Stonehenge (5 page)

5. The Wicker Man from Aylett Sammes’s
Britannia Antiqua Illustrata
of 1676. A wild extrapolation from Caesar’s account of Druid sacrifices, the image inspired Wordsworth and Blake as well as the cult film of 1973.

Although Sammes was described variously by contemporaries as ‘an impertinent, girning and pedantical coxcomb’ and ‘not at all qualify’d’, his
Britannia Antiqua Illustrata
got into the cultural bloodstream. It was the extraordinarily vivid pictures that did it. His images of a Druid and an ancient Briton had the persuasiveness that his text so lacked and lie behind innumerable later books, plays and even operas. But it was the picture of the wicker man, a gigantic figure – first described by Caesar in one of the few contemporary accounts of Druids – into which the sacrificial victims were tied before being burned alive, that is most powerful. It lives on in the work of Blake and Wordsworth, and nearly three hundred years later it was strange and frightening enough to be the basis of a cult film. First made in 1973, starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee, and remade as recently as 2006 with Nicolas Cage,
The Wicker Man
now has a place in the iconography of modern
horror. Meanwhile, once looked for, Phoenician antiquities began to be discovered and went on turning up for centuries. At Margate in Kent there is an elaborately decorated shell grotto, first excavated in 1835 and looking, to the uninformed eye, like a late Georgian creation, which was found to be a Phoenician construction of about two thousand years old and was still shown to visitors as such in the 1990s.

So it was that by 1695, when Edmund Gibson’s new edition of William Camden’s
Britannia
was published, Gibson could complain with some justice about the imbalance of ‘notions’ to facts. Gibson knew Aubrey and coaxed him into preparing a manuscript for publication, but it was too unwieldy. Instead, Thomas Tanner, who undertook the Stonehenge section of
Britannia
summarised Aubrey’s findings. He also worked his way through the other theories, dismissing the Phoenician idea, which ‘has met with so little approbation’. In the end he decided on an explanation that was a mixture of Aubrey and Jones, concluding that the circle was a British monument, but not prehistoric, having been built in imitation of Roman architecture after the invasion. There was one person, however, who took Aubrey’s Druid theory very seriously indeed. This was the philosopher and freethinker John Toland. Toland was an Irishman who had rejected, violently, the Catholicism of his childhood and established an international reputation as a Protestant scholar. He was an acquaintance of the philosopher John Locke, whose theories Toland countered in his most famous book,
Christianity not Mysterious
, published in 1695, and he was later admired by Voltaire. It was Toland who seems to have coined the word ‘Pantheism’ for a belief in God as ‘the omnipresent space in which all material and immaterial distinctions are intelligible’, a belief
to which Aubrey was certainly inclined. Toland met Aubrey and found him ‘a very honest man’ albeit ‘extremely superstitious’ and ‘the only person I ever met, who had a right notion of the Temples of the Druids’. This right notion, according to Toland, was that the Druids had indeed created Stonehenge and a great deal else. A brilliant linguist, familiar with Gaelic and Norse languages and their surviving literature, Toland thought he could reconstruct from the written sources the whole of Druid civilisation.

Of the original Druids contemporary descriptions are few and most of them relate to Gaul. Only Caesar and Tacitus refer to British Druids, but Caesar’s remark that Druidism was British originally and that Gallic Druids went to Britain to study, allowed for much patriotic extrapolation on this side of the Channel. The only supposedly eyewitness account of British Druids in action is Tacitus’s description of them on Mona (Anglesey) terrifying Roman troops with a spectacular display of cursing, after which they were all massacred. The other scant information about Druids refers to their worshipping in oak groves, cutting mistletoe and carrying out horrific human sacrifices, and it was used, very selectively, by later antiquaries. Although a modern view of prehistory makes it clear that the Druids, in so far as they are documented at all, are described at a period very much later than that of Stonehenge, there was nothing in Toland’s time to suggest this. It was difficult enough to imagine a pre-Roman Britain at all, and if it had to fit into Archbishop Ussher’s time-span it must have been short-lived, so Toland assumed, not unreasonably, that all his Celtic sources were contemporary with the Druids and with their temples. His ‘Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning’, an account of ‘the philosophy of the
Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general, and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, was a vivid narrative. Druids, with their short hair, long beards and magic wands, making sacrifices at midsummer, became moving figures in Aubrey’s megalithic landscape, though they were not to Toland attractive. With their ‘priestcraft’ and their desire to keep knowledge to themselves, they ‘dextrously led the people blindfold’, in very much the way that Toland believed the Catholic clergy did in Ireland. But if not admirable, his ‘retir’d and contemplative Druid’ was compelling.

When Toland died in 1722 his work, like Aubrey’s, was still unpublished. His
History of the Druids
appeared only in 1726. For the general reader unpersuaded by Sammes there was therefore a hiatus in the study of the ancient past. Pepys, who went to Stonehenge on 11 June 1668, had noted tersely of the stones, ‘God know what their use was’, and Daniel Defoe, touring Britain in the 1720s, was in more or less the same position as he looked at the standing stones at Boscawen in Cornwall with mildly irritated bafflement: ‘all that can be learn’d from them is, that here they are,’ he remarked, and moved on. Soon, however, there would be much more to say about ancient monuments, when the archaeological survey of Stonehenge and the history of the Druids were united in the work of one of the greatest antiquaries ever to consider the subject, William Stukeley. Stukeley is the figure who dominates and divides the story of antiquarian Stonehenge studies. The publication of his
Stonehenge
in 1740 was a watershed. It brought the subject into the public domain for the first time as an object of scientific study, to be measured, described and analysed, as well as making it a stop on every tourist’s itinerary. It also established it, more controversially, as the work of
the Druids and the site of elaborate proto-Christian rituals. For modern archaeologists Stukeley is a difficult figure, apparently mad, like Hamlet, north-north west. He began, they have argued, as a perfectly sensible field archaeologist who, in 1729, was ordained in the Church of England, contracted religious mania and invented a Druid civilisation to justify his insane theological views. But Stukeley cannot be neatly sliced in half. It would perhaps be truer to see him as a man whose lifetime spanned a shift of sensibility which he strove to understand and reconcile with his own, admittedly peculiar, spiritual experience.

Born in 1687, the year Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
was published, Stukeley read law at Cambridge but later trained as a doctor. Like Aubrey, he had among his friends some of the most eminent men of his age, including Newton himself. It was to Stukeley that Newton told the story of watching an apple fall and how it made him consider the question of gravity. Stukeley was Newton’s first biographer, a fellow of the Royal Society and the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries. From a young age he had cultivated an interest in local antiquities. At a time when smart people took a Grand Tour of the Continent, Stukeley argued that ‘a more intimate knowledge of Brittan’ was of greater use and at least as interesting in educating the ‘young nobility and gentry’. As early as 1719 the Royal Society was thanking him for his ‘Curious Communications’ on the subject of Stonehenge. ‘Curious’ was a term of unqualified praise in antiquarian circles and in 1724 Stukeley published his
Itinerarium Curiosum
, a tour of places of interest ranging from Hadrian’s Wall to country houses. It was the sight of Aubrey’s unpublished manuscript, however, which inspired him to concentrate on Stonehenge and Avebury. For five years he made regular summer visits to both sites and excavated some of the nearby barrows. He walked and rode, measured and pondered, accompanied on some of his trips by his patron, Lord Winchelsea. One day in 1723, for variety’s sake, the two of them had dinner on top of one of the trilithons. Stukeley’s survey of Stonehenge and its environs was not bettered for another hundred and fifty years. Like a true antiquary, he brought the skills of one discipline to bear upon another. As a doctor he is thought to have been the first anatomist to practise vertical dissection and he applied this technique to his archaeology, working carefully down through the strata and keeping detailed notes and drawings. He also took his own measurements. Like Aubrey and Charleton, he was anxious to refute Inigo Jones and he realised that if no unit of measurement at Stonehenge corresponded to the Roman foot, then he was not dealing with a Roman monument. This proved to be the case. He discovered instead a unit which he named the Druid’s cubit, which was about 20 ⅘ English inches.

5. A drawing from William Stukeley’s manuscript. Stukeley spent many years studying Stonehenge before producing his controversial book in 1740.

Stukeley rediscovered the Avenue at Stonehenge. It was he who named the trilithons, from the Greek for three stones, and he who observed and named the earthwork which he called the Cursus, thinking that it had been an ancient sports ground. Since he made no mention of the Aubrey Holes, it seems likely that they had by now been filled in, but he did notice what had been ‘never previously observed’, that the principal axis was aligned, more or less, with the midsummer sunrise. This, along with the Cursus, as Stukeley noted, ‘very much enlarges the idea we ought to entertain of the magnificence and prodigious extent of the thing’. This was one of his greatest contributions to the subject, his ability to look out from Stonehenge into the surrounding landscape. What twentieth-century archaeologists came to appreciate once more as the ‘complex web of intervisibility’ on Salisbury Plain was obvious at once to Stukeley. It was obvious not least because he lived in the first great age of landscape gardening. The idea of shaping nature to aesthetic purpose, of placing in it features redolent with associative meaning, was thoroughly familiar to him. The Earl of Pembroke, to whom Stukeley dedicated his
Abury
of 1743, had a ‘costly model of Stonehenge’ in his grounds at Wilton, while Stukeley himself, more modestly, landscaped a ring of trees in his own garden at Grantham into a Druid grove. In his descriptions he talked and thought in terms of avenues, walks and prospects and at Stonehenge he found the summit of the landscape gardener’s genius, a ‘magnificent wonder … apt to put a thinking and judicious person into a kind of ecstasy, when he views the struggle between art and nature’. It is not putting it too strongly to say that Stukeley loved Stonehenge. His aesthetic appreciation of it was acute, intense and spiritual. He noticed that the sarsens were tooled – ‘chizel’d and far from rude’ – and that they were worked more finely on the inside than the out. He observed the tapering of the uprights to correct the effect of perspective, such as the Greeks had practised in architecture. His Stonehenge was ‘a true master-piece. Every thing proper, bold, astonishing. The lights and shades adapted with inconceivable justness … the proportions of the dissimilar parts recommend the whole, and it pleases like a magic spell.’