Aubrey

Aubrey, JOHN, antiquary and folklorist, was born at Easton Percy, near Chippenham, in Wiltshire, 12th March 1626, and was educated at Malmesbury, under Latimer, Hobbes's preceptor, at Blandford grammar-school, and at Trinity College, Oxford. He entered the Middle Temple in 1646, but was never called to the bar; in 1652 he succeeded to estates in Wiltshire, Herefordshire, and Wales, but was forced through lawsuits to part with the last of them in 1670, and with his books in 1677. His last years were passed, in 'danger of arrests,' with Hobbes, Ashmole, and other protectors, till in June 1697 he died at Oxford, on his way back from London to Draycott. His quaint, credulous Miscellanies (1696) was the only work printed in his lifetime; but he left a large mass of materials. Of these, his Wiltshire and Surrey collections have in part been published; his 'Minutes of Lives' (Hobbes, Milton, Bacon, &c.), given to Antony à Wood, first appeared in 1813 (better edition by A. Clark in 1898); and his Remains of Gentilism and Judaism was issued by the Folklore Society in 1880. See an article by Professor Masson in the British Quarterly (1856).