Albion (32 page)

John Leland himself was perhaps the last man ever to touch or scrutinise
in situ
the texts of what is now a lost and forgotten inheritance. He saved some of the books, but most of the material was destroyed, “some to serve theyr iakes [toilets], some to scoure theyr candelstyckes & some they sent over the see to the bokebynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to the wonderynge of the foren nacyons.”

It is something of a paradox that the English, who of all nations used to pay homage to their past and to what Leland called “examples of extraordinarily wonderful antiquity,” should also be the most willing to efface and destroy that past; the vandalism of the Victorian developers in the 1880s, and of urban developers in the 1970s, testifies to that contrast. Yet it is not so difficult to elucidate. The power of the past lies beneath consciousness itself, and is so strong that the most invasive forces of destruction cannot necessarily efface it. It has also been argued that if antiquity is deeply embedded in place and in time, then extant physical memorials are not necessary.

Leland himself became insane, and was for two years in the care of his brother until he died; whether that insanity was produced by the spectacle of dissolution, and by the looting of all that he treasured, is an open question.

He was succeeded in his antiquarian zeal by a number of Tudor historians and topographers, among them John Stow, William Camden, John Bale and Sir Henry Savile. In the sixteenth century there was a great demand for a national historiography as noble as national history itself. Bale asked for “some learned Englishman . . . to set forth the English chronicles in their right shape.” It was recalled that Henry VII had “complained much of our histories of England, and that the English nation, which is inferior to none in honourable actions, should be surpassed by all in leaving the memory of them to posterity.” Antiquarianism could then be associated with national pride, and with the humanist demand for a return to “sources” and clarity of style; certain antiquarians were also concerned to revive the memory of the primitive English Church as a way of claiming spiritual legitimacy for England outside the jurisdiction of Rome. But the pure spirit of enquiry still remained the principal agent within the endless chronicles of the sixteenth century.

John Stow of London, however, can bear the title of Leland’s worthy successor. He was born in 1525, the son of a tallow chandler in Threadneedle Street; although he practised as a tailor for a while, his true passions were antiquarian. His first published work was an edition of Chaucer, that great exemplar of “ancient” English, before he embarked upon the systematic exposition of the old urban and national chronicles. In one of his earlier volumes,
A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles
, he wrote that “it is now eight years since I, seeing the confused order of our late English Chronicles, and the ignorant handling of ancient affairs, leaving mine own particular gains, consecrated myself to the search of our famous antiquities.” But his claim to enduring fame must lie with his comprehensive and elaborate
Survey of London
, published in 1598 as both a celebration and a memorial. It records the antiquities and monuments of the city, ward by ward, as well as local features and particular buildings. In a sense it captures the essence of English antiquarianism, which is conveyed in the notation and description of place. His
Survey
was successively edited and corrected by Munday, Dyson and Strype, who themselves celebrated London as “birthplace and breeder to us.”

This passionate attachment to one area is of the essence of antiquarianism. Stow loved London and spent much of his time wandering among its new buildings as well as its ruins which “cost many a weary mile’s travel, many a hard-earned penny and pound, and many a cold winter’s night study.” Yet in this pursuit he noted buried walls and old halls, ruinated tenements and luxurious lodgings, tennis courts and warehouses, each of which he attempted to date; his was an enormous undertaking, and every English historian owes him a debt. Yet his greatest achievement, perhaps, was to lend antiquarianism a local habitation. In his reports upon areas of narrow lanes or of monuments to local worthies he divines the
genius loci
—“now there is no such void place for willows to grow, more than the churchyard, wherein do grow some high ash trees. . . . The antiquities be these, first in Stayning Lane, of old time so called, as may be supposed, of painter-stainers dwelling there.”

His near contemporary William Camden had a similar reverence for the antiquity of place; his
Britannia
was published in 1568 with the purpose of restoring “Britain to its antiquities and its antiquities to Britain” by undertaking a survey of each county. The pursuit is known as chorography—the writing of place—and seems particularly suited to the English imagination. Camden himself helped to establish the Society of Antiquarians, which lent institutional coherence to a presiding national passion. The antiquarians characteristically delivered in English rather than in Latin their papers on local topography and customs, on charters and chronicles, on tombs and monuments, on laws and genealogy. The linguistic bond between the nation and its inhabitants was thereby asserted. It has been suggested that antiquarianism itself sprang from changes in land ownership, so that new families and new gentry might be ennobled by their location in county history rather than in medieval chronicle; but the study of the society was wider ranging, embracing the interrelationship and historical interaction between the land and its people. At a later date antiquarians were generally acknowledged to be radical in intent, establishing, for example, the nature of pristine English “liberties,” but even at this early juncture there was a marked hostility to antiquarian research from the court; James I effectively closed down the society. By concentrating upon the land and its people, antiquarians were deemed to be anti-monarchical in tendency; this in turn suggests once more that the English imagination itself may be of implicitly egalitarian temper.

The antiquarian publications of the seventeenth century follow broadly in the tradition established by Leland, Stow and Camden; Elias Ashmole’s Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, William Dugdale’s Origines Judicales and Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire took antiquarian methods into different areas. In the “epistle” to his
Parochial Antiquities
White Kennet remarked that “I cannot but congratulate the present Age, that a genius to our National Antiquities seems now to invigorate a great many Lovers of their Country.” As one historian of seventeenth-century literature has remarked, “Antiquarianism had undoubtedly become endemical in learned circles, and the utter devotion with which it was often pursued sometimes suggests that seventeenth-century fanaticism was emerging again in a new and more benign form.”
⁷

Yet the rigour of such studies faded by degrees into a form of imaginative antiquarianism. Inigo Jones, on surveying the monoliths of Stonehenge, pronounced them to be of Roman origin; he was no doubt encouraged in this belief by the classical ambience of his masques for the early seventeenth-century court. John Aubrey was always of an antiquarian disposition; he studied old stones and collected evidence of folklore, all in the service of an overwhelming passion for the past. His contemporary the antiquarian Anthony à Wood described him as “a pretender to antiquities . . . a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased . . . being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters sent to A.W.
⁸
with fooleries and misinformations.” But in that sense Aubrey was the very model of an English antiquary; he was exactly the sort of person whom Goethe derided, but who has added immeasurably to the English capacity for nostalgic scholarship. His knowledge was capacious but piecemeal, and was transmitted in random notes or jottings. “I have not leisure,” he wrote in typically English fashion, “to heighten my Stile.” He had a native fascination for biographical detail, too, and his
Minutes of Lives
combines erudition and scandal in an unmethodical digest.

The
full movement
of fanciful or romantic antiquarianism, however, manifested itself in the eighteenth century as the precursor or harbinger of what has become known as “romanticism.” The most celebrated and influential antiquarian study of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly Bishop Thomas Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
, published in 1765; its three volumes created the “ballad industry,” which was to have so powerful an effect for the next two hundred years, and reintroduced the Arthurian myths into English discourse. The titles of many of the ballads, rescued and often “improved” by Percy, are indicative: “King Arthur and King Cornwall” vies with “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” while “Hugh Spencer’s Feats in France” lies alongside “Durham Field.” Percy’s collection also inaugurated a revision of English poetic history.

This tendency to look backward, in the act of historical retrieval, emerges also in the eighteenth-century rediscovery of ancient music. An “Academy of Ancient Music” was established in 1731, and became “the first organisation to perform old works regularly and deliberately”;
⁹
it was joined in 1776 by the “Concert of Ancient Music,” and one historian has noticed that “no other country rivalled it in the amount and diversity of old music performed during the eighteenth century; no other went so far in building up significant social roles for such works in public ritual, or in defining them as a canon.”
¹⁰
The antiquarian tradition had existed before; the term “ancient music” emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century, and before that date Elizabethan “anthems and services”
¹¹
were performed in many English cathedrals. But in the eighteenth century “ancient music” became a key phrase for any understanding of English culture. The academy published a series of letters upon musical subjects, addressed nominally to Italy, in one of which it was stated that “when you cast your eyes upon those pieces [by Tallis and Byrd], you will clearly perceive that true and solid music is not in its infancy with us, and that, whatever some on your side of the Alps may imagine to the contrary, the muses have of old taken up their abode in England.” It is of some significance that in 1728 Daniel Defoe was one of the first to propose an Academy of Music; William Hogarth, too, was one of its members. It would seem that the notion of ancient music was remarkably congenial to the English imagination. It has even been claimed that the “tradition of ancient music was the foundation of the canon of musical classics in England,”
¹²
where antiquarianism becomes the standard both of taste and of performance.

The same predilections are also to be found in the arts of architecture. William Kent and John Vanbrugh were enchanted and influenced by medieval architecture, and did not hesitate to reproduce ogees, quatrefoils and fan vaulting. Batty Langley published a volume entitled
Gothic Architecture
Improved by Rules and Proportions
in 1747, but in fact it was the irregularity and eclecticism of Gothic which most appealed to the English imagination. Vanbrugh himself summarised this native inclination when he wrote that there “is perhaps no one thing which the most polite part of mankind have more generally agreed on; than in the value they have set on ancient times.”

It is no paradox, therefore, that the culture of nineteenth-century England, which witnessed the development of an entirely new metropolitan civilisation, should itself have been similarly preoccupied with “ancient times.” It is nonetheless curious that the Victorian age of innovation should also be the age of restoration, that a fervent belief in progress should be accompanied by a deep need for revival, and that a period of unprecedented industrial and commercial expansion should also be a period of unremitting nostalgia. Yet the vagaries of the human and social constitution are such that apparently irreconcilable forces can work together. There was some comfort to be derived, after all, from the close identification of Victorian architects and poets with medieval England; it offered a vision of permanence in the face of constant change, and a monument of faith in an age when scepticism and unbelief were everywhere apparent. The vogue for Pre-Raphaelite painting is part of the same movement of taste.

The close association with medievalism also provided an image of organic unity, of a civilisation established upon firm religious and cultural principles, in a period when every aspect of society was being called into doubt. Between 1821 and 1823 Augustus Charles Pugin published
Specimens of
Gothic Architecture, which may be seen as equivalent to Sir Walter Scott’s
Kenilworth,
composed in the same period. Nineteenth-century architecture itself is marked by a conflation of antique styles, from the early Gothic of Pugin himself, most thoroughly exemplified by the interiors of the Palace of Westminster, to the high Victorian Gothic of Butterfield and Burges. Even a pragmatist such as George Gilbert Scott realised that the English imagination was thoroughly backward. “I am no medievalist,” he wrote in
Remarks on
Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future
:

I do not advocate the styles of the middle ages as such. If we had a distinctive architecture of our own day worthy of the greatness of our age, I should be content to follow it; but we have not; and the middle ages having been the latest period which possessed a style of its own . . . I strongly hold that it has greater
prima facie
claims to be used as the nucleus of our developments than those of ancient Greece or Rome.

Once more emerges the peculiar fact that an old style is considered more appropriate for a new civilisation; peculiar, that is, to the English imagination. Gilbert Scott’s own attempts to restore the churches of medieval England were not altogether popular and prompted accusations of vandalism. His endeavours, however, led to the establishment by William Morris of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, an institution which reflected Morris’s own intense medievalism, which in turn was exemplified by such writings as
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems
.