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William Stukeley | |
|---|---|
 Portrait attributed to Richard Collins | |
| Born | 7 November 1687 |
| Died | 3 March 1765 (aged 77) |
| Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Cambridge |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Archaeology |
William Stukeley FRS FSA (7 November 1687 – 3 March 1765) was an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman. A significant influence on the later development of archaeology, he pioneered the scholarly investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire. He published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime. Born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, as the son of a lawyer, Stukeley worked in his father's law business before attending Saint Benet's College, Cambridge (now Corpus Christi College). In 1709, he began studying medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, Southwark, before working as a general practitioner in Boston, Lincolnshire.
From 1710 until 1725, he embarked on annual tours of the countryside, seeking out archaeological monuments and other features that interested him; he wrote up and published several accounts of his travels. In 1717, he returned to London and established himself within the city's antiquarian circles. In 1718, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and became the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 1721, he became a Freemason and, in 1722, co-founded the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain. In the early 1720s, Stukeley developed a particular interest in Stonehenge and Avebury, two prehistoric stone circles in Wiltshire. He visited them repeatedly, undertaking fieldwork to determine their dimensions.
In 1726, Stukeley relocated to Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he married. In 1729 he was ordained as a cleric in the Church of England and appointed vicar of All Saints' Church in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He was a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who encouraged him to use his antiquarian studies to combat the growth of deism and freethought in Britain. To this end, Stukeley developed the belief that Britain's ancient druids had followed a monotheistic religion inherited from the Biblical Patriarchs; he called this druidic religion "Patriarchal Christianity". He further argued that the druids had erected the stone circles as part of serpentine monuments symbolising the Trinity.
In 1747, he returned to London as rector of St George the Martyr, Holborn. In the last part of his life, he became instrumental in British scholarship's acceptance of Charles Bertram's forged Description of Britain [1] and wrote one of the earliest biographies of Sir Isaac Newton. Stukeley's ideas influenced various antiquaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to artists like William Blake, although these had been largely rejected by archaeologists by the second half of the 19th century. Stukeley was the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock and Ronald Hutton.
- ^ "The Description of Britain, also known by its Latin name De Situ Britanniae (On the Situation of Britain), was a literary forgery perpetrated by Charles Bertram on the historians of England. It purported to be a 15th-century manuscript by the English monk Richard of Westminster, including information from a lost contemporary account of Britain by a Roman general (dux), new details of the Roman roads in Britain in the style of the Antonine Itinerary, and "an antient map" as detailed as (but improved upon) the works of Ptolemy. Bertram disclosed the existence of the work through his correspondence with the antiquarian William Stukeley by 1748, provided him "a copy" which was made available in London by 1749, and published it in Latin in 1757. By this point, his Richard had become conflated with the historical Richard of Cirencester. The text was treated as a legitimate and major source of information on Roman Britain from the 1750s through the 19th century, when it was progressively debunked".