ABSTRACT
The antiquarian notes of John Aubrey show him living in a patriarchal world, conducting his researches in correspondence with other gentlemen of learning and leisure. Aubrey took the lore of the uneducated more seriously than he sometimes pretended; at the same time he has been shown to be less gullible than he seemed to his learned contemporaries. Aubrey represents his nurse's singing as a form of oral history by relating this observation, by means of the word "so," to his discussion of female oral history and to William of Malmesbury's use of old songs for his chronicle. Sublimating his interest in nurses' and old wives' tales as a scholarly pursuit of historical fact enabled the adult Aubrey to reappropriate the tales without sacrificing his own sense of superiority. An example of an old wives' tradition recorded by Aubrey from observation, but unquestionably disseminated by print, was already familiar to nineteenth-century scholars.
