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

its annual congress that he began to attract a wider following and to challenge the old
order. The Association was broadly antiquarian in its terms of reference. The modern
definition of archaeology as the study of the physical remains of the pre-historic past had
been proposed by Willis’s friend, William Whewell (1794-1866), in 1837, but the older
meaning of the word as simply the study of the past still co-existed. ‘Archaeological’ was
a more attractive term by the 1840s than ‘antiquarian’ when, in addition to the general
opprobrium that the word had always attracted, the Society of Antiquaries was felt by
many, including John Britton, to have slipped so far from the centre of the debate as to be
in the grip of ‘a long and morbid fit of apathy and uselessness… constitutionally unfitted
to administer to the reasonable demands of the majority of its fellows’. 204 It suited better
the ethos of the new reign and the foundation of the Association, like that of the RIBA,
which received its royal charter in 1837, marked a step towards specialisation and
professionalisation.
At the first BAA congress, in Canterbury, Willis, as President of the architectural
section of the Association, read his paper on Canterbury cathedral. It was to be his first
and last appearance. A dispute over the publication of the proceedings which it was felt
by some members should not be undertaken for profit, led to the secession of Willis and
others and the formation of the rival Architectural Institute, to which the rest of Willis’s
cathedral studies were delivered. The true reasons for the schism were thought by some
of the participants to be social and it was remembered by one of them that ‘there was a
small clique of ignorant persons who set up poor old John Britton as a rival to Willis’ and
that ‘Willis’s friends and pupils could not stand such nonsense’. 205 Willis himself,
according to Buchanan, prevented Britton from speaking. 206 The following year both the
rival societies met in Winchester. The BAA was addressed by Edward Cresy (1792-
1858), who had been a member of Britton’s short-lived Society of Antiquaries and
Architects of London. Like Willis he was an authority on Italian medieval architecture
but unlike him was also a working architect, currently employed in the important but
ungenteel capacity of sewerage consultant to the City of London.
204
Britton, Autobiography, (1850), 2, Appendix, p.103.
205
Quoted in Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, p.104.
206
Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, p.104.
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