Background
John Aubrey was born on 12 March 1626 at Easton Pierse or Percy, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, on the 12th of March 1626, his father being a country gentleman of considerable fortune. His father died in 1652, leaving to Aubrey large estates, and with them, unfortunately, complicated lawsuits.
Education
John Aubrey was educated at the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer, who had numbered Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and at his schoolmaster's house Aubrey first met the philosopher about whom he was to leave so many curious and interesting details. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were interrupted by the Civil War. In 1646 he became a student of the Middle Temple, but was never called to the bar.
Career
Two years later, while hunting, John Aubrey discovered and recorded the great prehistoric circle of stones at Avebury. His reminiscences on this subject date from the Restoration, and are probably softened by considerations of expediency. He lost estate after estate, until in 1670 he parted with his last piece of property, Easton Pierse. From time to time he forwarded memoranda to him, and in 1680 he began to promise the "Minutes for Lives, " which Wood was to use at his discretion.
He left the task of verification largely to Wood.
As a hanger-on in great houses he had little time for systematic work, and he wrote the " Lives " in the early morning while his hosts were sleeping off the effects of the dissipation of the night before.
John Aubrey constantly leaves blanks for dates and facts, and many queries. In 1592 he complained bitterly that Wood had destroyed forty pages of his MS. , probably because of the dangerous freedom of Aubrey's pen.
Wood was prosecuted eventually for insinuations against the judicial integrity of the earl of Clarendon.
One of the two statements called in question was certainly founded on information provided by Aubrey.
John Aubrey was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than erased.
And being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters sent to A. W. with follies and misinformations, which sometimes would guide him into the paths of errour. In 1673 Aubrey began his "Perambulation " or " Survey " of the county of Surrey, which was the result of many years' labour in collecting inscriptions and traditions in the country. In the next year he published his only completed, though certainly not his most valuable work, the Miscellanies, a collection of stories on ghosts and dreams.
Politics
John Aubrey took no active share in the political troubles of the time, but from his description of a meeting of the Rota Club, founded by James Harrington, the author of Oceana, he appears to have been a theorizing republican.