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

From sacred emblem of the division between this world and the next to medieval draught
excluder Lingard had no qualms about using the evidence of history to demolish the
dearly held notions of the present. It was this which made him popular and unpopular
with both Anglicans and Catholics.
Lingard was no sceptic in religion. Indeed he had begun, like Milner, as a
controversialist but had come to realise that pamphleteering meant preaching always to
the converted. He concentrated increasingly on the study of history in order to write
something that Protestants too would read and out of which, he hoped, both truth and
toleration might emerge. He was not, it must be said by his own account, an antiquary.
Nor has he been seen by posterity as one. The ‘Preliminary Notice’ to the 1849 edition of
his History of England specifically distinguishes between historians and other writers,
including antiquaries. Lingard preferred, he said, to follow ‘the stately and dignified
march of the historic muse’ rather than risk losing himself ‘in a labyrinth of dry details’.
24
As discussed earlier it was not uncommon for authors to disavow antiquarianism even
if they were fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, but Lingard really was not, in most
usual senses, an antiquary. He had an avowed aversion to ‘curious and miscellaneous
subjects’ and he was no collector. 25 Writing to Gage in 1831 he asked for advice about ‘a
carved piece of oak’ from Furness Abbey which he owned and ‘which as far as my
knowledge goes, is a great curiosity, though such things may be common among
collectors of antiquities’. 26 Clearly the presbytery at Hornby was no Abbotsford.
I would, however, argue that his method, as the first historian writing in English
to apply textual criticism to original sources, was essentially antiquarian. Unlike Hume,
his immediate predecessor, whose work he most particularly sought to contradict,
Lingard took the past seriously on its own terms. In this he was like his antiquarian
friends and correspondents. Where Hume, and most of his contemporaries held the
Enlightenment view that the Middle Ages had been a period of barbarism, of which the
24 th
Lingard, History of England, 5 edition, London, 1849, 1, p. xxvii.
25 th
Lingard, History of England, 5 edition, London, 1849, 1, p. xxvi.
26
Lingard to Gage, May 13 1841, Hengrave mss 21/3/41.
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