John Aubrey, of whom I wrote last week, had an extraordinary ability to capture, with a few strokes of the quill, the essence of another person, to discover what he or she was really like. In his bid to help the 17th-century historian Anthony Wood write his record of all the writers and bishops educated at Oxford between 1500-1690, he spent more time “anecdoting” his chaotic notes (now in the Bodleian) than annotating them.

Take for instance his sketch of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the man some say was the real Shakespeare: “The Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.”

But for a true whiff of life in a 17th-century Oxford college, wafted across more than 350 years, there is the word-portrait, contained in Aubrey’s famous Brief Lives, of Dr Ralph Kettle (1563-1643), President of his own college Trinity: “He was irreconcileable to long haire [I am using Aubrey’s spelling in all these quotes] . . . woe be to him that sate on the outside of the Table . . . I remember he cutt Mr Radford’s haire with the knife that chipps the bread on the Buttery Hatch.”

The doctor’s teaching methods were unorthodox. Aubrey wrote: “As they were reading of inscribing and circumscribing Figures, sayd he, I will shew you how to inscribe a Triangle in a Quadrangle. Bring a pig into the quadrangle, and I will sett the colledge dog at him, and he will take the pig by the eare, then come and take the Dog by the tayle and the hog by the tayle, and so there you have a Triangle in a quadrangle; quod erat faciendum.”

He had a half-way serious side : “He did not care for countrey Revells because they tended to debauchery. Sayd he, at Garsington [where he was parson], Here is hey for Garsington!, and hey for Cuddesdon! and hey Hockley! but here’s nobody cries hey for God Almighty!” Other Oxford and Oxfordshire people who feature in the Aubrey’s 426 Brief Lives include the poet Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (1610-1643) who built Great Tew where (Aubrey wrote) “his house was like a Colledge, full of learned men” — like Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller, and Thomas Hobbes, all of whom also appear in Brief Lives.

Falkland threw away his life on the Royalist side at the first battle of Newbury in 1643, by madly and needlessly charging between the two armies. No one knows why he did such a thing but chatterbox Aubrey wrote: “I have been well enformed by those who best knew him, and knew intrigues behind the curtaine (as they say) that it was the griefe of the death of Mrs Moray, a handsome Lady at Court, who was his Mistresse.” (And there was me all these years believing his death was a noble act of despair at seeing the two sides come to war after all his efforts at negotiating peace at Great Tew).

Then there was the bawdy poet John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). “He was Raunger [Ranger] of Woodstock- parke and lived often at the west end [Combe Lodge], a very delightful place and noble prospect westwards. Here his Lordship had severall lascivious Pictures drawen.”

And of the poet John Milton, whose family came from Stanton St John and whose first wife grew up in Forest Hill, he had this to say: “His harmonical and ingenious soul did lodge in a beautiful and wel-proportioned body.” And again: “He pronounced the letter R (litera canina) very hard — a certain sign of a satirical wit.”

Sadly, the collaboration between Aubrey and Wood did not end happily. Wood managed to libel the first Earl of Clarendon (despite the fact that the earl was dead) and the offending part of his book was publicly burned in Oxford by the common hangman. Wood wrote of Aubrey: “He was a shiftless person, roving and maggotty-headed and sometimes little better than crazed.” On the other hand, as Oliver Lawson Dick pointed out as editor of his 1949 edition of Brief Lives, Wood never let on to the court that the libel had originated with Aubrey.