The Lincoln Record Society (LRS) has been publishing the archival remains of its county for well over a century. The first volume in its series appeared in 1911 and there has been a recent focus on Stamford, which Smith calls ‘a dream for the new breed of antiquarians emerging in the early part of the eighteenth century’. The present volume is the second in a series entitled ‘Stukeley and Stamford’, publishing works by local clergyman and antiquary William Stukeley (1687–1765), vicar of All Saints’ church between 1729 and 1747.

John F H Smith, FSA presents two pieces from Stukeley’s voluminous output: The Historical Part of the Stamford Election, 1734 (along with the texts of two related petitions) and a description of a volume of prints and drawings of the town’s ancient monuments entitled The Designs of Stanford Antiquitys. Smith begins with a comprehensive introduction to Stukeley’s place in the sociable, religious and political life of the town. To us, Stukeley’s interests might seem impossibly diverse: he was a medical doctor who in his early forties was ordained into the Anglican Church, a stalwart of the sociable antiquarian scene (participating actively in the Royal Society, Society of Antiquaries of London and the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society), a Freemason and an authority on the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge (which he believed were built by Druids). Although such diversity of skill and experience is frequently found among the sociable antiquaries of the period, Stukeley’s eccentric personality was too much for some: he upset the locals by burying with Druidical rites under a Roman altar in his garden the remains of his wife’s miscarried child. He was, in Smith’s words, ‘an inexperienced clergyman [in] a hostile town’ and was subjected to ‘small-town malevolent gossip’. Stukeley’s authorship of the account of the 1734 Stamford election has only recently been recognised (by Smith in 2013) and the document gives an unusually rich insight into the perils of Georgian elections, where ‘corruption was rife and violence never very far away’. Bribes including houses and apprenticeships were offered to local men if they promised to vote for the Tory candidates. Stukeley (a Whig) sets out evidence and names the individuals concerned: one Nathaniel Bowdler (a labourer) was paid two guineas by Lord Exeter for a hogshead of ale and was promised a house rent-free for life if he would vote for him. Two days before the election a riot took place as the Tories sought to attack the house of the Whig candidate (Savile Cust), on which evening Bowdler was injured ‘in the breast with a stone’. Stukeley’s diaries show that he delivered the document to Sir Robert Walpole soon after the election, perhaps in the hope that he would reverse the result. He did not, and other records reveal that bribery was rife on the Whig side too. But this episode shows the elevated circles in which Stukeley (also a friend of Sir Isaac Newton and the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake) was able to move.

Stukeley’s Designs of Stanford Antiquitys is the visual companion to his Stanfordia Illustrata of 1735/6 (the text of his history of the town, edited by Diana and Michael Honeybone for the LRS in 2021). It comprises ninety-four leaves of pasted-in prints (primarily from Francis Peck’s published works on the town) and original drawings by Stukeley. In many cases the latter provide a unique record of buildings and features long since lost, and Stukeley’s approach supplements the work of earlier antiquaries (Peck had relied heavily on Anthony Wood’s history of Oxford of 1674, which in turn was based on a 1617 account by Brian Twyne, first keeper of the archives at Oxford). In the eighteenth century it was believed that Stamford had been a medieval centre of learning akin to a university, and that its more spectacular medieval survivals had been colleges linked either with the activities of monastic orders that held property there, or the flight there from Oxford of rebellious students in 1333. Smith provides a detailed commentary on the volume’s contents – noting the accuracy of Stukeley’s depictions – and includes photographs of some of the features that do survive, often incorporated into more modern buildings. This part of the present volume has also been issued as a booklet by the Stamford Mercury Archive Trust, entitled William Stukeley’s Stamford: Stamford in the 1730s.

Although this volume is heavily illustrated, the large format (much larger than almost all previous volumes in the LRS series) could have been used to fuller advantage, with only a few images allotted a full page here. It might also have made more sense for the LRS to have published the Honeybones’ edition of Stanfordia Illustrata alongside Smith’s account of the imagery as a single volume. Nonetheless Smith’s volume on Stukeley and Stamford tells us much about how well-connected provincial clergy engaged with issues of contemporary politics and the preservation of the past in Georgian Britain.