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William Stukeley

William Stukeley (7 November 1687 – 3 March 1765) was an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman. A significant influence on the later development of archaeology, he pioneered the scholarly investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire. He published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime. Born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, as the son of a lawyer, Stukeley worked in his father's law business before attending Saint Benet's College, Cambridge (now Corpus Christi College). In 1709, he began studying medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, Southwark, before working as a general practitioner in Boston, Lincolnshire.

From 1710 until 1725, he embarked on annual tours of the countryside, seeking out archaeological monuments and other features that interested him; he wrote up and published several accounts of his travels. In 1717, he returned to London and established himself within the city's antiquarian circles. In 1718, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and became the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 1721, he became a Freemason and, in 1722, co-founded the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain. In the early 1720s, Stukeley developed a particular interest in Stonehenge and Avebury, two prehistoric stone circles in Wiltshire. He visited them repeatedly, undertaking fieldwork to determine their dimensions.

In 1726, Stukeley relocated to Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he married. In 1729 he was ordained as a cleric in the Church of England and appointed vicar of All Saints' Church in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He was a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who encouraged him to use his antiquarian studies to combat the growth of deism and freethought in Britain. To this end, Stukeley developed the belief that Britain's ancient druids had followed a monotheistic religion inherited from the Biblical Patriarchs; he called this druidic religion "Patriarchal Christianity". He further argued that the druids had erected the stone circles as part of serpentine monuments symbolising the Trinity.

In 1747, he returned to London as rector of St George the Martyr, Holborn. In the last part of his life, he became instrumental in British scholarship's acceptance of Charles Bertram's forged Description of Britain and wrote one of the earliest biographies of Sir Isaac Newton. Stukeley's ideas influenced various antiquaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to artists like William Blake, although these had been largely rejected by archaeologists by the second half of the 19th century. Stukeley was the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like Stuart Piggott, David Boyd Haycock and Ronald Hutton.

Childhood and university: 1687–1708
Stukeley was born on 7 November 1669 at the family home in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, the eldest child in a family of four boys and one girl; it is possible that he was named after William of Orange, who soon after became King of England.

His paternal grandfather, John Stukeley (1623–1675), was a country gentleman who possessed a small estate at Uffington, Lincolnshire and who accrued a large number of debts by the time of his death. John had two sons; the elder, Adlard, was apprenticed to the legal profession, while the younger, also called John, was initially trained as a farmer before joining Adlard in a family law firm. On 28 May 1686, John married the teenage daughter of Robert Bullen in Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire; their first child was miscarried, with William being their second.

In 1692, at the age of five, Stukeley began an education at Holbeach's Free School, where he learned to read and write. By the age of thirteen, he was the top-rated pupil at his school. As a schoolchild, he began collecting Roman coins after a hoard was found nearby and also developed interests in botany and medicine.

In 1700, he was taken out of school to work in his father's legal business. With his father he travelled south to London on various occasions, where he purchased many books and scientific instruments. He was nevertheless bored by his law activities, and when he requested that he be allowed to study at university, his father agreed.

He began studying at Cambridge University in November 1703 as a pensioner at Benet College (now Corpus Christi College). Among the classes that he took during his studies were Classics, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Divinity, Mathematics and Philosophy. In his spare time, he dissected animals and searched for fossils in the gravel pits outside the town; in 1708, he dissected a hanged man.

Outside of term time, he travelled to London, there taking anatomy courses with George Rolf and becoming acquainted with the poet John Gay. In February 1706, his father died, with his uncle passing away three weeks later. He returned home to sort out the family's financial affairs. In 1707, his mother died, leaving him in charge of his younger siblings; to pay off family debts, he sold off their furniture and let out their Holbeach home. He attracted notoriety for dissecting a local who had committed suicide. In January 1709, he returned to Cambridge to defend his thesis, on the title of "Catamenia pendent a plethora". By this point he was taking a growing interest in architecture, producing careful pen-drawings of medieval buildings. He considered embarking on the fashionable Grand Tour of continental Europe to see the ancient ruins of Greece and Italy, but likely decided against it on financial grounds.

Medical career: 1709–1716

In August 1709, Stukeley moved to London to further pursue medicine under doctor Richard Mead at St Thomas' Hospital. In March 1710, he left the city to practise medicine in the countryside, establishing a practice in Boston, Lincolnshire. He took with him a black servant, which would have been a status symbol at the time. Little is known of the time that he spent in the town, although, in 1713, he was accorded the Freedom of the Town.

His brother, Adlard, moved in with him, and, in Boston, was apprenticed to a local apothecary. Stukeley also formed a local botanic society that went on weekly plant-collecting trips in the local area. In 1715, he produced a print of St Botolph's Church, Boston, which he dedicated to the Marquis of Lindsey. Many of his travels around Lincolnshire were written up in what appears to be his first book, Iter Domesticum, although the year of its publication is not known.

From 1710 until 1725, Stukeley embarked on a horseback expedition through the countryside at least once a year, taking notes on the things that he observed. In 1710, for example, he first visited the prehistoric ceremonial complex, the Rollright Stones. At the time, his interests were not purely antiquarian, for he also took notes on landscape gardens and other more recent constructions that he encountered.

In 1712, Stukeley embarked on an extensive tour of western Britain, taking in Wales before returning to England to visit Grantham, Derby, Buxton, Chatsworth and Manchester. He later published an account of these travels in Western Britain as Iter Cimbricum.

Stukeley's later biographer Stuart Piggott related that this book was "not yet the characteristic product of a field archaeologist" but rather "differs little from that which could be written by any intelligent gentleman of the period".

Stukeley befriended the antiquary Maurice Johnson and joined Johnson's learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, which is still based in Spalding, Lincolnshire. A 1714 letter indicates that Johnson recommended several books on British history to Stukeley, apparently at the latter's request; the suggested titles included Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, John Milton's The History of Britain, Robert Brady's An Introduction to the Old English History, Peter Heylin's Help to English History, and Richard Rowlands' A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the most noble and renowned English Nation. Another letter to Johnson, this time from May 1714, reveals that Stukeley was assembling a series of chronological tables of all British kings since Brutus of Troy; following the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stukeley believed that the legendary Brutus was a real historical figure.

In September 1716, he wrote an account of Richborough Castle, a Roman Saxon Shore fort in Kent. That same year, he described having made a model of the Neolithic/Bronze Age stone circle of Stonehenge.

Return to London: 1717–1725

By May 1717, Stukeley had returned to London, living in Great Ormond Street. Once in the city he began to circulate within its antiquarian circles. At Mead's nomination, in early 1718 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, then under the presidency of the scientist Isaac Newton. Stukeley befriended Newton and visited him at his home on several occasions; he was part of a coterie in the society who supported Newtonian philosophy.

Stukeley lectured to the society on a "fossil crocodile or porpoise" in 1719 (a plesiosaur now on display in the Natural History Museum, London ), arguing that it was evidence for the Genesis flood narrative; in February 1720, he lectured to the society on female human anatomy, illustrated with drawings of a cadaver he had autopsied. Following Edmond Halley's resignation as society secretary, in November 1721, Stukeley put himself forward as a potential replacement; he unsuccessfully ran against Newton's favoured candidate, James Jurin. This upset some of Stukeley's friendships in the group and cooled his relationship with Newton for several years.

Also in 1718, Stukeley joined the newly founded Society of Antiquaries of London and became its first secretary. In 1721–22 he was partly instrumental in setting up the society's committee on coins. He nevertheless appears to have taken little active part in the society's business. He retained his interest in medical matters, and in June 1719 took a medical doctorate in Cambridge, enabling him to join the London College of Physicians in 1720.

In October 1720, he was one of the physicians who conducted an autopsy of a deceased elephant in Hans Sloane's Chelsea garden. In March 1722 he gave the Goulstonian Lecture at the Royal College theatre; his topic was the human spleen. He published his lectures as On the Spleen in 1722, appending to it his "Essay Towards the Anatomy of the Elephant". According to Stukeley biographer David Boyd Haycock, On the Spleen was significant as "his first major publication, and his only one in anatomy".

Stukeley developed a friendship with two brothers who shared many of his antiquarian interests, Roger and Samuel Gale. From his father, the former Dean of York Thomas Gale, Roger had inherited a copy of the Monumenta Britannica, a work produced by seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. He showed it to Stukeley, who produced a transcription of Aubrey's document in either 1717 or 1718. Piggott suggested that it was Aubrey's manuscript that first brought Avebury to Stukeley's attention. Circa 1718, Stukeley first visited the site, accompanied by the Gale brothers. In 1719, he visited again, also taking in Stonehenge before traveling to Oxford to meet Thomas Hearne, an antiquarian who was highly critical of Stukeley. That summer, he spent time in Great Chesterford in Essex, where he identified a Romano-British temple from crop marks in a field.

Stukeley devoted much attention to Avebury during the 1720s. The records he produced of how the monument and its various features looked at the time has been important for later archaeologists for by the early twentieth century—when the earliest sustained archaeological investigation of the site took place—many of these features had been lost. He witnessed locals breaking up megaliths in the circle and although powerless to stop them it may have been this observation that led him to produce a detailed record of the site.

In January 1721, Stukeley was initiated as a Freemason. He suspected that Freemasonry was the "remains of the mysterys of the antients [sic]". By 1723 he was the Master of the Masonic Lodge meeting at Fountain Tavern on London's Strand. In July 1722, he and several friends formed the Society of Roman Knights, an organisation devoted to the study of Roman Britain. The group began with sixteen members before attracting new recruits over the following two years. In admitting women as well as men, the Society was unprecedented within British society at the time; the Society of Antiquaries for instance would not admit female members for another two centuries. Members of the Roman Knights each took a name from the Romano-British period; Stukeley's was "Chyndonax", the name of a priest listed in a Greek inscription reputedly found in a glass cinerary urn in 1598. Through the society he also became close friends with Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford and Heneage Finch, 5th Earl of Winchilsea; he encouraged the latter to carry out archaeological fieldwork, as at Julliberrie's Grave in Kent.

In August 1721, Stukeley and Roger Gale set forth on another tour, visiting Avebury and Stonehenge before going to Gloucester, Hereford, Ludlow, Wolverhampton, Derby, and finally reaching Grantham in October. He wrote up his notes of the journey as Iter Sabrinum.

He returned to Avebury in the summer of 1722 — this time with the artists Gerard Vandergucht and John Pine, who had both become Roman Knights that year — before proceeding to Stonehenge and Silchester. In September and October he embarked on another tour, this time taking in Cambridge, Boston, Lincoln, Dunstable, Leminster and Rochester, largely following Roman roads. He published a description of this tour as Iter Romanum.

In 1723, he travelled from London to Newbury and Marlborough before visiting Stanton Drew stone circles, and then heading back east to Bath, Exeter and Dorchester. These tours were written up as Iter Dumnoniense and Iter Septimum Antonini Aug. He also wrote an account of Dorchester's Maumbury Rings in October 1723 as Of the Roman Ampitheatre at Dorchester.

It was while at Avebury in 1723 that he began a draft of the History of the Temples of the Ancient Celts. This work drew upon his fieldwork at both Avebury and Stonehenge as well as his field-notes from other prehistoric sites and information obtained from the 'Templa Druidum' section of Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica. The work also cited Biblical and Classical texts. In the book, Stukeley discussed how prehistoric people might have erected such monuments using sledges, timber cradles, rollers and leavers. He devoted much space to refuting the suggestion, made by Inigo Jones and J. Webb, that Stonehenge had been erected by the Romans, instead attributing it to the prehistoric—or as he called it, "Celtic"—period. The druids are mentioned only briefly in the book, when Stukeley suggested that they might be possible creators of the stone circles.

In 1724, Stukeley returned to Avebury and Stonehenge, returning via Ringwood and Romsey before heading up to Lincoln and then back down to Kent later in the year. This was the final year in which he conducted fieldwork at Avebury. The Oxford English Dictionary lists that the first known use of the word relationship is from 1724, in his writings. In 1725, Stukeley engaged in the last of his great tours, this time with Roger Gale.

This took him from Dunstable up into the Midlands, where he visited Coventry, Birmingham, Derby and Buxton before heaving west to Chester and then north for Liverpool and the Lake District; there he visited stone circles like Long Meg and Her Daughters and Castlerigg stone circle. From there, Stukeley and Gale travelled further north to Whitehaven and then Hadrian's Wall, following it along to Newcastle before heading south back to London via Durham and Doncaster.

Marriage and the clergy: 1726–46
In 1726, Stukeley left London and relocated to Grantham in Lincolnshire. The reasons for his decision to do so are obscure. It may be that he left the city due to frustration that his antiquarian research was not being financially supported by wealthier benefactors. On his move to Grantham, Stukeley resigned as secretary of the Society of Antiquaries. Stukeley struggled to earn a living as a physician in Grantham; he also established a Freemasonic lodge in the town, although it never appeared on the roll of the Grand Lodge of England. In December 1727 he married Frances Williamson, daughter of a gentleman from Allington. The couple's attempts to conceive children met with failure, and Williamson suffered two miscarriages. In October 1728, Stukeley buried the second of the two unborn infants in his garden, performing a funeral ceremony that drew upon his interest in ancient Roman practices. Frances subsequently bore Stukeley three further daughters. Stukeley was friendly with the Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, who shared his interest in antiquarianism. Stukeley asked his friend if he may become a cleric in the Church of England, a request which Wake granted in June 1729. Wake ordained him as a deacon in Croydon on 20 July 1729. Given his intellectual pursuits, Wake saw Stukeley as a welcome recruit in the Church of England's conflict with Freethought.

In October 1729, the Lord Chancellor Peter King granted Stukeley the living of All Saints in Stamford, Lincolnshire, taking up residence in the town in early 1730. He enjoyed the town's medieval architecture, and began to write a history of the settlement in the form of a dialogue. He also enjoyed gardening while living in the town, in 1738 building a "Hermitage" in his garden, which featured niches, a stone arch and a fountain.

According to Piggott, Stukeley's ordination was "the essential turning-point in his whole life". His reasons for joining the clergy are not known for certain. One possibility is that he sought the steady income supplied by a Church of England living, having for a while complained about how little he earned as a doctor. Alternately, he may have believed that becoming a cleric would be a secure position from which he could pursue the unorthodox ideas he was developing. His decision to join the clergy concerned friends like Robert Gale. To Piggott, Stukeley sought to use his fieldwork "as ammunition in a holy war against the Deists". Stukeley would write that his purpose in becoming a cleric was "to combat the deists from an unexpected quarter", describing his "resentment of that deluge of profaneness and infidelity that prevails so much at present, and threatens an utter subversion of religion in general".

In 1736, he co-founded a local antiquarian and literary society, The Brazen Nose, with six other founder-members (George Lynn being one of them). It held weekly meetings at which they discussed a varied range of subjects; the first meeting involved discussions of astronomy, lunar maps, a wasp's nest, a medieval seal, and a bladder stone the size of a walnut that had been retrieved from a small dog. The society eventually lapsed, and Stukeley's attempt to revive it in 1746 proved unsuccessful. He also remained interested in the local discovery of antiquities; he became aware of a large, silver Romano-British dish uncovered at Risley Park, Derbyshire in 1729 and read an account of it to the Society of Antiquaries in 1736. In October 1742, Stukeley was alerted to the discovery of the Royston Cave by local politician William Goodhall. He wrote about the site in his 1743 book, Palaeographia Britannica No. I', in which he argued that the cave's decorated chamber was established as a hermitage for a Lady Roisia de Vere circa 1170. A 1744 pamphlet was then issued by the Reverend Charles Parkin, arguing that the carvings were Anglo-Saxon in origin. Stukeley was affronted by the suggestion, and wrote his 1746 Origines Roystonianae II in response to it. In 1740, he was removed as a member of the Society of Antiquaries for not renewing his membership dues.

In 1740, he published Stonehenge, a book that he described as being devoted to the subject of "Patriarchal Christianity". He believed that learned people would read the book to learn about stone circles and druids, and that in doing so they would encounter the ancient proto-Christian of Britain and thus recognise how similar it was to modern Anglicanism. In doing so, he believed, they would reject the ideas promoted by deism and the freethinkers.

In the winter of 1737, Stukeley's wife died at the age of forty. By February 1737/38, he suggested to Samuel Gale that they live together, although this plan never came to fruition. In 1739, Stukeley married the Gale brothers' sister, bringing her to live with him at Stamford. Her marriage portion of £10,000 allowed Stukeley to maintain two houses from 1740 onward; summers were spent at Stamford while winters were spent in his home in Gloucester Street, London. Also in 1739, he went into business producing medicinal oils with the daughter of John Rogers, a recently deceased apothecary whose wares Stukeley had previously championed.

When in London, he regularly attended meetings of the Royal Society. In December 1741, he was appointed an associate member of the Egyptian Society, a group led by Lord Sandwich as its first president. Through the society, Stukeley became friends with the 2nd Duke of Montagu, regularly visiting the latter's home at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Inspired by the medieval Gothic buildings, he began designing various Gothic plans of his own. This included a Gothic bridge and a mausoleum designed for the Duke of Montagu's estate, although neither were ever built.

In 1746, Stukeley drew up a very careful account of Charles I's journey from Oxford to the Scottish army camp near Newark in 1646.

Final years: 1747–1765
In late 1747, Stukeley became the rector for St George the Martyr, Queen Square, a parish in Bloomsbury, London. He moved permanently to the city in February 1748. Stukeley was a friend of Isaac Newton and wrote a memoir of his life in 1752. This is one of the earliest sources for the story of the falling apple that inspired Newton's formulation of the theory of gravitation. In the 1750s, he became a regular attendee at Royal Society events. However, within the group he found himself increasingly side-lined under the presidency of Martin Folkes; although the pair retained a cordial relationship, Stukeley felt that Folkes was responsible for a decline in the quality of the society and was likely upset by Folkes' mocking attitude towards Christianity.

Following Sloane's death in 1753, Stukeley was selected as a trustee to help establish the British Museum, reflecting his standing in London antiquarian circles. He was also involved in the running of the Foundling Hospital, where he became acquainted with the illustrator William Hogarth.

In 1753, a Late Bronze Age tool hoard was uncovered during landscaping at Kew Gardens; Stukeley was invited to come and inspect the discovery the following year, at which point he met with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, who had an interest in antiquarian matters. In 1754, he was re-admitted to the Society of Antiquaries. That same year, one of Stukeley's parishioners died, leaving his book collection to the Bodleian Library and Lincoln College, Oxford. Stukeley was left as one of his executors, and, in May 1755, transported the book collection to Oxford. Following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Stukeley developed an active interest in the subject, presenting papers on earthquakes to the Royal Society and, in 1750, publishing Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural and Religious.

In June 1747, Stukeley had received a letter from Charles Bertram, an Englishman living in Denmark. In their ensuing correspondence, Bertram claimed to possess a copy of a manuscript allegedly produced by a 14th-century monk from Winchester known as Richard of Cirencester, which in turn contained an account and map of Roman Britain. Stukeley expressed caution regarding Bertram's claims, asking for detailed information regarding the original manuscript's provenance, with Bertram responding that he could not provide any because he had been sworn to secrecy by the man who supplied him with it. Stukeley unsuccessfully attempted to buy the manuscript from Bertram, stating that he would deposit it in the library of the British Museum. In March and again in April 1756, Stukeley read papers on Bertram's manuscript to the Society of Antiquaries of London. He published these in 1757 as An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works, which reproduced the map but not the text of the original manuscript, instead consisting of Stukeley's own commentary. At the time, many antiquarians regarded it as a genuine text, although a few had suspicions; in 1795, Thomas Reynolds declared that Bertram's document was a forgery, although this would only be widely recognised in the 19th century. This discovery damaged Stukeley's reputation among later scholars, bolstering his reputation for credulity. Stukeley had similarly been taken in by another forgery, James Macpherson's Ossian poems, writing to Macpherson in praise of his alleged discovery.

Stukeley also displayed a growing interest in the Roman Emperor Carausius and his coinage. In 1750, he and John Kennedy saw a sketch of a silver coin that had been discovered at Silchester and donated to the King of France. Both of them misread the legend on the reverse of the coin, believing that it read "ORIVNA"; it had actually read "FORTVNA", but with the "F" largely eroded. In 1751, Kennedy published his Dissertation on Oriuna, in which he claimed that Oriuna was the guardian goddess of Carausius. Stukeley disagreed, believing that Oriuna was Carausius' wife; he published this argument as Palaeographia Britannica No. III in 1752. The last decade of Stukeley's life was — according to Piggott — "relatively uneventful". He had re-joined the Society of Antiquaries but the papers presented there were increasingly treated un-seriously, while at the Royal Society, his papers were turned down and not published in its Transactions. He retained his concern with the destruction of ancient monuments, in particular the pillaging of Hadrian's Wall for stone, imploring Princess Augusta to intervene and raising the issue in a November 1757 report for the Society of Antiquaries. He also raised concerns about the sturdiness of the Eleanor cross at Waltham Cross and ensured it was renovated.

In 1757, Stukeley's second wife died. In 1759, Stukeley purchased a cottage in the (then largely rural) area of Kentish Town, to the north of London. In 1763, he published Paleographia Sacra, or Discourses on Sacred Subject as a collection of some of his Sunday sermons.

In early 1765, Stukeley suffered a stroke, fell into a coma and remained in this state for three days before dying in his bed on 3 March, aged 77. He was buried without a monument in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene's Church, East Ham, which he is said to have selected as his resting-place on a visit there during his lifetime.

Ideas

Hutton noted that Stukeley "always had a strong streak of mysticism and interpreted ancient remains in accordance with set notions concerning the nature of primeval religion." He had a strong belief in immanent or inherent divinity. His belief in an immanent and interconnected divinity led him to adopt ideas from Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism: from the former he adopted the belief that music and numbers expressed the divine order, while from the latter he adopted the notion of hidden correspondences between various parts of the natural world.

Few of Stukeley's ideas were wholly original, being based on earlier sources. His general framework for understanding Britain's prehistoric past derived from his belief in the literal truth of Biblical mythology, including the Creation of the world in 4004 BC and events like the Genesis flood narrative. There is no evidence that when he started investigating Avebury and Stonehenge in 1719, he regarded them as having been erected by the druids. At the time, many antiquarians believed that they had been created in more recent periods; Inigo Jones believed Stonehenge had been built by Romans, Walter Charleton by Danish invaders in the Anglo-Saxon period, while Edmund Bolton attributed it to the ancient British but not specifically the druids. In adopting the idea that the druids had erected these monuments, he was following the ideas of Aubrey, which he had read in unpublished manuscript form.

Stukeley believed that the druids were part of "an oriental colony" of Phoenicians who had settled in Britain between the end of Noah's flood and the time of Abraham. He stated that the druids were "of Abraham's religion intirely [sic]" and that, although never having encountered divine revelation, had concluded through their own reasoning that God existed as a Trinity. He also stated that their religion was "so extremely like Christianity, that in effect in differ'd from it only in this; they believed in a Messiah who was to come into this world, as we believe in him that is come."

He believed that the leader of the Phoenician druids had been Hercules, who had landed in western Britain and created the Boscawen-Un circle in Cornwall. The idea that Hercules had arrived in south-west Britain was not original to Stukeley, having been adopted from Aylett Sammes' Britannia Antiqua Illustrata from 1676. Stukeley also believed that, because of Britain's isolated location, the druids had preserved the ancient monotheistic religion and that "the true religion has chiefly, since the repeopling of mankind after the flood, subsisted in our land".

His idea that the druids once formed a monotheistic priesthood akin to those of modern Christians also owed an influence from older sources. Michael Drayton's 1612 poem Poly-Olbion had for instance portrayed them as wise, monotheistic sages and philosophers.

By the time he became a cleric, he had come to believe that the ancient Egyptians, Plato and the druids all accepted the existence of the Trinity. By June 1730, he was claiming that Avebury was a symbolic depiction of the Trinity. He believed that ancient humans had venerated the components of the cosmos, such as the heavenly bodies and the four elements, and that they recognised the numbers and musical harmonies from which the cosmos had been created.

The idea that Britain was God's chosen nation was a recurrent idea in Stukeley's thought. He thought that Britons should emulate the ancient Romans. Stukeley believed that God had created the Roman Empire to prepare for the arrival of Jesus and to assist in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. In this, he believed that the ancient Romans had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people. In his view, the Roman Empire collapsed because its inhabitants had corrupted Christianity with what he called "superstitious fopperys" and that this perverted mixture survived as the Roman Catholic Church. Like many English people of his time, he believed that the Church of England, which had split from the Roman Catholic Church during the 16th-century English Reformation, had gained special favour from God; in Stukeley's words, it represented "the main support of religion now upon the face of the earth". Haycock noted that "a leading theme in Stukeley's antiquarian work" was "the resurrection of British history as an archetype for world history, and of Britain as a country historically fit to lead the world into the future". He criticised Britons who favoured archaeological remains encountered abroad during the Grand Tour, claiming that they were neglecting their own national heritage and adopting continental habits and vices such as effeminacy.

Fieldwork
Stukeley placed an emphasis on measuring and recording historical sites and encouraged his various correspondents to do the same. He engaged in excavation by digging in and around archaeological sites, relating that doing so was "like an anatomical dissection". He recognised the principle of stratigraphy, that different layers of soil reflected different periods in the development of a site.

From the 1720s, he believed that the prehistoric complex at Avebury was laid out to represent a snake with its head and tail. By 1724, he was arguing that the snake was a symbol of Christ, with its shedding of skin echoing the resurrection and the circle or head representing the unity and wholeness of God. Using Halley's arguments about the gradual shift in the compass over time, Stukeley calculated that Stonehenge was built in 460 BC and Avebury in 1860 BC.

Personal life

Piggott described Stukeley as "a gregarious creature" who enjoyed conversation and being flattered. Haycock referred to Stukeley's "amiable personality", while Piggott also highlighted "an immensely likeable quality" to Stukeley's personality, as evidence highlighting that when the reverend was laid up in bed in Queens Square on one occasion, over 120 friends and parishioners either visited him or sent him a message of sympathy. He also regarded the antiquary as displaying a "charm and pleasant oddness" as well as a "cheerfulness and disarming ingenuousness". Piggott also noted that in later life, Stukeley became "self-opinionated" and "dogmatic".

After the antiquarian's death, Bishop Warburton stated that in Stukeley displayed "a mixture of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition and antiquarianism, that he afforded me that kind of well-seasoned repast, which the French call an Ambigu, I suppose from a compound of things never meant to meet together."

According to Hutton, Stukeley had "a profound and lifelong love of structure, form and design" that was reflected in his interest in the medieval profession as well as antiquities. He had an enthusiasm for gardening, and was fond of both city and countryside, enjoying the ability of traveling between the two. Fond of pets, he reported feeling great grief following the death of his cat, Tit, in the 1740s. While living in Boston, he aligned himself with the Tories. He suffered from gout, having his first attack of the disease in 1709.

Stukeley's decision, in 1722, to adopt the pseudonym of Chyndonax reflected his inclinations towards identifying with the druids in a personal capacity. This was bolstered by the tendency of friends in the Society of Roman Knights to refer to him, both in conversation and correspondence, as "the Druid".

By 1740, he was beginning to depict the stone circles at Avebury—which are perfectly circular—as ovals in his illustrations so that they better fitted the shape of a serpent's head, which he believed they symbolised.

Reception and legacy
Haycock noted that Stukeley's books Stonehenge and Abury were well received, and that scholars "should not lose sight of his achievements behind the screen of his failings." He noted that Stukeley was "not a lone figure hypothesising wildly in his study" but "participating in a philosophical debate" that attracted the attention of various Enlightenment figures, including Newton, adding that Stukeley had established himself in "a firm position in London's intellectual society". By the early 1720s, Stukeley had a growing reputation as the country's main authority on druids and ancient monuments, having no obvious competitor given the comparative novelty of studying stone circles. However, by the 1750s, some of Stukeley's contemporaries were criticising the accuracy of some of his plans, and some were also accusing his interpretations of being speculative.

Haycock observed that Stukeley's "influence upon antiquarian studies for the century or so after his death" was "profound". For instance, in his 1796 book Indian Antiquities, Thomas Maurice drew upon Stukeley's publications as part of his argument that the druids were a group of Indian brahmins who had travelled west. According to Haycock, he "most famous propagator of Stukelian ideas in the early nineteenth century" was the artist and poet William Blake, who had read both Abury and Stonehenge and been influenced by them. In the nineteenth century, many of Stukeley's interpretations were being adopted and expanded by several antiquarian clergymen, including William Lisle Bowles, D. James and John Bathurst Deane. The Wiltshire archaeologist Richard Colt Hoare gave Stukeley's work some additional respectability when praising his use of fieldwork; Hoare concurred with Stukeley that sites like Stonehenge and Avebury were likely "Celtic" but did not endorse the idea that they were built by druids, believing that such information was unknowable.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the tide had turned against Stukeley's ideas in British archaeological circles. In 1889, Augustus Pitt Rivers noted, in his presidential address to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, that Stukeley's name "has been handed down to us chiefly as an example of what to avoid in archaeology". According to his biographer, Stuart Piggott, Stukeley was the "central figure of early eighteenth-century archaeology". The historian Ronald Hutton called him "perhaps the most important forefather of the discipline of archaeology", while the archaeologist Paul Ashbee referred to Stukeley as "a pioneer unmatched in the history of archaeology".

The first edition of Piggott's biography of Stukeley was published in 1950, with a revised edition released in 1985. Piggott thought him "one of the most curious and complex of the English eccentrics, pathetic, charming, admirable, and laughable by turns." Piggott believed that Stukeley's folios of Avebury and Stonehenge were his "most important contributions to archaeology". He noted that the antiquarian's plan of Avebury, "though failing by modern standards of accuracy, was nevertheless a very much better achievement than anything that had been produced before". Piggott's ultimate assessment was that Stukeley "was not a good scholar: he was uncritical of his literary sources and his reading was discursive rather than profound. His value to archaeology in his own day and now lies in his capacity to observe and record facts in the open air." He situated Stukeley's intellectual failings within the wider context of British intellectual decline in the years following 1730.

Piggott referred to the "varying quality" of Stukeley's work, believing there to have been a "lamentable decline in his later life". He believed that Stukeley had moved from a "neutral empiricism to an often wildly speculative religious interpretation" of prehistoric archaeology. In 2005, Hutton noted that there had been "a considerable change of attitude" to Stukeley among scholars over the previous few years, as they had rejected the division into two halves of his life which Piggott had constructed.

Stukeley was the first person to identify the Stonehenge Avenue and Stonehenge Cursus, giving these features the names by which they are now known.

Piggott noted that Stukeley's speculations on druids, "which seem to us so childishly fantastic", shaped the literary mood of the romantic revival. Haycock noted that, along with Macpherson and Thomas Gray, Stukeley "helped create the principal historical and literary foundations for the 'Druidical revival' that flourished in the last decades of the eighteenth century".

title: William Stukeley


text:
Talk:Westminster School

Assessment
It has been requested that I review the assessments of this article. First, I am going to maintain the article's existing high importance rating for WikiProject Schools, an argument could even be made for Top importance though I will leave that to a separate discussion. This article merits at least a C-class, so I will not demote it, however will compare it against the B-class criteria to see if it merits B-class:

 * Criterion 1: Article has lots of references and uses inline citations, but there are noticeable gaps in the references. There appear to be a few gaps in the History section for example of historical claims that will need full sourcing, but currently appear to have no refs. There are big gaps in the Westminster Jargon and Houses section. Also, too many alumni claims have no refs to support them. Lack of use of citation templates while not needed for B-class/GA also bring down the quality of the article.
 * Criterion 2: Enough for B-class, though one noticeable omission is the lack of info on academics and curriculum. See WP:WPSCH/AG for help.
 * Criterion 3: The article is well structured, the lead section needs to be a lot bigger for an article of this size and should summarise the entire article, see WP:LEAD for help, but this is not a problem for B-class.
 * Criterion 4: No serious issues with article flow, though for GA some WP:MOS issues will need to be corrected. Full stops should be before references, and images should be laid out per WP:MOSIMAGE e.g. not having text sandwiched between images. Also, bold should not be used to make article headings as done here to explain jargon.
 * Criterion 5: Has enough pictures and a school logo.
 * Criterion 6: Technical terms are explained.

So the article currently passes criteria 2,3,4,5 and 6, but fails criterion 1, and articles need to pass all these criteria to get B-class. So while nearly B-class, I am assessing the article as C-class for now.

Oh yes and an opinion was requested on the length of the article, the article is 58KB in total so it is not in danger zone yet and only readable prose counts at WP:SIZERULE and after a test I found the readable prose for this article is under 30KB. One easy way of reducing article size is to move all the alumni list into the former pupils sub-article and just have a brief prose summary in this article. Camaron · Christopher · talk 14:34, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Regarding jargon/slang marked as "obsolete"
Would it be possible to indicate how long ago the relevant terms became obsolete? I'm reading John Rae's Westminster diary, The Old Boys' Network, and he uses "begging a play" as though it was current at the time. In the entry for 16 October 1973, Rae mentions that "I have asked Gerald Ellison ... to come to Latin prayers and beg a play" (lower-case p).

On a slightly different, but related, note, in the entry for 23 October 1975, Rae gives boys (plural) a digniora, and specifically refers to it as being Maundy money. When did that change? Loganberry (Talk) 18:55, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Promotional sentence
This sentence seems not to be suitable for an encyclopedia: "Prospective donors are particularly invited to note the School's gratitude to benefactors." I propose its deletion. Pemboid (talk) 12:55, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I have deleted it. -- Alarics (talk) 14:14, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Photo
Changed caption of photo - which does not show the facade of the school. None of the range of buildings of The Sanctuary house the school, which doesn't really have a facade as such. The photo does, however, show the War Memorial to boys who died in the Crimean War. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.30.108.33 (talk) 14:10, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Links
In view of close links between Westminster School and Oxford and Cambridge universities, the high number going to the latter two need not have any academic significance. Common staff are the norm. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.153.96.198 (talk) 14:42, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
 * See Greg Winter. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.153.96.198 (talk) 14:45, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Christopher Lewis appears.

Advert
I agree that this is an advertisement. I have been trying to get the spamming out for years. There is very little else I can do without being sued for libel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.171.21.223 (talk) 15:08, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just added archive links to 17 one external links on Westminster School. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
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External links modified
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I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Westminster School. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
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Private School
I would suggest that Westminster school be described as a private school. The description independent is vague and unclear. Wikipedia is global and most readers recognise organisations as being either public sector or private sector. 'Independent school' is an Anglocentric term and is just not a recognised term in most countries. It only serves to open up questions; independent from whom? Independen from what?

Over the last ten years most UK public sector secondary schools have converted to academies and are therefore independent. They're independent of central government and Local Education Authority control. This development has made it all the more confusing to describe private schools as independent. If you take private healthcare; go to the BUPA article and in the opening paragraph it is described as a private hospital. If private schools have private school in the opening paragraph the link takes the reader to an article that makes explicitly clear:

Private schools, also known as independent schools, non-governmental, or nonstate schools,[1] are not administered by local, state or national governments; thus, they retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students tuition, rather than relying on mandatory taxation through public (government) funding; at some private schools students may be able to get a scholarship, which makes the cost cheaper, depending on a talent the student may have (e.g. sport scholarship, art scholarship, academic scholarship), financial need, or tax credit scholarships that might be available.

That is clear, unambiguous and uneqivocal. (Garageland66 (talk) 01:10, 30 August 2016 (UTC)).

 * It is made fairly clear in the link to independent school what the term means. If the reader is unclear about the term, they need only click on it. This is exaclty as clear as having private school there and having them click on that. Benboy00 (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Clicking on private school is also takes the reader to an article fully explaining the term. However most readers don't click on links. Leaving independent is only confusing and unclear. Independent of what? This has already been explained. (Garageland66 (talk) 19:03, 9 September 2016 (UTC))

 * What has been explained to you is that you are editing disruptively on several different articles to push your own point of view, and you should be in no doubt as to where that will lead if you choose to continue. The articles are perfectly clear on the schools' independence of government as they stand, and a consensus of other editors is perfectly clear about the situation, too. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:08, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Infobox
The infoboxes for the seven historic English public schools are, at present, inconsistent. Five have the School Type  listed as ‘Independent’, one has it as ‘Private’ and only one has it as ‘Public’. Can I propose that, for the sake of consistency, they all have ‘Public School’ in the infobox. They are defined as such by the 1868 Public Schools Act. Is there a consensus on this? Garageland66 (talk) 11:37, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Style
For such a prestigious school, the style of prose in this article is less than scholarly. Partially cleaned up by the WP:WPCH, there is a lot left to do, in particular the pruning out of non essential detail and content. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:27, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * The style should be the same for all articles, regardless of the degree of snobiness. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.48.238.18 (talk) 11:32, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

External links modified
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Apparently Fred-Wee Fart-Ham went on the study PhilThe at Jesus college after going here — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.67.162.228 (talk) 22:41, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Westminster School


text:
Thomas Birch

Thomas Birch (23 November 1705 – 9 January 1766) was an English historian.

Life
He was the son of Joseph Birch, a coffee-mill maker, and was born at Clerkenwell.

He preferred study to business but, as his parents were Quakers, he did not go to the university. Notwithstanding this circumstance, he was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1730 and priest in 1731. As a strong supporter of the Whigs, he gained the favour of Philip Yorke, afterwards Lord Chancellor and first Earl of Hardwicke, and his subsequent preferments were largely due to this friendship. He held successively a number of benefices in different counties, and finally in London.

He was noted as a keen fisherman during the course of his lifetime, and devised an unusual method of disguising his intentions. Dressed as a tree, he stood by the side of a stream in an outfit designed to make his arms seem like branches and the rod and line a spray of blossom. Any movement, he argued, would be taken by a fish to be the consequences of a mild breeze.

In 1735 he became a member of the Society of Antiquaries, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was secretary from 1752 to 1765. In 1728 he had married Hannah Cox, who died in the following year. Birch was killed on 9 January 1766 by a fall from his horse, and was buried in the church of St Margaret Pattens, London, of which he was then rector. He died, according to his will, "in a full confidence in the Mercy and Goodness of almighty God and with a firm persuasion of a blessed Immortality discoverable by the Light of Nature and confirmed for us Christians by that of Revelation", leaving his books and manuscripts to the British Museum, and a sum of about £500 to increase the salaries of the three assistant librarians.

Writings
Birch was prolific, even if Horace Walpole questioned his "parts, taste and judgment." He corresponded with prominent men of his time. Samuel Johnson wrote: "Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties". Boswell observed "That the literature of this country is much indebted to Birch’s activity and diligence must certainly be acknowledged. We have seen that Johnson honoured him with a Greek Epigram; and his correspondence with him, during many years, proves that he had no mean opinion of him."

Birch often collaborated with the greatly successful London bookseller, Andrew Millar, who helped publish some of Birch's most highly profitable publications. These included The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, co-written by Reverend Henry Miles (in 5 volumes folio, 1744), and A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (in 2 volumes folio, 1738, followed in 2 volumes quarto, 1753).

Birch wrote most of the English lives in the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, 10 vols. (London, 1734–1741), assisted in the composition of the Athenian Letters (London, 1741–43), edited the State Papers of John Thurloe (London, 1742) and the State Papers of W. Murdin (London, 1759). He also wrote:

Among the papers left at his death were some which were published in 1848 as the Court and Times of James I and the Court and Times of Charles I.
 * Inquiry into the share which King Charles I had in the transactions of the Earl of Glamorgan for bringing over a body of Irish rebels (published by Millar in London, 1756);
 * Historical view of Negotiations between the Courts of England, France and Brussels 1592-1617 (London, 1749);
 * Life of Archbishop Tillotson (London, 1753);
 * History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1756–1757);
 * Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 1760), and other works.
 * The heads of illustrious persons of Great Britain, in 108 copper plates, engraved by Mr. Houbraken and Mr. Vertue, with their lives and characters, by Thomas Birch, D.D. Secretary of the Royal Society, London, 1761

Copies of Franklin letters
Recently discovered by American researcher Alan Houston at the British Library is a file entitled Copies of [Benjamin Franklin's] Letters relating to the March of General Braddock. Birch was said to have obsessively copied any documents of historical importance he could get his hands on. He was a friend of Franklin, and they were both members of the Royal Society. In his autobiography, Franklin refers to his "Quire Book", which has never been found, but which contained letters and papers concerning his efforts to support the British Government at that pre-revolutionary time. They speak of his 1755 efforts to help British Redcoats led by Braddock in their march to defeat the French at Fort Duquesne (in today's Pittsburgh). Braddock desperately needed transportation for his troops, and Franklin rounded up horses and wagons for him using his persuasive powers as Pennsylvania's leading politician. Incidentally, Braddock and most of his men (who included George Washington) were defeated by the French and their Indian allies.

Works

 * at Google Books.
 * at Google Books.

title: Thomas Birch


text:
Tatar language

Tatar (татар теле, tatar tele or татарча, tatarça) is a Turkic language spoken by the Volga Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan (European Russia), as well as Siberia and Crimea.

Geographic distribution
The Tatar language is spoken in Russia by about 5.3 million people, and also by communities in Azerbaijan, China, Finland, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, the US, Uzbekistan, and several other countries. Globally, there are more than 7 million speakers of Tatar.

Tatar is also the mother tongue for several thousand Mari, a Finnic people; Mordva's Qaratay group also speak a variant of Kazan Tatar.

In the 2010 census, 69% of Russian Tatars claimed at least some knowledge of the Tatar language. In Tatarstan, 93% of Tatars and 3.6% of Russians claimed to have at least some knowledge of the Tatar language. In neighbouring Bashkortostan, 67% of Tatars, 27% of Bashkirs, and 1.3% of Russians claimed to understand basic Tatar language.

Official status

Tatar, along with Russian, is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan. The official script of Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic script with some additional letters. The Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999, which came into force in 2001, establishing an official Tatar Latin alphabet. A Russian federal law overrode it in 2002, making Cyrillic the sole official script in Tatarstan since. Unofficially, other scripts are used as well, mostly Latin and Arabic. All official sources in Tatarstan must use Cyrillic on their websites and in publishing. In other cases, where Tatar has no official status, the use of a specific alphabet depends on the preference of the author.

The Tatar language was made a de facto official language in Russia in 1917, but only within the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Tatar is also considered to have been the official language in the short-lived Idel-Ural State, briefly formed during the Russian Civil War.

The usage of Tatar declined during the 20th century. By the 1980s, the study and teaching of Tatar in the public education system was limited to rural schools. However, Tatar-speaking pupils had little chance of entering university because higher education was available in Russian almost exclusively.

As of 2001 Tatar was considered a potentially endangered language while Siberian Tatar received "endangered" and "seriously endangered" statuses, respectively. Higher education in Tatar can only be found in Tatarstan, and is restricted to the humanities. In other regions Tatar is primarily a spoken language and the number of speakers as well as their proficiency tends to decrease. Tatar is popular as a written language only in Tatar-speaking areas where schools with Tatar language lessons are situated. On the other hand, Tatar is the only language in use in rural districts of Tatarstan.

Since 2017, Tatar language classes are no longer mandatory in the schools of Tatarstan. According to the opponents of this change, it will further endanger the Tatar language and is a violation of the Tatarstan Constitution which stipulates the equality of Russian and Tatar languages in the republic.

Dialects
There are two main dialects of Tatar:
 * Central or Middle (Kazan)
 * Western (Mişär or Mishar)

All of these dialects also have subdivisions. Significant contributions to the study of the Tatar language and its dialects, were made by a scientist Gabdulkhay Akhatov, who is considered to be the founder of the modern Tatar dialectological school.

Spoken idioms of Siberian Tatars, which differ significantly from the above two, are often considered as the third dialect group of Tatar by some, but as an independent language on its own by others.

Central or Middle
The Central or Middle dialectal group is spoken in Kazan and most of Tatarstan and is the basis of the standard literary Tatar language. Middle Tatar includes the Nagaibak dialect.

Mishar
The Western (Mişär) dialect is distinguished from the Central dialect especially by the absence of the uvular q and ğ and the rounded å of the first syllable. Letters ç and c are pronounced as affricates. Regional differences exist also.

Mishar is the dialect spoken by the Tatar minority of Finland.

Siberian Tatar
Two main isoglosses that characterize Siberian Tatar are ç as and c as, corresponding to standard  and. There are also grammatical differences within the dialect, scattered across Siberia.

Many linguists claim the origins of Siberian Tatar dialects are actually independent of Volga–Ural Tatar; these dialects are quite remote both from Standard Tatar and from each other, often preventing mutual comprehension. The claim that this language is part of the modern Tatar language is typically supported by linguists in Kazan, Moscow and by Siberian Tatar linguists  and denounced by some Russian and Tatar ethnographs.

Over time, some of these dialects were given distinct names and recognized as separate languages (e.g. the Chulym language) after detailed linguistic study. However, the Chulym language was never classified as a dialect of Tatar language. Confusion arose because of the endoethnonym "Tatars" used by the Chulyms. The question of classifying the Chulym language as a dialect of the Khakass language was debatable. A brief linguistic analysis shows that many of these dialects exhibit features which are quite different from the Volga–Ural Tatar varieties, and should be classified as Turkic varieties belonging to several sub-groups of the Turkic languages, distinct from Kipchak languages to which Volga–Ural Tatar belongs.

Vowels
There exist several interpretations of the Tatar vowel phonemic inventory. In total Tatar has nine or ten native vowels, and three or four loaned vowels (mainly in Russian loanwords).

According to Baskakov (1988) Tatar has only two vowel heights, high and low. There are two low vowels, front and back, while there are eight high vowels: front and back, round (R+) and unround (R−), normal and short (or reduced).

Poppe (1963) proposed a similar yet slightly different scheme with a third, higher mid, height, and with nine vowels.

According to Makhmutova (1969) Tatar has three vowel heights: high, mid and low, and four tongue positions: front, front-central, back-central and back (as they are named when cited).

The mid back unrounded vowel ë is usually transcribed as ı'', though it differs from the corresponding Turkish vowel.

The tenth vowel ï is realized as the diphthong ëy, which only occurs word-finally, but it has been argued to be an independent phoneme.

Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letters and the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets):

In polysyllabic words, the front-back distinction is lost in reduced vowels: all become mid-central. The mid reduced vowels in an unstressed position are frequently elided, as in кеше keşe >  'person', or кышы qışı  >  '(his) winter'. Low back is rounded  in the first syllable and after, but not in the last, as in бала bala  'child', балаларга balalarğa  'to children'. In Russian loans there are also, , , and , written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively.

Historical shifts
Historically, the Old Turkic mid vowels have raised from mid to high, whereas the Old Turkic high vowels have become the Tatar reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in Bashkir.)

Consonants

 * Notes
 * The phonemes, , , , ,  are only found in loanwords.  occurs more commonly in loanwords, but is also found in native words, e.g. yafraq 'leaf'. , , ,  may be substituted with the corresponding native consonants , , ,  by some Tatars.

 * and are the dialectal Western (Mişär) pronunciations of җ⟨c⟩ and ч⟨ç⟩, the latter are in the literary standard and in the Central (Kazan) dialect.  is the variant of ч⟨ç⟩ as pronounced in the Eastern (Siberian) dialects and some Western (Mişär) dialects. Both  and  are also used in Russian loanwords (the latter written ц).
 * and are usually considered allophones of  and  in the environment of back vowels, so they are never written in the Tatar Cyrillic orthography in native words, and only rarely in loanwords with къ and гъ. However,  and  also appear before front  in Perso-Arabic loanwords which may indicate the phonemic status of these uvular consonants.

Palatalization
Tatar consonants usually undergo slight palatalization before front vowels. However, this allophony is not significant and does not constitute a phonemic status. This differs from Russian where palatalized consonants are not allophones but phonemes on their own. There are a number of Russian loanwords which have palatalized consonants in Russian and are thus written the same in Tatar (often with the "soft sign" ь). The Tatar standard pronunciation also requires palatalization in such loanwords; however, some Tatar may pronounce them non-palatalized.

Syllables
In native words there are six types of syllables (Consonant, Vowel, Sonorant):
 * V (ı-lıs, u-ra, ö-rä)
 * VC (at-law, el-geç, ir-kä)
 * CV (qa-la, ki-ä, su-la)
 * CVC (bar-sa, sız-law, köç-le, qoş-çıq)
 * VSC (ant-lar, äyt-te, ilt-kän)
 * CVSC (tört-te, qart-lar, qayt-qan)

Loanwords allow other types: CSV (gra-mota), CSVC (käs-trül), etc.

Prosody
Stress is usually on the final syllable. However, some suffixes cannot be stressed, so the stress shifts to the syllable before that suffix, even if the stressed syllable is the third or fourth from the end. A number of Tatar words and grammatical forms have the natural stress on the first syllable. Loanwords, mainly from Russian, usually preserve their original stress (unless the original stress is on the last syllable, in such a case the stress in Tatar shifts to suffixes as usual, e.g. sovét > sovetlár > sovetlarğá).

Phonetic alterations
Tatar phonotactics dictate many pronunciation changes which are not reflected in the orthography.

 * Unrounded vowels ı and e become rounded after o or ö:
 * коры/qorı > [qoro]
 * борын/borın > [boron]
 * көзге/közge > [közgö]
 * соры/sorı > [soro]

 * Nasals are assimilated to the following stops:
 * унбер/unber > [umber]
 * менгеч/mengeç > [meñgeç]

 * Stops are assimilated to the preceding nasals (this is reflected in writing):
 * урманнар/urmannar ( < urman + lar)
 * комнар/komnar ( < kom + lar)

 * Voicing may also undergo assimilation:
 * күзсез/küzsez > [küssez]

 * Unstressed vowels may be syncopated or reduced:
 * урыны/urını> [urnı]
 * килене/kilene > [kilne]

 * Vowels may also be elided:
 * кара урман/qara urman > [qarurman]
 * килә иде/kilä ide > [kiläyde]
 * туры урам/turı uram > [tururam]
 * була алмыйм/bula almıym > [bulalmıym]

 * In consonant clusters longer than two phones, ı or e (whichever is dictated by vowel harmony) is inserted into speech as an epenthetic vowel.
 * банк/bank > [bañqı]

 * Final consonant clusters are simplified:
 * артист/artist > [artis]

 * Final devoicing is also frequent:
 * табиб/tabib > [tabip]

Grammar
Like other Turkic languages, Tatar is an agglutinative language.

Nouns
Tatar nouns are inflected for cases and numbers. Case suffixes change depending on last consonants of the noun, while nouns ending in п/к are voiced to б/г (китабым) when a possessive suffix was added. Suffixes below are in back vowel, with front variant can be seen at section.

The declension of possessive suffixes is even more irregular, with the dative suffix -а used in 1st singular and 2nd singular suffixes, and the accusative, dative, locative, and ablative endings -н, -на, -нда, -ннан is used after 3rd person possessive suffix. Nouns ending in -и, -у, or -ү, although phonologically vowels, take consonantic endings.

Declension of pronouns
Declension of personal and demonstrative pronouns tends to be irregular. Irregular forms are in bold.

Verbs
The distribution of present tense suffix is complicated, with the former (also with vowel harmony) is used with verb stems ending in consonants, and latter is used with verb stem ending in vowels (with the last vowel being deleted, — эшли, compare Turkish işlemek — continuous işliyor). The distribution of indefinite future tense is more complicated in consonant-ending stems, it is resolved by -арга/-ырга infinitives (язарга — язар). However, because some have verb citation forms in verbal noun (-у), this rule becomes somewhat unpredictable.

Tenses are negated with -ма, however in the indefinite future tense and the verbal participle they become -мас and -мыйча instead, respectively. Alongside with vowel-ending stems, the suffix also becomes -мый when negates the present tense. To form interrogatives, the suffix -мы is used.

Definite past and conditional tenses use type II personal inflections instead. When in the case of present tense, short ending (-м) is used. After vowels, the first person imperative forms deletes the last vowel, similar to the present tense does ( — эшлим). Like plurals of nouns, the suffix -лар change depending the preceding consonants (-алар, but -ганнар).

Some verbs, however, are anomalous. Dozens of them have irregular stems with a final mid vowel, but obscured on the infinitive ( — укы, укый, — төзе, төзи). The verbs кору "to build", тану "to disclaim", ташу "to spill" have contrastive meanings with verbs with their final vowelled counterparts, meaning "to dry", "to know", "to carry".

Predicatives
These predicative suffixes now fallen into disuse, or rarely used.

Writing system

During its history, Tatar has been written in Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

Before 1928, Tatar was mostly written with in Arabic script (Иске имля/İske imlâ, "Old orthography", to 1920; Яңа имла/Yaña imlâ, "New orthography", 1920–1928).

During the 19th century Russian Christian missionary Nikolay Ilminsky devised the first Cyrillic alphabet for Tatar. This alphabet is still used by Christian Tatars (Kryashens).

In the Soviet Union after 1928, Tatar was written with a Latin alphabet called Jaꞑalif.

In 1939, in Tatarstan and all other parts of the Soviet Union, a Cyrillic script was adopted and is still used to write Tatar. It is also used in Kazakhstan.

The Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999 that came into force in 2001 establishing an official Tatar Latin alphabet. A Russian federal law overrode it in 2002, making Cyrillic the sole official script in Tatarstan since. In 2004, an attempt to introduce a Latin-based alphabet for Tatar was further abandoned when the Constitutional Court ruled that the federal law of 15 November 2002 mandating the use of Cyrillic for the state languages of the republics of the Russian Federation does not contradict the Russian constitution. In accordance with this Constitutional Court ruling, on 28 December 2004, the Tatar Supreme Court overturned the Tatarstani law that made the Latin alphabet official.

In 2012 the Tatarstan government adopted a new Latin alphabet but with limited usage (mostly for Romanization).

 * Tatar Perso-Arabic alphabet (before 1928):

 * Tatar Old Latin (Jaꞑalif) alphabet (1928 to 1940), including a digraph in the last position:

 * Tatar Old Cyrillic alphabet (by Nikolay Ilminsky, 1861; the letters in parentheses are not used in modern publications):

 * Tatar Cyrillic alphabet (1939; the letter order adopted in 1997):

 * 1999 Tatar Latin alphabet, made official by a law adopted by Tatarstani authorities but annulled by the Tatar Supreme Court in 2004:

 * 2012 Tatar Latin alphabet

History
Tatar's ancestors are the extinct Bulgar and Kipchak languages.

The literary Tatar language is based on the Middle Tatar dialect and on the Old Tatar language (İske Tatar Tele). Both are members of the Volga-Ural subgroup of the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, although they also partly derive from the ancient Volga Bulgar language.

Most of the Uralic languages in the Volga River area have strongly influenced the Tatar language, as have the Arabic, Persian and Russian languages.

Crimean Tatar, although similar by name, belongs to another subgroup of the Kipchak languages. Unlike Kazan Tatar, Crimean Tatar is heavily influenced by Turkish (mostly its Ottoman variety with Arabic and Persian influences) and Nogai languages.

Examples
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1:

Барлык кешеләр дә азат һәм үз абруйлары һәм хокуклары ягыннан тиң булып туалар. Аларга акыл һәм вөҗдан бирелгән һәм бер-берсенә карата туганнарча мөнасәбәттә булырга тиешләр.

Barlıq keşelär dä azat häm üz abruyları häm xoquqları yağınnan tiñ bulıp tualar. Alarğa aqıl häm wöcdan birelgän häm ber-bersenä qarata tuğannarça mönasäbättä bulırğa tiyeşlär.

Tatar online learning
A common complaint among those curious about Tatar language outside of Russia has been its lack of non-Russian Latin alphabet sources. For this, a young Germany-based Tatar architect Aygul Ahmetcan (Aygöl Əxmətcan), with the help of her partner, a linguistics student Bulat Shaymi (Bulat Şəymi), has created a Telegram channel Learn Tatar, which offers Tatar language teaching in English. It has gained thousands of viewers in few months after its creation in August 2023. Shaymi himself has a Youtube channel dedicated to Tatar content.

Since then, a website learntatar.com has also been established.

Among other helpful sources is the website Aybagar ("Sunflower"), which "publishes scientific works and original materials about Tatars, the Tatar language and Tatar culture, focusing especially on the Tatar diaspora worldwide". Tatar pronunciations can be found in Forvo and "Corpus of Written Tatar".

Modern Tatar Identity is a podcast that has "conversations with people who have dedicated a part of their life to Tatar and Tatar language research".

title: Tatar language


text:
Conyers Middleton

Conyers Middleton (27 December 1683 – 28 July 1750) was an English clergyman. Though mired in controversy and disputes, he was also considered one of the best stylists in English of his time.

Early life
Middleton was born at Richmond, North Yorkshire, in 1683. His mother, Barbara Place (d. 1700), was the second wife of William Middleton (c.1646–1714), the rector of Hinderwell. Conyers Middleton had two brothers and a half-brother.

Middleton was educated at St Peter's School, York, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in March 1699. He graduated with a BA in 1703. He was elected a fellow of the college in 1705 and took his MA in 1706 In 1707 he was ordained a deacon, and a priest in 1708.

In 1710 Dr. Middleton married Sarah Morris, the daughter of Thomas Morris (died 1717) of Mount Morris, Monks Horton, Hythe, Kent, and widow of Councillor and recorder Robert Drake of Cambridge (died 1702), of the family Drake of Ash. In due course Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) became a step-grand-daughter.

Dispute with Bentley
Middleton was one of the thirty fellows of Trinity College who on 6 February 1710 petitioned the Bishop of Ely, as visitor of the college, to take steps against Richard Bentley the Master, at odds with the fellowship. In 1717, he became involved in a dispute with Bentley over the awarding of degrees. George I visited the university, and the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred on 32 people, including Middleton. Bentley, as regius professor of divinity, demanded a fee of four guineas from each of the new doctors in addition to the established complimentary "broad-piece". Middleton, after some dispute, consented to pay, taking Bentley's written promise to return the money if the claim should be finally disallowed. He was then created doctor. Having vainly applied for a return of the fee, he sued for it as a debt in the vice-chancellor's court. After various delays and attempts to make up the quarrel, the vice-chancellor issued a decree (23 September 1718) for Bentley's arrest. Bentley's refusal to submit to this decree led to further proceedings, and to his degradation from all his degrees by a grace of the senate on 18 October.

The matter was then pursued in a pamphlet war and Bentley brought an action against the publisher of the anonymous On the Present State of Trinity College (1719), which was the work of Middleton with John Colbatch. Middleton claimed (9 February 1720) the pamphlet as his own; Bentley continued to prosecute the bookseller, until Middleton made a declaration of his authorship before witnesses. Bentley then laid an information against him in the King's Bench, based on a passage in the pamphlet about the impossibility of obtaining redress in "any proper court of justice in the kingdom". The proceedings were slow, and meanwhile Middleton took advantage of Bentley's proposals for an edition of the New Testament to attack him in a sharp pamphlet. Bentley replied, using terms of gross abuse directed mainly against Colbatch, to whom he chose to attribute the authorship. Bentley's reply was condemned by the Cambridge heads of houses. Colbatch brought an action against him, and Middleton wrote a longer and more temperate rejoinder (possibly helped by Charles Ashton).

When Middleton's case was heard in the court of king's bench (Trinity term 1721), he was found guilty of libel. Sentence was delayed. Friends subscribed towards his expenses, and he obtained the intercession of a highly placed person for a lenient sentence. The chief justice John Pratt advised the two doctors to avoid scandal by a compromise, and Bentley finally accepted an apology. Middleton, however, had to pay his own costs, and expenses of his opponent.

The dispute flared up again, to end on a note of bathos. Middleton's supporters (14 December 1721), passed a vote through the university Senate making him a librarian—a salaried "Protobibliothecarius" of the university library—a new post, on the pretext of the king's recent donation of Bishop John Moore's library. Middleton in 1723 published a plan for the future arrangement of the books; but with swipes at Bentley for retaining some manuscripts (the Codex Bezæ among them) in his own house, and on the court of king's bench. Bentley appealed to the court, and on 20 June 1723 Middleton was fined, and ordered to provide securities for good behaviour for a year. Middleton went off to Italy. On his return he renewed his old suit for the four guineas. Bentley did not oppose him, and in February 1726 Middleton at last got back his fee, together with 12s. costs.

Later life
Middleton stayed in Rome during a great part of 1724 and 1725. Henry Hare, 3rd Baron Coleraine, a fellow collector, was his companion on this journey. Middleton made a collection of antiquities, of which he later published a description; he sold it to Horace Walpole in 1744.

His first wife, Sarah Morris, died on 19 February 1731. In 1731 Middleton was appointed first Woodwardian Professor of Geology, and delivered an inaugural address in Latin, pointing out the benefits which might be expected from a study of fossils in confirming the history of Noah's Flood. He resigned the chair in 1734, on his second marriage.

Middleton's sceptical tendency became clearer, and Zachary Pearce accused him of covert infidelity. He was threatened with a loss of his Cambridge degrees. Middleton replied in two pamphlets, making such explanations as he could. In 1733, however, an anonymous pamphlet (by Philip Williams the public orator) declared that his books ought to be burnt and he should be banished from the university, unless he made a recantation. Middleton made an explanation in a final pamphlet, but for some time remained silent on theological topics. His relationship with Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, was damaged.

Middleton's major work, his Life of Cicero (1741), was a success. He was attacked by Samuel Parr in 1787, however, for knowing plagiarism: Parr claimed it was based on De tribus luminibus Romanorum, a scarce work by William Bellenden. Middleton's second wife Mary died in 1745, and he returned to controversial theology in 1747. He looked for ecclesiastical preferment, but was unpopular with the bishops. Middleton lived at Hildersham, near Cambridge, and married again shortly before he died, on 28 July 1750.

Works
A modern opinion is that

"Middleton stood out as an especially lethal species of the polemical divine. At best sarcastic and withering, at worst poisonous and unfair, Middleton justly deserved his reputation [...]."

On the other hand, Alexander Pope thought he and Nathaniel Hooke were the only prose writers of the day who deserved to be cited as authorities on the language. Samuel Parr, while exposing Middleton's plagiarisms, praised his style. An edition of his works, containing several posthumous tracts, but not including the Life of Cicero, appeared in four volumes in 1752, and in five volumes in 1755.

Early works
The pamphlets from the struggle with Bentley were:

 * A full and impartial Account of all the late Proceedings … against Dr. Bentley, 1719.
 * Second Part of the above, 1719.
 * Some Remarks upon a Pamphlet entitled “The Case of Dr. Bentley further stated and vindicated” …, 1719.
 * A True Account of the Present State of Trinity College in Cambridge under the oppressive rule of their Master, Richard Bentley, late D.D., 1720.
 * Remarks, paragraph by paragraph, upon the Proposals lately published by Richard Bentley for a new Edition of the Greek Testament and Latin Version, 1721.
 * Some further Remarks … containing a full Answer to the Editor's late Defence …, 1721.
 * Bibliothecæ Cantabrigiensis ordinandæ Methodus quædam …, 1723.

Middleton visited Italy, and drew conclusions on the pagan origin of Christian church ceremonies and beliefs; he subsequently published these in his Letter from Rome, showing an Exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism (1729). This work led to an attack from the Catholic side by Richard Challoner, in the preface to The Catholic Christian instructed in the Sacraments, Sacrifice and Ceremonies of the Church (1737); Challoner in particular accused Middleton of misrepresenting the articles of the Tridentine Creed that applied to saints and images. Middleton retaliated through the legal system, and Challoner in 1738 left for Douai. Thomas Seward wrote further on the subject in a 1746 "sequel" to Middleton and Henry Mower (i.e. More).

Controversy with the medical profession
In 1726, prompted by the Harveian Oration by Richard Mead, with an appendix by Edmund Chishull, Middleton offended the medical profession with a dissertation contending that the healing art among the ancients was exercised only by slaves or freedmen. He was answered by John Ward, Joseph Letherland, and others, to whom Middleton replied. Middleton let the matter drop after meeting Mead socially; but two related works, an Appendix seu Definitiones, pars secunda and a letter from Middleton to another opponent, Charles La Motte, were later published in 1761 by William Heberden the elder.

Deistic controversy
Middleton had remonstrated with Daniel Waterland when the latter replied to Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation. Middleton took a line which exposed him to the reproach of infidelity. In professing to indicate a short and easy method of confuting Tindal, he laid emphasis on the indispensableness of Christianity as a mainstay of social order. This brought him into conflict with those who held the same views as Waterland. Middleton was attacked from many quarters, and produced several apologetic pamphlets. His letter to Waterland from Rome, however, hinted that Middleton himself was active in Deism. Middleton wrote "Deity can be conceived to interpose himself; the universal good and salvation of man."

Classical scholarship
His Life of Cicero (1741) was largely told in the words of the writings of Cicero. Middleton's reputation was enhanced by this work; but, as was later pointed out, he drew largely from a rare book by William Bellenden, De tribus luminibus Romanorum. The work was undertaken at the request of John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey; from their correspondence came the idea for The Roman Senate, published in 1747.

Middletonian controversy on miraculous powers
The years 1747–8 produced Middleton's most significant theological writings. The Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry addressed "the miraculous powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the church from the earliest ages." Middleton suggested two propositions: that ecclesiastical miracles must be accepted or rejected in the mass; and that there is a distinction between the authority due to the early Church Fathers' testimony to the beliefs and practices of their times, and their credibility as witnesses to matters of fact. In 1750, he attacked Thomas Sherlock's notions of antediluvian prophecy, which had been published 25 years before. Among those who answered, or defended Sherlock, were: Thomas Ashton; Julius Bate; Anselm Bayly; Zachary Brooke; Thomas Church; Joseph Clarke; William Cooke; William Dodwell; Ralph Heathcote; John Jackson; Laurence Jackson; John Rotheram; Thomas Rutherforth; and Thomas Secker. Methodist founder John Wesley wrote an extensive response to Middleton recording his disagreement with him in January 1749.

Reflections on the variations, or inconsistencies, which are found among the four Evangelists was posthumous, published in 1752.

Family
Although Middleton died childless, he married three times.

 * firstly, in 1710, to Sarah Drake, the widow of Counsellor Drake of Cambridge, and daughter of Mr. Morris of Oak Morris in Kent;
 * secondly, in 1734, to his cousin Mary, daughter of the Rev. Conyers Place of Dorchester, who died 26 April 1745, aged 38;
 * thirdly, at the end of his life, to Anne, daughter of John Powell of Boughrood, in Radnorshire, who had lived as a companion to Mrs. Trenchard, widow of John Trenchard, later married to Thomas Gordon.

Elizabeth Montagu was a granddaughter of Sarah Drake, and she spent much time as a child with the Middletons in Cambridge, as did her sister Sarah Scott.

title: Conyers Middleton