William Stukeley (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 Bene't College, Cambridge. In 1709 he began studying medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, Southwark, before working as a general practitioner in Boston, Lincolnshire. From 1710 till 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 and wrote one of the earliest biographies of his friend, Isaac Newton.
Stukeley's ideas influenced various antiquaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to artists like William Blake, although had been largely rejected by archaeologists by the second half of the nineteenth century. He is nevertheless regarded as an important forerunner of archaeology for his emphasis on methodically measuring and documenting ancient sites. He has since become the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock, and Ronald Hutton.
Childhood and university: 1687–1708
Stukeley was born on 7 November 1687 in his parental home in Holbeach, Lincolnshire. He was the eldest child in a family of four boys and one girl; it is possible that he was named after William of Orange, who soon after became King of England. His paternal grandfather, John Stukeley (1623–1675), was a country gentleman who possessed a small estate at Uffington, Lincolnshire and who accrued a large number of debts by the time of his death. John had two sons; the elder, Adlard, was apprenticed to the legal profession, while the younger, also called John, was initially trained as a farmer before joining Adlard in a family law firm. On 28 May 1686, John married the teenage daughter of Robert Bullen in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire; their first child was miscarried, with William being their second.
In 1692, at the age of five, Stukeley began an education at Holbeach's Free School, where he learned to read and write. By the age of thirteen, he was the top-rated pupil at his school. As a schoolchild, he began collecting Roman coins after a hoard was found nearby and also developed interests in botany and medicine. In 1700, he was taken out of school to work in his father's legal business. With his father he travelled south to London on various occasions, where he purchased many books and scientific instruments. He was nevertheless bored by his law activities, and when he requested that he be allowed to study at university, his father agreed.
He began studying at Cambridge University in November 1703 as a pensioner at Bene't College. Among the classes that he took during his studies were Classics, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Divinity, Mathematics, and Philosophy. In his spare time, he dissected animals and searched for fossils in the gravel pits outside the town; in 1708 he dissected a hanged man. Outside of term time, he travelled to London, there taking anatomy courses with George Rolf and becoming acquainted with the poet John Gay. In February 1706 his father died, with his uncle passing away three weeks later. He returned home to sort out the family's financial affairs. In 1707 his mother then died, leaving him in charge of his younger siblings; to pay off family debts, he sold off their furniture and let out their Holbeach home. He also attracted local attention for dissecting a local who had committed suicide. In January 1909 he returned to Cambridge to defend his thesis, on the title of "Catamenia pendent a plethora". By this point he was taking a growing interest in architecture, producing careful pen-drawings of medieval buildings. He considered embarking on the fashionable Grand Tour of continental Europe to see the ancient ruins of Greece and Italy, but likely decided against it on financial grounds.
In August 1709, Stukeley moved to London to further pursue medicine under doctor Richard Mead at St Thomas' Hospital. In March 1710, he left the city to practice medicine in the countryside, establishing a practice in Boston, Lincolnshire. He took with him a black servant, which would have been a status symbol at the time. Little is known of the time that he spent in the town, although in 1713 he was accorded Freedom of the Town. His brother, Adlard, moved in with him and in Boston was apprenticed to a local apothecary. Stukeley also formed a local botanic society that went on weekly plant-collecting trips in the local area. In 1715 he produced a print of Boston's St Botolph's Church, which he dedicated to the Marquis of Lindsey. Many of his travels around Lincolnshire were written up in what appears to be his first book, Iter Domesticum, although the year of its publication is not known.
From 1710 until 1725, Stukeley embarked on a horseback expedition through the countryside at least once a year, taking notes on the things that he observed. In 1710, for example, he first visited the prehistoric ceremonial complex, the Rollright Stones. At the time, his interests were not purely antiquarian, for he also took notes on landscape gardens and other more recent constructions that he encountered. In 1712, Stukeley embarked on an extensive tour of western Britain, taking in Wales before returning to England to visit Grantham, Derby, Buxton, Chatsworth, and Manchester. He later published an account of these travels in Western Britain as Iter Cimbricum. Stukeley's later biographer Stuart Piggott related that this book was "not yet the characteristic product of a field archaeologist" but rather "differs little from that which could be written by any intelligent gentleman of the period".
Stukeley befriended the antiquary Maurice Johnson and joined Johnson's learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, which was based in Spalding, Lincolnshire. A 1714 letter indicates that Johnson recommended several books on British history to Stukeley, apparently at the latter's request; the suggested titles included Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, John Milton's The History of Britain, Robert Brady's An Introduction to the Old English History, Peter Heylin's Help to English History, and Richard Rowlands' A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the most noble and renowned English Nation. Another letter to Johnson, this time from May 1714, reveals that Stukeley was assembling a series of chronological tables of all British kings since Brutus of Troy; following the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stukeley believed that the legendary Brutus was a real historical figure. In September 1716, he wrote an account of Richborough Castle, a Roman military fort in Kent. That same year, he described having made a model of the Neolithic/Bronze Age stone circle of Stonehenge.