Ancients of the Earth
A HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES. By Joan Evans. (The Society of Antiquaries, 35s.) THE first pages of the first minute book of the Society of Antiquaries of London, written in William Stukeley's hand and dated January 1, 1717-18, laid down as Article vi that the Director of the Society 'shall superintend and regulate all the drawings, prints, plates and books of the Society and all their works of printing, drawing or engraving.' The present Director, daughter of one President and sister of another, has discharged her office with the exemplary zeal she has 'for the honour of the Society' by writing this, the first full-length history of the Society, planned as part of the celebration of the bicentenary of the Royal Charter granted to it by George II in 1751.
What kind of a Society was the Antiquaries meant to be? What did the Antiquaries at various periods of their history think they were at? In short, what was, and what is, an Antiquary? Dr. Evans herself senses `a true dichotomy among antiquaries . . between those whose eyes are trained to documents (in the narrow sense) and those whose eyes are trained to things.' This was always the issue and perhaps the growth of specialist societies, from the Numismatic Society founded in 1838 to the Prehistoric Society almost a hundred years later in 1934, is an indication of how impossible it was for one Society to study all the material aspects of the past : and yet how valuable a Society is which sets no barriers to its study of archeology—although admittedly it re- jected in 1883 a paper on the shipwreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovel in 1707.
What the Society did gradually set its face against was the study of taste—and how this infuriated Horace Walpole! 'The Antiquaries will be as ridiculous as they used to be,' he wrote to Cole in 1778, 'and since it is impossible to infuse taste into them, they will be as dry and dull as their predecessors. . . . Bishop Lyttleton used to torment me with barrows and Roman camps, and I would as soon have attended to the turf graves in our churchyards. I have no curiosity to know how awkward and clumsy men have been in the dawn of arts or in their decay.' But that was, in the end, what the Society of Antiquaries was for: to wrest the facts of history from the intractable material remains of the past, whether in themselves those remnants were beautiful or ugly, large or apparently insignificant. It was Pitt- Rivers who hammered home this doctrine that all objects were of equal interest to the archeologist: as Dr. Evans writes, He fully exorcised the ghost of taste.'
This long book provides a mine of well-documented informa- tion for anyone interested in the study of the past by the British
since the sixteenth century. GLYN E. DANIEL
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