William Stukeley
William Stukeley was an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman. A significant influence on the later development of archaeology, he pioneered the scholarly investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire. He published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime. Born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, as the son of a lawyer, Stukeley worked in his father's law business before attending Saint Benet's College, Cambridge. In 1709, he began studying medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, Southwark, before working as a general practitioner in Boston, Lincolnshire.
From 1710 until 1725, he embarked on annual tours of the countryside, seeking out archaeological monuments and other features that interested him; he wrote up and published several accounts of his travels. In 1717, he returned to London and established himself within the city's antiquarian circles. In 1718, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and became the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 1721, he became a Freemason and, in 1722, co-founded the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain. In the early 1720s, Stukeley developed a particular interest in Stonehenge and Avebury, two prehistoric stone circles in Wiltshire. He visited them repeatedly, undertaking fieldwork to determine their dimensions.
In 1726, Stukeley relocated to Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he married. In 1729 he was ordained as a cleric in the Church of England and appointed vicar of All Saints' Church in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He was a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who encouraged him to use his antiquarian studies to combat the growth of deism and freethought in Britain. To this end, Stukeley developed the belief that Britain's ancient druids had followed a monotheistic religion inherited from the Biblical Patriarchs; he called this druidic religion "Patriarchal Christianity". He further argued that the druids had erected the stone circles as part of serpentine monuments symbolising the Trinity.
In 1747, he returned to London as rector of St George the Martyr, Holborn. In the last part of his life, he became instrumental in British scholarship's acceptance of Charles Bertram's forged Description of Britain and wrote one of the earliest biographies of Sir Isaac Newton. Stukeley's ideas influenced various antiquaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to artists like William Blake, although these had been largely rejected by archaeologists by the second half of the 19th century. Stukeley was the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock and Ronald Hutton.
Biography
Childhood and university: 1687–1708
Stukeley was born on 7 November 1687 at the family home in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, the eldest child in a family of four boys and one girl; it is possible that he was named after William of Orange, who soon after became King of England.His paternal grandfather, John Stukeley, 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.
In 1692, at the age of five, Stukeley began an education at Holbeach's Free School, where he learned to read and write. By the age of thirteen, he was the top-rated pupil at his school. As a schoolchild, he began collecting Roman coins after a hoard was found nearby and also developed interests in botany and medicine.
In 1700, he was taken out of school to work in his father's legal business. 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.
He began studying at Cambridge University in November 1703 as a pensioner at Benet College. Among the classes that he took during his studies were Classics, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Divinity, Mathematics and Philosophy. 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.
Outside of term time, he travelled to London, there taking anatomy courses with George Rolf and becoming acquainted with the poet John Gay. 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. 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. In January 1709, he returned to Cambridge to defend his thesis, on the title of "Catamenia pendent a plethora". By this point he was taking a growing interest in architecture, producing careful pen-drawings of medieval buildings. 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.
Medical career: 1709–1716
In August 1709, Stukeley moved to London to further pursue medicine under doctor Richard Mead at St Thomas' Hospital. In March 1710, he left the city to practise medicine in the countryside, establishing a practice in Boston, Lincolnshire. 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, although, in 1713, he was accorded the Freedom of the Town.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. In 1715, he produced a print of St Botolph's Church, Boston, which he dedicated to the Marquis of Lindsey. 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.
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. In 1710, for example, he first visited the prehistoric ceremonial complex, the Rollright Stones. 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.
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.
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".
Stukeley befriended the antiquary Maurice Johnson and joined Johnson's learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, which is still based in Spalding, Lincolnshire. 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. 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.
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.
Return to London: 1717–1725
By May 1717, Stukeley had returned to London, living in Great Ormond Street. Once in the city he began to circulate within its antiquarian circles. 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. 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.Stukeley lectured to the society on a "fossil crocodile or porpoise" in 1719, arguing that it was evidence for the Genesis flood narrative; in February 1720, he lectured to the society on female human anatomy, illustrated with drawings of a cadaver he had autopsied. 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.
Also in 1718, Stukeley joined the newly founded Society of Antiquaries of London and became its first secretary. 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. 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.
In October 1720, he was one of the physicians who conducted an autopsy of a deceased elephant in Hans Sloane's Chelsea garden. 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". According to Stukeley biographer David Boyd Haycock, On the Spleen was significant as "his first major publication, and his only one in anatomy".
Stukeley developed a friendship with two brothers who shared many of his antiquarian interests, Roger and Samuel Gale. 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. 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. 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. That summer, he spent time in Great Chesterford in Essex, where he identified a Romano-British temple from crop marks in a field.
Stukeley devoted much attention to Avebury during the 1720s. 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. 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.
In January 1721, Stukeley was initiated as a Freemason. He suspected that Freemasonry was the "remains of the mysterys of the antients ". By 1723 he was the Master of the Masonic Lodge meeting at Fountain Tavern on London's Strand. In July 1722, he and several friends formed the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain. 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. Members of the Roman Knights each took a name from the Romano-British period; Stukeley's was "Chyndonax", the name of a priest listed in a Greek inscription reputedly found in a glass cinerary urn in 1598. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. These tours were written up as Iter Dumnoniense and Iter Septimum Antonini Aug. He also wrote an account of Dorchester's Maumbury Rings in October 1723 as Of the Roman Amphitheater at Dorchester.
Image:Stukelykitscoty.jpg|thumb|right|300px|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. 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 John Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica. The work also cited Biblical and Classical texts. In the book, Stukeley discussed how prehistoric people might have erected such monuments using sledges, timber cradles, rollers and levers. 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. The druids are mentioned only briefly in the book, when Stukeley suggested that they might be possible creators of the stone circles.
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. The Oxford English Dictionary lists that the first known use of the word relationship is from 1724, in his writings. In 1725, Stukeley engaged in the last of his great tours, this time with Roger Gale.
This took him from Dunstable up into the Midlands, where he visited Coventry, Birmingham, Derby and Buxton before heading 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.