Robert Plot (1640-1696)

Autumn, 1996

On the track between field and forest,

the solitary horseman moved slowly. He rode looking downwards,

eyes and head traversing, keenly searching shrub and fern, tree

and flower for all and anything new, different and unusual. Every

now and then he would stop, dismount even, to examine more closely

a stone, a stream, an insect. In his travel pack and saddle-bags

a spade and pick accompanied clothes and provisions. Collecting

bottles, chemicals, a compass and other mathematical instruments

were carefully packed against the shocks of the route, notebooks

and loose papers were equally carefully protected from dust and

damp.

The time is the decade of the 1670s,

the place anywhere on the bridleways of the southern and Midland

counties of England. The horseman is Robert Plot perambulating

England in order to record its curiosities of art and nature.

Fascinated by antiquities and the past, intoxicated by the marvels

of the natural world, Plot has understood that natural products

could be exploited far more fully than hitherto. He has also understood

that what man makes with the materials nature offers, his arts

and inventions, machines and models, paintings and drawings, are

also a part of the environment in which he lives. Plot has set

out to record the natural history of England in all its variety.

This year marks the 300th anniversary

of the death of Plot who, as the first Keeper of the Ashmolean

Museum and Professor of Chemistry, spent much of his working life

in the Old Ashmolean, the building that now houses the Museum

of the History of Science. He was born in December 1640 at Sutton

Barne in the parish of Borden, near Sittingbourne, Kent and was

baptized there on the 13th of the same month. His family had been

established in the region since the fifteenth century.

Educated at the Free School in Wye,

Plot entered Magdalen Hall on the 24th March 1658, matriculated

in the University on the 2nd July, and graduated B.A. in 1661

and M.A. in 1664. After 1664 he stayed on at Magdalen Hall, where

he held the posts of Dean and of Vice-Principal, teaching – the

name of one of his pupils, Matthew Bryan, is known for 1665 –

and preparing his B.C.L. and D.C.L., both of which he took in

1671.

It was during these years of teaching

and study that Plot must have laid the foundation of the formidable

erudition that earnt him the sobriquet ‘learned Dr Plot’. He also

acquired practical skills such as elementary land-surveying and

the operations of chemistry.

In 1667 Plot followed a course in practical

chemistry given by William Wilden, and he was a young observer

and participant in the activities of the group of natural philosophers

that congregated around Robert Boyle at Deep Hall until 1668,

and thereafter around Thomas Willis at Beam Hall in St John’s

Street. At Beam Hall not only did Plot become imbued with a deep

and lasting fascination for the new sciences, but he also made

acquaintances whose names and influence would later be helpful

to him.

Other settings were also valuable to

Plot. At Magdalen Hall he belonged to a society which was home

to a series of geographical writers during the seventeenth century,

and which held an important collection of geographical works in

its library. At Magdalen Hall too, Plot continued to be in the

company of his erstwhile tutor, Josiah Pullen (1631-1714) from

whom he may have acquired his taste for antiquities.

The writings of Francis Bacon had an

influence on Plot, but behind his Baconian rhetoric can be found

the more fundamental influence of the antiquarian writers of the

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – the chorographers

– who had begun to write the survey of Britain county by county.

Behind them, permeating Plot’s whole approach and his writings,

was also the humanist-classical tradition mediated through the

Historia naturalis of Pliny.

Plot, it is not too great an exaggeration

to say, saw himself as a latter-day Pliny. In about 1670, perhaps

earlier, he drew up a long outline of a ‘plan for a survey of

Britain in search of natural and artificial curiosities, knowledge

of which could improve the pleasure, the knowledge and the commerce

of man.’ Plot’s model for this, he explicitly states, was Pliny.

To Pliny he added the rhetoric and the utilitarianism of Baconianism

and the concentration on a local unit and interest in antiquities

of the antiquarians William Camden (1551-1623) and John Leland

(1506?-1552).

Plot managed to win sufficient financial

support for his project so that, in 1674, he could set off on

nearly two years of travel and writing about the natural curiosities

of England. By mid-1676 he had finished his first essay in the

genre, The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

The success of Plot’s Natural History

was immediate. It ‘took’ with the reading public and was approved

of by his scholarly peers. Already in June 1677 there was talk

in the Univer sity of creating a special lecture for Plot to expound

‘philosophicall history’. By this was meant the development of

reasoned explan ations of unusual natural phenomena and controverted

subjects.

In the event, this plan became involved

in the project developed by the University’s governors as they

negotiated with Elias Ashmole the bequest of his collections.

The core of Ashmole’s collection, derived from that of the father

and son John Tradescant, was of natural specimens, although to

them Ashmole himself had added medals, coins, antiquities, books,

manuscripts, and heraldic and genealogical collections.

In its entirety the collection provided

an excellent assembly of specimens similar to those that Plot

himself had for some time been collecting, and over which he could

exercise his explanatory skills. Between 1679 and 1683 an imposing

building was erected next to the Bodleian Library and the Sheldonian

Theatre (a visible central core of University buildings was being

created), to house Ashmole’s museum, a lecture hall and a chemical

laboratory. Plot was appointed to give life to the whole as both

Keeper of Ashmole’s Musæum and as Professor of Chemistry.

Plot was energetic and productive in

his double post. During the seven years in office he wrote and

published two books (although one, it must be admitted, was only

a Latin translation of part of the other), founded and animated

the Oxford Philosophical Society, lectured on chemistry, augmented

the Ashmolean collection, and for two years acted as Secretary

of the Royal Society of London, editing the Philosophical Transactions.

His major achievement during this period

was the completion of his Natural History of Staffordshire

which was published in 1686. The county was no doubt chosen to

please Ashmole, but the book was intended to be the second instalment

of Plot’s survey of England. It is a more mature and readable

book than Oxfordshire, although no less learned and no

less committed to finding phenomena and practices, knowledge of

which might be useful to others. Even so, the book is far more

philosophical, the explanations of the reasons of things longer,

more wide-ranging and more trenchant.

Plot has sometimes been accused of

being credulous, mainly on the strength of an unsubstantiated

remark in an early nineteenth-century source. In reality he was

simply typical of his times. If his belief in pharmaceutical alchemy

now seems misplaced, it was no more than old-fashioned in contemporary

terms. It is perhaps to be linked with a tendency on Plot’s part

towards Catholicism and towards an older world view than the apparent

modernity of his books would suggest.

Rather than credulity, the fault that

might be found with Plot is ambition linked with greed. As a collector

he was clearly somewhat grasping, with a reputation, if stories

recorded by Thomas Hearne are to be believed, for not returning

antiquities and specimens leant to him for study.

It was ambition (as well as marriage)

which also seems to have led to Plot’s resignation from the Museum.

Already in 1687 he tried to obtain the Wardenship of All Souls.

This may have resulted from a recognition that having failed to

obtain the royal patronage for which he had angled in the dedications

of his Oxfordshire and Staffordshire volumes to

Charles II and James II, the Keepership of the Ashmolean Museum

offered no great promise of further advancement.

Despite stating at the end of Staffordshire

that he intended to write no more county histories, it is clear

that Plot’s commitment to such works never entirely waned, for

he projected surveys of Kent and of London and Middlesex, issuing

questionnaires and subscription proposals for them. Nonetheless

in the last ten years of his life he concentrated more seriously

on antiquarian, particularly genealogical and heraldic studies,

than on those of natural history.

To some extent the move was successful.

In 1687 Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, a patron whom Plot had

presented for an honorary doctorate at Oxford in 1684, made him

Registrar of the Court of Chivalry. In 1688 he was made Historiographer

Royal only to lose the post the following year in the wake of

the Orangist succession. In January 1695 the office of Mowbray

Herald Extraordinary was created for him, and two days later he

was given the place of Registrar of the College of Heralds by

the Earl Marshal.

That in 1694 Plot was nonetheless at

work on the Natural History of London and Middlesex may

not be unconnected with the fact that a bevy of influential men

had subscribed towards it. Like Plot’s own hopes however, those

of the subscribers would be disappointed, for on the 30th April

1696 Plot died after suffering sufficiently greatly for the fact

to be recorded on the memorial plaque erected to his memory in

Borden Church.

Stone, however, was not Robert Plot’s true monument.

A man of contradictions, time-serving but committed to the subjects

of his research; ambitious but also concerned to be useful; grasping,

on occasion arousing the ire of his colleagues, but nonetheless

of convivial disposition, bibulous and jovial, Plot’s importance

lies in the way that his early work dove-tailed with the interests

of a wide range of country gentry who were willing, even eager,

to participate in local projects such as he organized and were

therefore prepared to support Plot’s perambulations and to send

specimens to his Museum.

Plot at the Ashmolean created a true centre of empirical

research and also a tradition of study. From his example during

the next fifty years flowed a series of studies in local or delimited

natural history. Plot’s work supplied a model, and remained a

point of reference throughout the eighteenth century for antiquaries

and naturalists alike. More important, as the several copies of

his works that survive with annotations show, his works were read

by the men at whom they were directed – the county gentry of England.

Anthony Turner

Further reading: the best modern account

of Plot is M. W. Greenslade, The Staffordshire Historians,

(Collections for a History of Staffordshire: Staffordshire

Record Society, 4th series, vol. 11, 1982), ch. v.

A valuable collection of source materials relating to him is in

R. T. Gunther, Dr Plot and the Correspondence of the Philosophical

Society of Oxford (Oxford, 1939).

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