Whenever I approach the blind corner on the path south of my house in Oxford, I ring my clear-toned bicycle bell and think of John Aubrey, who noted in the 17th century that church bells sound clearer after rain (which was true for my little bell today). I have often also passed on to tense students approaching their final exams Aubrey’s excellent advice that you are ‘more apt to study’ if you’ve played a gentle game of real tennis (or some less real modern equivalent). And whenever I find myself on a coach to London passing through St Clement’s, I remember Aubrey’s note that ‘St Edmund, Arch-Bishop of Canterbury did sometimes converse with an Angel, or Nymph, at a Spring without St Clements Parish near Oxford’. There is no end to the ways in which Aubrey’s writings enchant the townscape: recently, while drinking coffee in Golden Cross yard, I heard a tour guide rehearsing the tale of Shakespeare stopping with the poet D’Avenant’s parents at their tavern here. Every word of his patter was derived from Aubrey’s inexhaustible Brief Lives (1669–96). 

So who was he, this man who made such wonderful notes on almost everything from Shakespeare to poltergeists to Stonehenge? John Aubrey was born in ‘Grandfather Lyte’s Chamber’ in his family’s substantial house at Easton Piercy in Wiltshire, ‘about Sun-riseing’ on 12 March 1626. (He died in Oxford in 1697 after a prodigiously productive life, in the course of which he finished only a very few projects, despite starting so many.) He was an antiquary, natural philosopher, biographer, folklorist, proto-anthropologist, architectural historian, travel writer, topographer and experimental scientist in an age before most of these disciplines existed. He had a vivid prose style, immense curiosity, intellectual originality, hundreds of friends and an acute eye for detail. Without the sprawling, incomplete and compelling manuscripts which he left behind, we would lose a unique channel of contact with the material past and also with the humanity of our ancestors. At his best he can give you the feeling that you are hearing the long-silent voices of the early modern dead at the other door of the room.

His friends certainly did feel this, for they often told him about their ghosts: many of their narratives (and other supernatural tales and traditions) found their way into Aubrey’s Miscellanies, published in 1696. He talked and listened to everyone – courtiers, virtuosi, blacksmiths, Jesuits, country people – and made notes and jottings of what he learned. He seems to have got on with most of the people he met, unless they were dunning him for debt or he was suing them for breach of promise. For a 17th-century individual, he seems unusual in being frightened of so few things and people: the bogies of his time, be they witches or Catholics, did not bother him much.

An Oxford-educated Wiltshire gentleman who lost his small estates to lawsuits and debts after the Civil Wars, he was somehow set free by this personal disaster to live, in Auden’s words, ‘a wonderful instead’. Instead of worrying about lawsuits and estate work, he lived on and with his innumerable friends. He travelled and observed places, traditions and monuments, always with a sense that many of his contemporaries, especially during the wars, were intent on the destruction of all these things. His drawn records of the megaliths at Stonehenge and Avebury are still valued today; but so are his records of people’s customs, songs and beliefs, which he gathered in Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7). Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot,’ he writes in his celebrated Brief Lives, ‘did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.’

The context for this delightful sentence about memory comes at the end of one of his most intricate and memorable pieces of writing. His notes for a life of the short-lived beauty Venetia Digby (as edited from Aubrey’s manuscript by Kate Bennett) are haunting:

She had a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire … her face, a short oval, darke browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eie-lidds. The colour of her cheeks, was just that of a Damaske-rose: which is neither too hot, nor too pale. 

In all his work Aubrey offers us those details about the past for which we long: dreams, places, personal idiosyncrasies of behaviour and speech. It is from him that we know that Sir Walter Raleigh ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dyeing day’. It is partly from his description of the ‘Lady of Christ’s College’ that the portrait of the young John Milton now in the National Portrait Gallery was identified. In a letter he notes his dream of three antiquarian friends: ‘I doe not forget you nor [their friend’s estate] Weston, for I oftentimes dreame I am walking, our old walkes towards the Wood.’ He gives an idea of the texture and feeling of days in the years of peace before the Civil Wars:

’Twas as pleasant a journey as ever men had; in the heighth of a long Peace and luxury, and in the venison season. The second night they lay at Marlborough, and walking on the delicate fine downes at the Backside of the Towne whilest supper was making ready… 

There are many events and two publications planned to mark this 400th anniversary year. There are monthly ‘brief lives’ writing workshops at Chippenham Museum, which will also host an Aubrey exhibition (with loans from the Bodleian
Library, the Ashmolean Museum, Worcester College, Oxford, the Royal Society and others) from 12 June to 19 September. There will be an academic conference on Aubrey at New
College, Oxford, in September. Louise Ryland-Epton has edited Aubrey’s remarkable Natural History of Wiltshire (never before available in a complete text), which will be published by Hobnob Press in June, and for Aubrey’s March birthday they will publish an edition of John Aubrey’s Villa, which is to say the beguiling and poignant collection of his drawings of, and projects for, the house and estate at Easton Piercy, which he lost to his creditors in the 1670s.

I’d like to think for a moment about the monochrome drawing which Aubrey chose to bind in at the end of this collection: a prospect across well-wooded land towards the spire of Kington St Michael, the church where he was baptised, and where the parish clerk taught him to read. A spring shower is passing over from the south, the trees and hedges are in leaf. Little figures of a man and a dog can be seen: Aubrey walking away from us, a stick over his shoulder, with his dog (Fortune) running ahead of him. He expresses in this drawing the same feeling which is found in his memoranda about his own life: that this loss of his childhood home set him free to become the writer and observer for whom many people still feel affection, four hundred years later.

His recall of friendships, of beauties now dead, of dreams, his loving drawings of corners of Wiltshire fields – all call on our sympathy. The unfinishedness of Aubrey’s work appeals across the centuries and makes potential collaborators of every reader. In this curious sense he remains our contemporary, as though he were in some way still alive, out there with his dog in the green southwestern quadrant of England. In his own words, reading him ‘makes things past to be present, and present past’. It is more than a literary encounter; it is a strange, satisfying, sleep-troubling and dream-invading relationship, one that adds emotional weight to the anniversary of Aubrey’s birth four hundred years ago.