lend me their tools. I fancy myself an engineer. I wish I lived near Bristol like my father’s mother. In a city I would be able to visit the watchmakers and locksmiths and learn their trades instead of learning grammar. I can understand grammar easily, but struggle to remember it. I like to dream. I like to think about the past.

. . .

I like to ask
²
the old men and women for stories. When I was smaller, old Jack Sydenham, the Snell family’s servant, would swing me high in his arms. He lives at Kington St Michael, near the old priory across the brook. He tells me that long ago the old priory was full of women: nuns, widows, grave single women, and young maids, learning physic, writing, drawing, etc. In memory of those women, the meadow is called Nymph Hay. They used to spin there in the morning with their rocks and spinning wheels. On Fridays there was a market at the crossroads for the nuns to buy their fish, eggs and butter. There is no market now. My grandfather remembers that in his grandmother’s time the tablecloth would be spread all day with food and drink to offer to pilgrims and other travellers passing by. But since the dissolution of the monasteries and religious houses, no one comes.

. . .

I lie on the bank
³
of the brook and dig idly in the blue clay. I count and name the plant types: calver-keys, hare parsley, wild vetch, maiden’s honesty, polypodium, foxgloves, wild vine, bayle, cowslip, primrose, adder’s tongue and others whose names I do not know. It seems to me a kind of ingratitude not to care about the plants that grow round about our dwellings, since we see them every day and they nourish us.

. . .

The north part
⁴
of Wiltshire between Chippenham and Malmesbury is stiff clay; the parish of Kington St Michael especially. Wormwood grows plentiful, as does woodwax and sorrel, an abundance of sower herbs and brook lime. It is an excellent place for plants. Our soil is very good for oaks and witch hazel trees.

The stones at Easton
⁵
Pierse are full of small cockles, no bigger than silver halfpennies. The stones at Kington St Michael and Draycot Cerne are also cockley, but the cockles of Draycot are bigger.

. . .

I am so bored
⁶
, so alone. My imagination is like a mirror of pure crystal water, which the least wind does disorder and unsmooth. So noise, etc., stirs me. I have been told that I was late to learn to speak. I still stutter on certain words.

. . .

When I was learning
⁷
to read, I found a flint as big as my fist in the west field by our house: it was a kind of liver colour. Such coloured flints are rare.

. . .

I love to read
⁸
. My nurse, Kath Bushell of Ford, taught me my letters from an old hornbook. The letters were black and purple and difficult to recognise. The parish clerk of Kington St Michael first taught me to read. His aged father was clerk before him and wore a black gown every day with the sleeves pinned behind, which was fashionable in Queen Elizabeth’s time.

I started school
⁹
in the church at Yatton Keynell: the parish next to Kington St Michael, where my mother was born. My grandfather went to the same school. There used to be a fair and spreading yew tree in the churchyard there; we boys delighted in its shade and loved to sit under it to learn our grammar; it furnished us with scoops and nutcrackers. But it was lopped to make money from its branches and died; the dead trunk stands there still.

There is another
¹⁰
remarkable tree in our parish: a great oak at Rydens. It was struck by lightning, not in a straight but in a spiral line, which wound one and a half times round the tree, as a hop twists about the pole. The scar in the bark looks like it was made with a gouge.

. . .

Mr William Stumpe is the rector at Yatton Keynell: he is the great-grandson of a great clothier from Malmesbury who purchased the site of the abbey and some of its neighbouring lands. Mr Stumpe has inherited several manuscripts that came from Malmesbury Abbey. He says that when he brews a barrel of special ale he stops the bunghole, under the clay, with a sheet of manuscript and, according to him, nothing works so well: my eyes prick with tears at the thought. Even before I could read, I loved to look at the parchment pages that covered the books of the older boys.

. . .

I have moved
¹¹
to Mr Latimer’s school at Leigh Delamere, which is in the next parish and better. Manuscripts are used to cover books at my new school too. Now I can decipher some of them. My grandfather says that in his time all music books, account books, copybooks, etc. were covered with pages of antiquity, and the glovers at Malmesbury even used them to wrap their gloves for sale. He says that over the last century, a world of rarities has perished hereabouts. Before that, they were safe in the libraries of Malmesbury Abbey, Broad Stock Priory, Stan Leigh Abbey, Farleigh Abbey, Bath Abbey and Cirencester Abbey. All these old buildings are within twelve miles of my home. But when the great change – the Dissolution – came, the religious houses were emptied, the occupants all turned out in the road, and their manuscripts went flying around like butterflies through the air. A hundred years later, it seems to me that they are still on the wing. I would net them if I could. It hurts my eyes and heart to see fragile painted pages used to line pastry dishes, to bung up bottles, to cover schoolbooks, or make templates beneath a tailor’s scissors.

. . .

My fine box top
¹²
has been stolen from me. At the age of eight I have learnt what theft is. I know that I am lucky not to have learnt before now.

. . .

In Latin lessons
¹³
I have learnt the first declension without a book and it has made my head ache, or perhaps the heat of the weather we are having this May is to blame.

. . .

My most distinguished ancestor
¹⁴
, my paternal great-grandfather William Aubrey, was a fine statesman and a Doctor of Law. He argued against the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots but Queen Elizabeth forgave him and called him her ‘little doctor’. He lived at Kew, a mile from Dr Dee, the learned alchemist, who lived at Mortlake. When she was a child, my grandmother often saw them together. In the house of Dr Dee, I have heard, they used to distil eggshells and other revolting ingredients: menstrual blood, human hair, clouts, chalk, shit and clay. The children were frightened because they thought Dr Dee was a conjuror of evil spirits.

I do not think I would have been frightened of him.

. . .

My nurse, Kath
¹⁵
, presses her cool hand to my forehead. I have been lying in bed all day. I was riding my pretty horse back from school when I had a premonition I would fall: a briar swept against my face; the horse bolted. I cannot remember them carrying me home. My body woke to vomit. Nothing, I think, is broken. It is just the ague come upon me again. The ague is my earliest memory; since I was about three or four years old, it has come regularly: my stomach wringing itself into knots, like a rancid wet sack, trying to turn inside out. Moments before, when I know it will happen, I scrabble at the sheets. I need to vomit; I need it to be over; I need it not to begin. There is pain. There is blood. There is bile. There is nothing left inside me. I fall back, my body slack around the tight little ball below my ribs. I had measles too, but that was nothing: I was hardly sick.

Kath knows the history
¹⁶
of England in ballad from the Norman Conquest down to the reign of the present King. She learnt it when she was young, sitting up late by the fireside, where fabulous stories of the olden days are passed from grandmother to mother to daughter: stories of sprights and the walking of ghosts. Many women cannot read. Kath can, but she still loves the old songs and all the frightening fables she learnt the same way. She believes in spirits, ghosts and fairies; so, sometimes, do I.

. . .

I am newly recovered
¹⁷
from a violent fever that almost carried me off. But now there is fluid running from a lesion in my head that will not stop.

. . .

It is venison season
¹⁸
. As I arrived at school today, I overheard a tall stranger ask about me of my teacher Mr Latimer, who still wears a dudgeon with a knife and bodkin in the old-fashioned style. The stranger was our Malmesbury philosopher, Mr Thomas Hobbes, returning to visit the man who had been his teacher too. Mr Hobbes is over forty but has no streaks of grey in his crow-black hair. He was born in Malmesbury, his father was the vicar of Westport, the parish outside the West Gate of the town, and his brother Edmund, a glover, lives here still.

When he looked up at me on my little horse, there was kindness in his bright eyes that are hazel colour. When he laughs, his eyes almost disappear. He told me that we boys are lucky to have Mr Latimer, who is a fine Grecian, the first in Wiltshire since the Reformation. When Mr Hobbes was a boy, some years older than I am now, but not many, Mr Latimer encouraged him to translate Euripides’s
Medea
from Greek to Latin iambics. He did it and presented the manuscript to Mr Latimer, who must still have it somewhere. Whenever we leave the class to go for a pee, Mr Latimer gives us a Latin word and we have to give it back to him upon returning. It is a good teaching method, by which he gives us a store of words without us noticing.

Mr Hobbes went to Oxford
¹⁹
at fourteen in the year 1603. His uncle, another glover, paid. Malmesbury is good for gloves and glovers. Mr Hobbes, who is tutor to the young Earl of Devonshire, will leave for a tour of Europe in a matter of weeks, but when he is back I hope we will know each other well for a long time.

Riding home, I felt happy. I have invited Mr Hobbes to meet my family tomorrow. He says he will come. He will stay in Malmesbury for a week or so. Something has happened to me and more will happen to me. This meeting seems an end to my loneliness. Mr Hobbes’s kind words were still in my mind this evening as I turned into Bery Lane, where there were two women in conversation beside a laburnum bush, one old, one young. They turned their backs. Malmesbury is good for witches too. They like the mud.

Here are some
²⁰
of the bad things witches can do: twist trees; tear and turn up oaks by the roots; raise tempests; wreck ships; tumble steeples; blast plants; cause whirlwinds and hurricanes; dwindle away young children; bind spirits and imaginations; make men impotent and women miscarry.

. . .

I rode over
²¹
to the old stones at Stonehenge today. I go often and know them well. About two or three miles from Andover is a village called Sarsden: Caesar’s dene on Caesar’s plains (also known as Salisbury Plain). The Sarsden stones peep above the ground a yard or more high. Those that lie exposed to the weather are so hard that no tool can touch them. They take a good polish. As for their colour, some are a kind of dirty red, towards porphyry; some perfect white; some dusky white; some blue, like deep blue marl; some an olive greenish colour; but generally they are whitish. Stonehenge – that stupendous antiquity – is framed from these stones.

Sir Philip Sidney
²²
, one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, wrote verses about Stonehenge almost a hundred years ago:

Near Wilton sweet, huge heaps of stones are found,

But so confused, that neither any eye

Can count them just, nor reason try

What force brought them to so unlikely ground.

But it must be possible to count and number the stones. I will do so one day.

. . .

My honoured teacher
²³
, old Mr Latimer, has died. There will be an inscription for him on a stone under the communion table in the church of Leigh Delamere.

. . .

I love the music
²⁴
of the tabor and pipe that is played especially on Sundays, holy days, christenings and feasts.

. . .

Anno
1635

Above alderman and woollen draper
²⁵
Mr Singleton’s parlour fireplace, in his house near the steeple in Gloucester, there is a moving screen, a thing of marvels. One long strip of paper, the length of the room at least, pasted together from printed pages, and rolled like cloth, tight at each end on a tall pin. The pins are secured either side of the chimneypiece, and if you stand at one end and turn, you see the figures from Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral procession march by all in order, a glow beneath their feet.

First come thirty-two poor men, one for every year of Sidney’s life. Next come the band, playing but softly on their flutes and drums; the standard bearer, with lowered and trailing flag; trumpeters, corporals, officers of his horse; statesmen, gentlemen, servants, friends. It took fourteen to carry the body of the soldier, courtier, poet in its leaden coffin below its velvet drape, to its resting place in St Paul’s Cathedral. Sidney died after the Battle of Zutphen from a bullet-torn thigh, almost fifty years ago. At his funeral, on 16 February 1587, Queen Elizabeth and her nation mourned.