John Weever

Abstract John Weever was an unexpected antiquarian. He published Ancient Funeral/ Monuments in 1631, a year before his death, without having given any previous indication of interest in the subject. Thirty years earlier, he had tried his hand at a literary career, publishing five short volumes of verse, variously satiric, erotic, and religious, around the turn of the century, and had then fallen silent. What little we know of him has been pieced together in a recent biography by Ernst Honigmann, from whom we derive a picture of a fretful, irascible Cambridge scholar of Lancashire origins, tranquillized by money from a successful marriage, who turned in middle life to the study of church antiquities. At his own expense he travelled all over England for many years, compiling a record of monumental inscriptions and a register of who is buried where. It seems to have been a solitary, self-imposed task, carried out. haphazardly, that began to acquire some method only after he gained the acquaintance of the major London antiquaries in the early 1620s. He claims our attention, however, for several reasons. His hopelessly ambitious task was characteristic of the kind of comprehensive, nation-wide survey of an antiquarian subject inspired by the example of Camden ‘s Britannia, and it was carried forward by a rather simple-minded patriotism that desired to honour the memory of worthy men and women, wherever they were buried. He brought a note of literary richness to antiquarian studies, writing often with an eloquence suitable to his subject of mortality and commemoration. Weever also exemplifies the anti quarian as consolidator: he wrote to strengthen the social fabric of the Church in England by reminding his readers that the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, has always had a role in preserving and protecting the honourable dead of the nation, and he was motivated in part by an anxiety that this historic function was in danger of being negated by the growth of Puritan narrow mindedness which had no sympathy with the Church as a repository of accumulated social history.