ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the motivations which led to the development of an extraordinarily successful English provincial learned society, the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), over a period of 50 years. They can locate in the minutes of societies such as the SGS a system of values which explains the process whereby early eighteenth-century people saw natural knowledge as a significantly useful aspect of their everyday lives. The values in question are those based on natural law, discussed in the work of seventeenth-century philosophers, principally Grotius, Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, Locke and Richard Cumberland, and leading to a theory of rights and duties based on the possession of landed property. Evidence can be found for the significance of sociability and curiosity to the communication of natural knowledge within English society in the surviving records of local groupings of gentlemen who were concerned to put into practice benevolent ideas of civic improvement by regular meetings.
