ABSTRACT
Nearing the end of his life in July 1695, Robert Plot wrote to his friend Arthur Charlett with an air of resignation: he had, explained Plot, left London for Kent, “where I think to shake hands with the world, and trouble it no more, with Natural Histories or anything else”.2 The previous four years had clearly drained his energy and ambition. Back in 1691 he had sounded much more up beat, declaring to the same correspondent that he was “almost over come with temptations to undertake the Natural History of Middsx & Kent”.3 As late as 1694 in fact, the project was still very much on his mind. Many people of no slight significance, he told Sir Robert Southwell, had urged him to pursue this survey, “[in] the same manner I have already don[e] those of Oxford and Staffordshire”. His reason for writing to Southwell, then president of the Royal Society, was to
entreat the favour that you would mediate for me,... that I may have free use of all such materials toward the compiling the said History, that I shall find either in their [the Royal Society’s] Repository of Registeries, fit for my use.4
