istory is gossip,” the poet Robert Frost said. No one understood this better than John Aubrey. Aubrey was the first biographer in the modern sense. Before he wrote his Brief Lives in the late 17th century, most biographers weren’t interested in gossip – what kind of clothes people wore, their personality, the colour of their eyes. The purpose of telling the life of a famous person was to teach a moral lesson, either about a saint or about a real brute.
Aubrey had a different idea. He wanted to get at the “naked and plain truthe”, even if it raised a “blush in a young virgin’s cheeks”. Now he himself is the subject of a novel kind of biography, John Aubrey: My Own Life, by the Cambridge scholar Ruth Scurr. Scurr decided that a conventional biography would not work, so she has put together a diary instead – using his own words. It is a bold and brilliant experiment, but it suits the fragmentary nature of Aubrey’s work and life.
His brainwave was to collect seemingly inconsequential details, and he reassured sceptics that “a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull”. It came naturally to him because he was an inveterate hoarder of fragments – old stuff, coins, books. He collected anecdotes in the same way. “I heard…” is how his stories often start. It’s no wonder that he sought refuge in the past. He lived through times of ruction: the Civil War (he packed in his Oxford degree because of it), the execution of Charles I, Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution.
His mini-biographies treat all sorts – philosophers, scientists, women (usually colourful women). Edmund Waller, for example, the royalist politician and poet, had “frizzed” hair and a “brain very hot”; Sir John Danvers would perfume his beaver hat by brushing it on aromatic hyssop and thyme; the lawyer John Selden “got more by his prick than he had done by his practice” (according to Aubrey’s saddler); and the Countess of Pembroke was “very salacious”.
Aubrey’s truthful technique is commonplace now but it must have seemed radical back then. The authors of the old exemplary biographies were not interested in realism – they shaped the narrative to fit the message. A sympathetic 16th-century life of Luther would be keen to show that the great Protestant reformer was an instrument of divine providence. Today, we are equally interested in the fact that he had chronic constipation and wrote his 95 theses on the lavatory.
But has the pendulum swung too far? Is our age only interested in trivia? “Give us the goss!” we leer. I would argue that there is a right sort of gossip – what you might call socio-anthropological analysis – and a wrong sort. ŠMy colleague Christopher Howse has written that he is repelled by hot cross buns with Belgian chocolate and toffee in them. So am I. But there is no need to have hot cross buns all year round. It just happens that because of mass production they have become the dominant variety of fruit bread. Before mass production there were hundreds of regional fruit breads and yeast cakes (as opposed to cakes made with baking powder). Clever artisan – or “real” – bakers could revive them.
Elizabeth David dug up lots of recipes for her masterpiece, English Bread and Yeast Cookery. The names roll temptingly off the tongue: Scotch Christmas buns, Cornish saffron or Devonshire cakes, Banbury buns, Selkirk bannocks, bara brith (Welsh, and more often these days made with baking powder like a conventional fruit cake) and barmbrack (Irish).
My favourite, because it is everything the debased “luxury” hot cross buns aren’t, is lardy cake – made of dough, a few currants, sugar and pork lard. Traditionally baked at harvest time, there’s a Suffolk variant and one from Northumberland. A Hampshire recipe quoted by David gives the secret of a good lardy cake: “Turn it upside down after baking so the lard can soak through.” Lardy cake may be oozing in fat and sugar but it has one quality that deluxe hot cross buns studded with fudge lack – simplicity. ŠHave you noticed how children, when you ask them how they are, reply: “Good”? Or “Good, thanks” if you’re lucky. Never “well”. It must come from America, just as “have” in the sentence “May I have a cup of coffee?” is being replaced by “get”, because that is how they say it on American telly. In a generation’s time will anyone say “I’m well, thank you”? Or will “well” soon be gone forever?