Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

e but a Crosse or stone footstool in the way, hee’l be considering it so long, till he forget his
journey. 18
Obsessive yet absent-minded, full of facts, yet knowing nothing of real worth, the
antiquary of satire remained the unclubbable in pursuit of the illegible. The kernel of
truth from which the caricature sprang is evident two centuries later in Edward Willson,
as he murmurs to himself in his memoranda:
Local note by Parishes and Wapentakes…Quaere how these towns came into the possession of the Danes?
By Doctor Henry’s History it would seem that King Alfred gave them up as places of refuge to the Danes
who remained in England…Quaere whether this is expressly recorded in any good authority…Inscription
on a sword, found in the River Witham…the larger spur was found amongst some old brass in an
ironmongers shop here…it will be several months yet before I get my treatise on the proportions of bells
finished… I suppose that the incident of the skeleton was only an imaginary circumstance... 19
The amiable eccentric was, however, still shadowed by the darker figure of the
subversive. The antiquarianism of the sixteenth century had been born out of social crisis
and in succeeding centuries antiquarianism continued to be have political implications.
Leland was, whatever else, a government agent. James I ‘took a little mislike’ to the first
Society of Antiquaries on account of its views of the house of Stuart and it seems to have
disbanded as a result in about 1607. 20 George III was to be no more enthusiastic about its
successor. 21 The greatest of the Stuart antiquaries was William Dugdale (1605-86).
Dugdale was with the Royalist army at the Battle of Edgehill. His politics were
inseparable from his scholarship and were reflected in his greatest work the Monasticon
Anglicanum. A highly tendentious defence of the English Catholic church in which the
Reformation serves as an ante-type for the civil wars, its implications were still well
understood when it was re-edited and republished in the early nineteenth century on the
eve of Catholic Emancipation. 22
18
Earle, Micro-Cosmographie, p.14.
19
Society of Antiquaries, Willson Collection, 786/1 and 786/3.
20
Henry Spelman, quoted in Evans, History of the Society of Antiquaries, p.14.
21
See Chapter 5.
22
A new enlarged edition of the Monasticon was published from 1817-1830. It was edited between London
and Oxford and the long list of subscribers includes no fellows or colleges from Cambridge.
13