MAKING HISTORY
Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007
Royal Academy of Art, until December 2
MAKING HISTORY
Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007
272pp. Royal Academy of Arts. £40 (paperback, $22.95); US $80.
978 1 905711 03 1
"Of purely antiquarian interest”. The phrase itself smells musty now. We
are no longer so confident of being able to identify a dominant historical
narrative and relegate the rubbish to the dustbin of history. To us now the
dustbin is history, and we are its scavengers – some professional totters,
others mere amateur fossickers. Every boffin hopes to be a golden dustman,
rescuing from pollen residues and crockery shards the reality that has
eluded old-style, document-bound historians. It is political history which
now has to compete for airtime with the history of food and families, of
dress, disease and death. As David Starkey points out in his introduction to
this irresistible show, it is this “thinginess” which has given the Royal
Society of Antiquaries its peculiar flavour and accounts for its unique
contribution to our modern understanding, both scholarly and popular, of the
past. Until the 1920s, the Society’s principal meeting-room was arranged,
not like a lecture room, but like an anatomy theatre: seats were ranged
around a huge table on which the “Remains of Antient Workmanship” were
placed to be viewed, argued about and anatomized. It was things, not theses,
they looked at first and foremost.
This table is depicted, pretty accurately, in George Cruikshank’s engraving of
the Society in session in 1812, with Lord Aberdeen in the President’s chair
(as a young man, Aberdeen had excavated the Acropolis and brought back a
couple of marbles, now in the British Museum, though he later wearied of
what he called “ancient rubbish”). In Cruikshank’s caricature the table is
strewn with everyday objects fancifully dubbed, a coal scuttle labelled
“Ancient Shield”, a pigswill trough “Roman Sarcophagus” and a chamber pot
ticketed “Roman Vase”.
Antiquaries had not been going long before they had acquired a name for
gullibility, wishful thinking and plain error. Even the “Lamp of Knowledge”,
which the Society adopted as its emblem in 1770 and is represented in brass
on the floor of its entrance hall in Burlington House, was wrongly presumed
to be Roman and is now known to be medieval, perhaps a Jewish Sabbath lamp.
It was Dr Jeremiah Milles, President of the Society for fifteen years, who
was fooled by the teenage Thomas Chatterton and sponsored a second edition
of the poems of the fictitious fifteenth-century poet Thomas Rowley. Inigo
Jones, dispatched by James I to dig and measure at Stonehenge, concluded
that it was a temple built by the Romans to a sky god. Walter Charleton
rejected this thesis in his paper to the Royal Society and plumped for the
Danes as the builders of Stonehenge, and Avebury too. Yet these guesses seem
pardonable enough when we consider that, two centuries later, Flinders
Petrie, the rising star of the newish profession of archaeologist (the term
dates only from 1824), by estimating the date at which the midsummer sun
would have appeared directly over the Heel Stone, proposed that the henge
was built in 730 ad. Even in the twentieth century, dates now considered a
millennium too late were being confidently proposed by astronomers and
archaeologists.
Yet what strikes one from the first is how open the disputations were. When
Charleton made his pitch, the Royal Society had also before it a rival paper
by John Aubrey who deduced correctly, from the rudeness of the stones, that
the Ancient Britons must have dragged them there. Aubrey’s concern for
accurate measurement and his cautious empirical approach became integral
when the Royal Society lost interest in antiquities under the presidency of
Sir Isaac Newton, and a book dealer, a shoemaker and a librarian met in a
tavern to found the Society of Antiquaries. From the first, the best
antiquaries were concerned to measure things scrupulously, to write up their
findings carefully and, when pinched, to alter them in the light of fresh
evidence. They, like the natural scientists who had turfed them out, were
imbued with the spirit of Francis Bacon, and, as the number of Fellows
burgeoned into the hundreds, they became more and more determined not only
to interpret the relics of the past but to record them accurately. John
Carter’s marvellous drawings for the Society of English cathedrals are still
used by cathedral staff at Wells today. The dazzling precision of these
drawings gives them a peculiar beauty of their own. The cathedral project
sprang from the belief of Sir William Chambers, architect of the Society’s
first premises, in Somerset House, that a “correct publication of our
cathedrals” should be undertaken “before they totally fall into ruin, it
would be of real service to the Arts of Design”.
A sense of the fragility of the past, as much as intellectual curiosity, was
the Society’s driving force. Again and again, drawings and engravings for
the Society remain the only record of works of art that later perished in
fires or were demolished to make way for new buildings and railways, like
the wall-paintings at Cowdray House, or the wonderful medieval paintings in
St Stephen’s Chapel and in the Painted Chamber in the old Palace of
Westminster. For some of these prints a new large size of paper had to be
devised, known as “Antiquarian”. The expense was colossal, especially for a
society whose members and patrons were mostly modest professional men. At
the outset, the Society was operating on a tiny budget as a National
Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, V&A and national archive rolled into
one; not to mention a Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the
brainchild of William Morris, the keenest of antiquarians.
Long before SPAB was dreamed of, the Society was instrumental in protecting
precious fragments of the past. In 1721, when the Society was barely off the
ground, at the instigation of Sir William Stukeley it was agreed to pay ten
shillings to erect two oak bollards to protect Waltham Cross, one of the
only three surviving Eleanor Crosses, from being damaged by passing carts.
When on a later visit Stukeley found that the Turnpike Commission had
removed the bollards, he had them reinstated. This may have been not only
the first instance of a historical monument being protected by someone other
than the owner, but also the first example of realizing the necessity for
continued vigilance against vandals in high places.
It is with Morris that the aesthetic and moral, as well as the historic and
patriotic, purposes of the Society come into clearer focus. There had always
been some inkling that a kind of redemption might be found in dispelling
those mists of the past which were only the fog of ignorance. An
unsuccessful application to James I for the royal blessing on a Royal
Academy argued that it would be “for the universal betterment of your people
in their manners, for the more advantage of your kingly prerogatives,
certainly for Yr Majesties greater comfort”. And William Camden, who can
claim, after John Leland, to be the father of British antiquaries, said that
those with no knowledge of their history were “strangers in their own
country”.
Making History is not a big exhibition. It takes up only three-and-a-bit of
the Royal Academy’s main rooms. But it is full of charm and its catalogue
burns with enthusiasm, more so than many a self-styled blockbuster that
takes a period or style and smothers it in philistine commentary about the
consumption patterns of a new leisured class. There are some beautiful
objects on show that antiquaries have dug up or got hold of: the Roman
legionary’s cavalry parade helmet, found in 1796 by a clogmaker’s son
playing on waste ground at Ribchester, Lancs; the garnet-and-gold brooch
found in the Kingston Barrow by the son of the Revd Bryan Faussett, the
greatest of eighteenth-century barrow-diggers, who was himself sitting in
his carriage at the time, suffering from a severe attack of gout; the big
bronze shield found in an Ayrshire bog, along with five or six others which
have all disappeared. There are also objects here whose historical
associations must stir the most sluggish blood: the processional cross found
on Bosworth field with the sunburst of York embossed at Christ’s feet; the
golden spur from the battlefield of Towton with the motto “en loial amour
tout mon coer”; the Jousting Cheque with the scores from the tilting at the
Field of the Cloth of Gold – all these from the unsuspected riches of the
Society’s own collection.
But the delight of the show comes not just from the objects on display but
from the zest of antiquaries at work, their itch to see for themselves, to
dig deeper, to retrieve, record, restore and collect. Collecting was a
driving force from the start, going hand in hand with the business of
scholarly recording. John Leland’s “Laboryouse journey and Serche for
England’s antiquities” was undertaken as keeper of Henry VIII’s libraries,
to pick up books by ancient writers from the dissolved monasteries. For all
his scholarly virtues, he was the Official Looter. Sir Richard Colt Hoare of
Stourhead had 400 burial mounds dug up to provide material for his
pioneering two-volume History of Ancient Wiltshire, and he bought most of
the relics off his digger-in-chief, the “ingenious tradesman” William
Cunnington. At a humbler level, the pharmacist Charles Roach Smith built up
his own museum of antiquities by trawling the foreshore of the Thames and
scavenging in the rubble of building sites in Victorian London, purchasing
direct from workmen, while at the same time meticulously recording the
details of the site. Whether banking baronet or City pharmacist, the
antiquarian had notebook in one hand and cashbook in the other.
What an impatient, desirous, hot-tempered brood they were, from William
Stukeley to Robert Byron. In Burlington House you can hear the rumble of
their carriage wheels, the clink of their spades, the buzz of their
disputations. The show includes a drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, the
architect of the British Museum, of the excavation of the Woodchester Roman
villa, near Stroud, Gloucestershire. In the foreground, the diggers are hard
at work digging up the churchyard, perhaps about to reveal the great Orpheus
mosaic, the largest mosaic discovered north of the Alps. A couple of yards
away, an artist is sketching the scene. In the background, the church and
the manor slumber amid the trees. One can sense the deep, absorbed pleasure
of all involved, not least that of the sketcher who is sketching the
sketcher. And over it all, the haze of romance yielding gently to
scholarship. The only confusion I spotted in the catalogue actually
underplays the romantic element. The stained glass that now occupies the
east window of St Margaret’s Westminster is said here to celebrate the
wedding of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon. In fact, it was first made to
commemorate Catherine’s marriage to Henry’s ill-fated brother, Arthur.
Starkey makes it plain that the bulk of the work over the centuries, certainly
the bulk of the enthusiasm, has come from amateurs rather than academics. We
should not forget how, until the 1930s, the Society was virtually the sole
institution to fund excavations on any scale. By now, many of the
antiquary’s interests have been divided and subdivided into new specialisms.
The study of human skeletons has been repeatedly renamed, first as physical
anthropology, then human osteology, biological anthropology,
osteoarchaeology and, most recently, human bioarcheology. Even as these
disciplines multiply and spawn increasingly recondite technologies, the
popular enthusiasm for the past remains undiminished. Animal, Vegetable,
Mineral?, Chronicle and Timewatch became some of the longest-lasting TV
shows and Glyn Daniel, Mortimer Wheeler, Magnus Magnusson among the medium’s
most enduring stars. In the RA show, there is film footage of Wheeler’s
excavations at Maiden Castle and of early attempts to recreate the transport
of the blue stones from the Preseli mountains to Salisbury Plain. None of
these heavings has had any more success than Icarus had, the last such big
stone coming to rest in the National Botanic Garden of Wales, having gone
only a fraction of the distance.
If the exhibition has a gap, it is in the natural bias of national
organizations to undervalue the local. County organizations of
archaeologists and antiquaries get only a walk-on part. Yet their
contribution both to preservation and knowledge has often been formidable.
The Wiltshire Archaeological Society, for example, founded what is now the
Wiltshire Heritage Museum at Devizes and bought Colt Hoare’s collection,
from which it has lent the exhibition items from the Golden Barrow at Upton
Lovell. Papers published by such societies may vary between the scholarly
and the fantastical, but then this eclectic openness is the virtue of their
defect. The Woolhope Club, the Herefordshire society which covers natural
history and geology as well as history, architecture and archaeology, has
included among its members Roderick Murchison, the investigator of early
Palaeozoic rock formation, George Bentham the botanist, and the
brewer-miller Alfred Watkins, pioneer photographer and inventor of the first
profitable pocket calculator, but who is best remembered as the pioneer of
ley-line theory and the author of The Old Straight Track. Where else could
one find in the same room practitioners of the hardest science and of the
most engaging fancy? It is in these obscure transactions that you can still
recapture something of the old unity and uncertainty of human inquiry. Or,
as a short cut, you can go to Making History.
Ferdinand Mount's most recent novel is The Condor's Head, published
earlier this year. Mind the Gap: The new class divide in Britain appeared in
2004, and Cold Cream: My early life and other mistakes will be published
next year.
