John Aubrey

John Aubrey (1626–1697) was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and biographer. Born into the Wiltshire gentry, he studied at Oxford, lost his estates through lawsuits and debt, and spent the rest of his life as a guest of friends, collecting information on everything from stone circles to folklore. He was among the first to recognize Avebury as a prehistoric monument and was a founding member of the Royal Society. The Brief Lives, hundreds of biographical notes on his contemporaries compiled for Anthony Wood between 1669 and 1696, remained in manuscript until long after his death and are now prized as the frankest and liveliest record of seventeenth-century English life.