Stonehenge (4 page)

It was James I, who prided himself on being up to date with intellectual fashion, who initiated the archaeological investigation of Stonehenge, although as befits the man known as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ his efforts had mixed results. Staying nearby at Wilton House in 1620, he expressed an interest in the stones. Since the Reformation the land on which Stonehenge stood had passed into private hands and it was to remain private property until the twentieth century. James’s intimate friend the Duke of Buckingham, eager to please, immediately tried to buy it for the King. The owner, however, refused to sell, so Buckingham had to be content with digging an enormous hole in the middle of it, from which he removed various objects now lost and, as John Aubrey later thought, caused one of the stones (stone 56) to tilt over ‘by being underdigged’. After this unpromising start the King approached the Royal Surveyor, Inigo Jones, and asked him to produce a report. Jones’s
Stone-Heng Restored
appeared posthumously in 1655. It was the first book entirely devoted to the subject and it argued that Stonehenge was Roman. Since Jones was an architect, the discussion of his theory belongs to the next chapter, but it belongs here too
because the reaction that it provoked kick-started the antiquarian investigation of Stonehenge. If there was anything the typical antiquary liked more than proving himself right, it was proving somebody else wrong, and Jones’s book prompted two people, Walter Charleton and his friend John Aubrey, to throw their energies into discrediting it.

The archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes famously remarked that every age ‘has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires’ and the Stonehenge of the Stuart antiquaries was born of the age that saw the foundation of the Royal Society, the wider exploration of the Americas and a new Baconian spirit of critical enquiry, in which nature and mathematics were the ultimate authorities. This critical, analytical cast of mind brought about a change in attitudes to the past and to the study of it. Until then history had been narrated, chiefly, as the story of a Golden Age, with everything since a long-protracted fall. ‘Till about the yeare 1649,’ as Aubrey noted, ‘’twas held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning; and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers.’ Enquiry now was all the rage, but it was tinged also with melancholy and foreboding. The generation of antiquaries that had lived through the Civil Wars had seen towns and families divided. They had watched Puritans smash stained glass and knock the heads off the statues in churches; they feared for the past and for the future. Charleton, who was the first to respond to Inigo Jones, had been particularly close to these events as physician to Charles I and later to his son in exile. His book,
Chorea Gigantum Or, The Most Famous Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly called Stone-heng
, was published in 1663. When Charleton looked at the monument he saw the stones
‘sleeping in deep Forgetfulness, and well-nigh disanimated by the Lethargy of Time’. But he also saw the spot where Charles II, now restored as king, had paused on his flight after the Battle of Worcester at one of the most desperate moments of his life. Both images haunt Charleton’s treatise and inform its surprising conclusion that the circle was the work of the Danes.

The argument was based on some, admittedly rather loose, comparisons with the stone circles of Denmark documented by his Danish friend and fellow antiquary Ole Worm, but the method was new and not naïve. In trying to understand Stonehenge in its own terms, without magic and in relation to the other similar monuments, Charleton was a pioneer. The dedicatory poem that prefaces
Chorea Gigantum
was written by John Dryden and it associates Charleton firmly with the new spirit of ‘free-born Reason’. From now on the attempt to ‘make
Stones
to live’ was to be on a par with medicine and exploration as a proper study for the best minds. In the end Charleton’s thesis found by analogy with Denmark that Stonehenge was not a temple, or the tomb of Boadicea as Edmund Bolton had suggested in 1624, but a meeting place for the election and coronation of kings. This was an especially happy conclusion given that Charleton’s book was dedicated to his employer, Charles II. As Dryden put it:

These Ruins sheltred once
His
Sacred Head,
Then when from Wor’ster’s fatal Field He fled…
His
Refuge
then was for a
Temple
shown:
But,
He
Restor’d, ‘tis now become a
Throne
.

Charleton is usually written off as a sycophant as well as a
poor scholar. Yet in so far as his book is a political statement, and there are few antiquarian texts of the seventeenth century which are not, he is no simple-minded royalist.
Chorea Gigantum
is not an endorsement of the Divine Right of Kings but of popular leaders, governing ‘by the general suffrage of the assembly’. It dwells, to the point of tactlessness in the circumstances, on the fact that the Danes were republicans. Charleton’s Stonehenge is an emblematic reminder to the restored monarch that he reigns only with the people’s consent.

The treatise concludes somewhat smugly that ‘this Opinion of mine, if it be erroneous, is yet highly plausible; having this advantage over the others … that it is not so easily to be refuted’. Charleton was wrong about that as well and he was not to rest on his laurels for long. Inigo Jones’s former pupil John Webb retaliated rapidly with his
Vindication of Stone-Heng Restored
, but it was Charleton’s friend and fellow antiquary Aubrey, having found that Inigo Jones’s account gave him ‘an edge’ to explore the matter for himself, who completely discredited Charleton in the process of making the first great advance in the modern understanding of Stonehenge. Aubrey, best remembered today for his
Brief Lives
, was a remarkable man – the first English archaeologist, the first folklorist, the first person to attempt to date Gothic architecture by its style and the author of the first book on place names. Sceptical, anti-clerical and peace-loving, he belonged like Charleton to the new age, though he had a hankering too for the old beliefs he documented as they passed, lamenting that in his own day ‘the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder’ had ‘frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries’. Aubrey made many innovations, but he laboured too under many difficulties. He was often in trouble, in debt and in a
muddle, the despair of his friends, his notes lying about in heaps ‘2 quiers of paper + a dust basket’, as he recalled on one topic alone, ‘some whereof are to be valued’.

Considering Stonehenge, Aubrey found that Jones had ‘not dealt fairly’ with either the monument or his readers, while Charleton, despite ‘a great deal of learning in a very good stile’, had made a ‘gross mistake’ in thinking it Danish. Like Charleton, Aubrey favoured ‘Comparative antiquity’, but unlike Charleton, who had made his comparisons from written descriptions and drawings – there is nothing to suggest that he actually visited Stonehenge – Aubrey decided to rely on ‘my own Eisight’ and on observations ‘writ on the
spott
’. In 1663 he ‘took a review’ of Stonehenge. This was a thorough plane-table survey, which gave him more accurate measurements and confirmed his worst suspicions about Jones’s. Such precise measuring, obvious as it now seems, was novel. Aubrey’s contemporary William Dugdale, a scrupulous antiquary in most respects, was content to describe a megalithic monument in Cumberland as ‘about the diameter of the Thames from the Heralds’ office’. Aubrey was not only more accurate, as a native of Wiltshire, he had the advantage of local knowledge, and his acute antiquarian eyesight had already helped him to one great discovery, which was to be critical to his analysis of Stonehenge. In January 1649, on a hunting trip, he saw Avebury and was the first person to recognise that it was not just a random collection of rocks but a stone circle, ‘the greatest, most considerable & ye least ruinated of any of this kind in our British Isle’. ‘No body hath taken notice of it before,’ Aubrey remarked, ‘though obvious enough.’ It was not to be the last time that a great archaeological discovery with implications for Stonehenge would be
made by simply looking with new eyes at what had always been there.

Avebury was the touchstone for Aubrey’s comparative study. By analogy, ‘a kind of Algebraical method’, he found the series of holes at Stonehenge marking, as he thought, the site of stones now missing. This was, he noted to himself, ‘a good remark’ and the Aubrey Holes bear his name today. He disproved the historian William Camden’s suggestion that Avebury had been a military camp by pointing out that the ditch was inside the ‘rampart’ and for defensive purposes it should be the other way round. He also dismissed Camden’s suggestion that the Sarsen stones were not stone at all but some form of artificial cement, pointing out, again from observation, that such stones were to be seen all over the Marlborough Downs. Aubrey’s interest in language and oral tradition led him to notice that local people called the monument ‘Stonedge’, meaning stones on their edges, which he thought a plausible derivation. On the question of how the sarsens got their name, he suggested that it came from the Anglo-Saxon
‘sar-stan
’ meaning ‘troublesome or difficult stone’, which still seems more likely than the conventional derivation from ‘Saracen’. In conversations with local people, especially Mrs Mary Trotman, a particular source of ‘good information’, he gleaned the story of the Heel Stone, which in his day was stone 14, said to bear the mark of Merlin’s foot as he ran from the Devil.

As Aubrey pondered all that he learned, the facts played on his imagination. Surveying the Marlborough Downs, he noted that the greywethers lying around might make one ‘fancy it to have been the scene, where the Giants fought with huge stones against the Gods’. This ability to ‘fancy’ was
as important to his understanding of Stonehenge as his plane table. Both are necessary in archaeology, as in any science, for while a pure fantasist can contribute nothing, neither is a pedant likely to have much insight. The balance of fact to imagination and personal experience in the study of Stonehenge has tipped wildly in both directions from time to time, but perhaps in Aubrey it was most perfectly poised. He looked to his own experience to interpret what he found, but more subtly and sensibly than Charleton. Considering the barrows around Stonehenge and remembering the Civil Wars, he decided that they must mark ritual burials rather than the graves of the Britons murdered by Hengist. After a battle, he noted, ‘soldiers have something els to do’ than build elaborate tombs. Jones’s naming of the ‘altar stone’ he thought another case of over-interpretation: ‘Perhaps they used no altar; for I find the middle of the monument voyed.’

Aubrey took a literally and intellectually broad view of Stonehenge, which he recorded in the first book of his
Monumenta Britannica
in 1665, including in it drawings of stone circles and monuments from all over the British Isles, some of which he visited, for others of which he relied on information from his fellow antiquaries. He went on to describe many ancient earthworks, some he thought British, others Roman, Saxon or Danish, and he drew a map showing the location of these sites in the south-west of England, demonstrating their density in the area of Malmesbury, Salisbury and the Welsh Marches and the continuity of this pattern with later towns and settlements. Within such a landscape Stonehenge still loomed large, but it no longer seemed an isolated wonder. Of its purpose, however, Aubrey remained uncertain. That it was a temple of some sort he was convinced
and its alignment might be astronomical, but of this ‘I can not determine,’ he noted scrupulously, ‘I can only suggest.’ When it came to authorship, his comparative researches pointed Aubrey firmly in the direction of the early Britons. ‘To wind up this Discourse’ he wrote:

The Romans had no dominion in Ireland, or (at least not far) in Scotland. Therefore these temples are not to be supposed to be built by them: nor had the Danes Dominion in Wales … But all these monuments are of the same fashion and antique rudeness; wherefore I conclude, that they were erected by the Britons: and were Temples of the Druids.

If modern archaeologists have found any quarrel with Aubrey it is with this almost passing reference to the Druids, which unwittingly ushered in more than three centuries of, from their point of view, nonsense. But the important part of Aubrey’s conclusion was that he believed Stonehenge to be British and to belong to a period of what came to be called prehistory. This was a new idea and one that took time to be accepted. The later seventeenth century, the age of Newton, saw further into space than ever before, but it remained trapped in time, with a span of less than six thousand years allowed for the whole of history. Using the biblical accounts of the Creation and the Flood, which seemed to be the only evidence available, Archbishop James Ussher had calculated in 1654 that the world had been created on 22 October 4004
BC
(which was a Saturday) and this was a generally accepted, if increasingly awkward, fact for some time to come. Aubrey, however, was a sceptic. He referred to the Bible very little in his writings and was prepared to speculate that ‘the world is much older
than is commonly supposed’. His collections of folk tales and local customs gave him a glimpse of a pre-Christian world, and he knew from his reading about the newly encountered inhabitants of the Americas. He was able to conceive of a time and a society that was neither recorded in writing nor yet merely mythological, within which a whole, real culture might exist and might create monuments. As for the Druids, according to the scant classical sources, they were the priests of the early Britons and Aubrey did not elaborate on them in this context, merely assuming, reasonably enough, that at that date they would have been responsible for religious rites and buildings.

In 1663 Aubrey presented a paper about Avebury to the Royal Society, the first archaeological paper ever delivered. Two years later he had completed his accounts of Avebury and Stonehenge, and King Charles, to whom Charleton, rather generously in the circumstances, had introduced him, was anxious that he should publish them. But Aubrey hated to finish anything. He went on adding to his
Monumenta Britannica
until 1693 and, despite later efforts by Aubrey himself and others to organise the material, it remained unpublished at his death in 1697. It appeared in a printed, partially edited form only in 1982. So, despite their importance, his findings had little immediate influence, certainly much less than those of Aylett Sammes, whose
Britannia Antiqua Illustrata
, came out in 1676. Sammes is a prime example of that kind of antiquarianism which is at the same time both completely wrong and highly important. Sammes was a lawyer and an antiquary. Almost nothing in his book was true, but the images he planted in his readers’ imaginations were indelible. His theory was that the Phoenicians, an eastern Mediterranean people from Tyre, had travelled as far as Britain and become its first inhabitants. This was already a current idea, but Sammes took it to new heights, or depths, of elaboration using highly speculative etymology. ‘Not only the name of Britain itself, but of most places therein of ancient denomination are purely derived from the Phoenician Tongue’, he asserted, without explanation, ‘the Language itself for the most part, as well as the Customs, Religions, Idols, Offices, Dignities of the Ancient Britains are all clearly Phoenician, as likewise their instruments of war.’ The Phoenicians, who spoke Hebrew, had settled the coasts, he went on. The interior inhabitants, the Celts, and their priests, the Druids, were drawn into the Phoenicians’ cult of Hercules, who had also come to Britain and was worshipped under the name of Ogmius at Stonehenge.