For many people, up to the end of the seventeenth century, dragons and fairies were part of everyday life. Dragon skins hung in some parish churches and ploughing regularly turned up elf arrows, little-worked flints of great delicacy. The geographer Sir Robert Sibbald included several examples in his great account of the natural history of Scotland, Scotia Illustrata, published in 1684. At that date “Britain” was, by contrast, a largely mythical concept, a political allegory useful to the Stuart monarchy. After 1707, the situation was reversed. With the Act of Union, Britain became a legal entity, while dragons and fairies had begun their slow fade into myth. Writing in 1699, the naturalist Edward Lhuyd, to whom Sibbald had just shown off his collection of elf arrows, had no hesitation in dismissing them as man-made, “just the same as the chip’d flints the natives of New England use to head their arrows with”.

The shift of belief was seen by most historians as a sign of social and intellectual progress, a notion which in itself, as John Aubrey observed, represented a change in attitudes towards the past. History had generally been seen in the Middle Ages and after as a store of ancestral wisdom. Before “about the yeare 1649”, Aubrey wrote, “’twas held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation . . . and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his . . . forefathers”; now each generation prided itself on its superiority to the last. Aubrey, however, was an antiquary. He could not but regret that “Printing and Gunpowder” had “frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries”, and antiquaries on the whole have been more sensitive to the shifting nature of relations with the past and less guilty than historians of what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”.

Antiquaries and Archaists, a collection of essays based on a conference held at the Society of Antiquaries in the year of its 300th anniversary, triumphantly demonstrates the value of the kind of antiquarianism which takes the past seriously, even where it cannot take it literally. The work of a group of historians, archaeologists, sociologists and art historians, the conference had its origin in “a series of conversations held in several pubs”, followed by an interdisciplinary outing to inspect the White Horse at Uffington. The resulting papers range over time and space from Wiltshire to Beijing and from the early Middle Ages to the latest pagan goings-on at Glastonbury, sweeping with similar freedom across the boundaries of academic disciplines. Within its broadly chronological sequence the book describes not the conventional upward curve towards modern scientific materialism, but rather a wave pattern in our relations with the past of “enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment”.

In an original and witty opening essay on “Dragons, Elves and Giants”, Jeremy Harte discusses Anglo-Saxon and Medieval beliefs. He is sceptical of the explanation for giant myths that they derive from Anglo-Saxon amazement at the scale of Roman remains. This will not account, Harte points out, for giants like those described in the eighth-century poem “The Ruin”. Its anonymous author, Harte argues, was learned and “knew his Venantius Fortunatus”. Walking amid the ruins of Bath he was, unlike most visitors today, perfectly well able to read the Latin inscriptions. If he described it as the work of giants it was not because he and his readers did not know the difference between Romans and giants but that “they didn’t really care that there was one”. Harte makes no pretence of explaining why this was so. His purpose is not to provide answers so much as to reopen questions that have been too hastily closed. Different categories of experience are not the same as naivety.

Moving into the age of disenchantment, Megan Aldrich’s essay on the Quaker architect Thomas Rickman, who studied medieval architecture in the early nineteenth century, makes a similar leap across the boundaries between art and science that were in Rickman’s lifetime still permeable. In his case it was what he didn’t know that mattered. Earlier attempts to describe Gothic buildings had been based on readings of documents and had generally tried to cram the architecture of the Middle Ages into an equivalent of the Roman orders. Rickman, unable to read Latin, had only the architecture itself to work from. He was steeped in the lively world of self-education embodied in the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, and Aldrich suggests that he based his four-part system of categorization on the work of the meteorologist Luke Howard, specifically his On the Modification of Clouds of 1804. Rickman, who created “the first accurate account of the development of medieval architecture in the British Isles” and coined the terms for the periods of Gothic still in use today, has too often been a footnote in the history of the Gothic Revival. Aldrich revives him.

In the last section of the book Robert J. Wallis’s essay on modern paganism considers the “re-enchantment” of the present. His account of current debates between pagans, archaeologists and museum curators about the treatment of ancient sites and human remains suggests that a less purely materialistic view of the past is once more gaining ground. When Lindow Man, the body found in Lindow Moss, was loaned to Manchester by the British Museum for a year from April 2008, a “consultation report” led to an opening ceremony for the exhibition that included a pagan ritual, and the display was augmented with a shrine space for offerings to the ancestors. Edward Lhuyd would have been astonished by the recurrence of such beliefs; John Aubrey probably would not. The interplay of past and present, knowledge and belief, is complex and in raising as many questions as they answer the authors of Antiquaries and Archaists have done their job well. This is an inspiring, original and thought-provoking book.

Megan Aldrich and Robert J. Wallis, editors
ANTIQUARIES AND ARCHAISTS
The past in the past, the past in the present
170pp. Spire Books. Paperback, £19.95.
978 1 904965 23 7

Rosemary Hill’s book God’s Architect: Pugin and the building of Romantic Britain appeared in paperback last year.

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