 President, fellows, and guests. In 1790, John Nichols published an account of the Gentleman's Society at Spalding in the third volume of Bibliotheca Topographic of Britannica. Drawing on manuscript sources left by Roger and Samuel Gale, Nichols wrote that, while the Royal Society of Antiquaries flourished in the capital, others were set on foot in different parts of the kingdom, not subordinate to the others but corresponding with them. Among these, the Gentleman's Society at Spalding took the lead. It may even boast a principal share in the revival of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and it outlived the lesser societies which surrounded it and may be said to have merged in it. In recent years, a more skeptical note has crept in to accounts of the early history of the Spalding Gentleman's Society. The SGS, as it was known and still is, was, and I quote, an ancillary to the Royal Society, supported by members of the Antiquaries and Royal Society who were, and I quote again, dragooned into accepting and paying for honorary membership. Excellent work by Diana and Michael Honeybone, Valerie Rumbold, and Rowie Sweet, among others, has begun to shed light on the SGS's early history, especially the story of its founder, Morris Johnson, nicknamed the Antiquary. However, a similar disjunction still appears in accounts of Johnson's life, eulogized by William Stucley as a man who preferred the serene suites of a country life, learned leisure, study, and contemplation. More recently, Johnson has been described as a gregarious, chatty, and ambitious man who liked to make himself out more important than he was. I really do like that description. My goal this afternoon is not to speak as an apologist for the SGS or for Morris Johnson much as I am tempted to do so. Instead, I want to consider the ways in which the Society of Antiquaries and the SGS supported and sustained one another in the first half of the 18th century and the extent to which they operated in tandem as institutions and as communities of individual scholars. In doing so, I will also explore the role played by Johnson within and between the two societies, his methods as a scholar, and his successes as an organizer. Before I get into specifics, though, I'll give you a brief overview of Johnson's life and the SGS's history as a bit of context. And I should say I apologize to those of you who may have heard this story before in some form. Morris Johnson was born in 1688 at Ascoffey Hall in Spalding, the son of Morris Johnson's senior and his first wife, Jane. Morris was educated at the local grammar school and then at Eaton, probably his companion to the future second Duke of the Clue, whose father was Lord of the Manor of Spalding. In 1705, Johnson was admitted to the inner temple and remained in London until he was called to the bar in 1710. These five years in London would shape every aspect of Johnson's life. He became friends there with Sir Richard Steele who introduced him to a crowd of Buttons Coffee House in Covent Garden that included Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, John Gay and the then poet Laureate, Lawrence Euston. Sometime after 1708, Johnson became associated with Humphrey Wanley, John Bagford, and Roger and Samuel Gale who were then almost certainly meeting at the fountain just around the corner from the inner temple to the west at the corner of Chancellery Lane and the Strand. Around the corner to the east, of course, was Crane Court, home to the Royal Society. When Johnson returned to Spalding to marry the girl next door, Elizabeth Ambler, he was leaving London for a place his friend William Bogdani called a town separated from the rest of mankind. Johnson immediately gathered his father and two brothers, his father and brother-in-law and a group of local clergymen, doctors, lawyers and land surveyors into what he called a society of gentlemen who met weekly in a Spalding Coffee House to discuss literature, history and the newspapers. In November 1712, a group of 13 of these members, and I quote from this document, formed themselves into a voluntary society for the supporting mutual benevolence and their improvement in the liberal sciences and polite learning. Their remit was, in short, everything. Politics was the only subject prohibited and that very positively by our laws. This breadth of perspective was essential to Johnson's aim of mirroring metropolitan intellectual life. It was also fundamental to the society's primary charitable objective of developing a universal library divided between the parish church, the grammar school and the society's own museum, but available to local people free of charge. And here you see the library catalog that contained all of these, broken down into books, books and manuscripts, maps, prints and what Johnson calls supelex literaria. And yet despite this attempt at universalism and aquarium subjects pervade the society's minutes. At the second meeting on November 10th, 1712, the members discussed a 12th century inscribed tomb at Peterborough Cathedral. At the second meeting a week later, they studied a collection of paint and stain recipes gathered from the works of Albrecht Dürer and other artists. Over the next two months, subjects included a medal attributed to the Polish Duchess of Seviery, a history of hockey, the history of side saddles and women's writing attire they really liked this medal. Charters, seals and support for monuments from nearby parish churches. Approximately half of the surviving papers for the period of 1712 to 1723 are concerned with antiquarian and historical subjects followed closely by bibliographical topics, the administration of the libraries and natural philosophy. The SGS very quickly moved to cultivate a far-flung network of honorary members that included the Duke of Buclu who eventually became the society's patron, Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, as well as Pope, Gay, Isaac Newton, Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloan, George Virtue, Martin Fox, Emmanuel Mendes de Costa, military and naval officers, ambassadors, East India Company factors, colonial governors, and such notable individuals as Decidius, Archimandrite of St. Pantocrator on Mount Athos, and Suleiman Job Diallo, a Muslim priest and former slave who was proposed by four members of the Society of Antiquaries and elected to SGS membership in May 1734. Despite the fact that neither the Society of Antiquaries itself nor the Royal Society seems to have introduced or considered Diallo amongst its membership. As membership increased, it did so very rapidly, moving from just 20 in 1717 to more than 200 by 1730, and by 1760, a total of more than 400 men had been or were members of the SGS. As the Society's collections and membership grew, it steadily outgrew its accommodations. In 1715, it left that first coffee house for the Parsonage, then an assembly room in the marketplace, and finally to a rented cottage in the remains of Spaulding Priory, which members fitted out as you can see here in this plan, with bespoke cabinets for their books, maps, prints, curiosities, natural specimens, and scientific instruments. They also cultivated their aphysic garden where they experimented with rare cultivars and medicinal herbs. Members of the public were admitted to the museum outside the Society's meeting times and the frequent payments for new locks for the Garden Gate suggests that the public desire for education was indeed powerful. Local members met every Thursday, 52 weeks a year, for four hours in summer and six in winter. In addition to their books and museum collections, they maintained a wine cellar and a stock of pipes, glasses, and tankards, as well as sheet music for scratch performances and an annual summer anniversary soiree attended by members, families, and visitors. These visitors included members of the Peterborough Gentleman Society, founded by Timothy Neve in 1728 as a sister society to the SGS. Or members from Lincoln, Ancaster, and Stamford, where shorter-lived satellite societies had been planted but failed to take root. For most of his adult life, Morris Johnson served as the SGS's secretary, responsible for maintaining the Society's minute books, its library catalogs, and its steadily-grown collection of correspondence from honorary members. Thanks to Johnson's careful archiving and endowment of a librarianship via a quest in his will, the early 18th-century collections survived all but entire. Thanks to the efforts of historic SGS librarians and current volunteers who are cataloging this material, as well as the assistance of the library team here, it's been possible to begin to reconnect the 18th-century SGS and the Society of Antiquaries, and it's this that I now want to examine in a bit more detail. And just for clarity's sake, throughout the rest of this talk, I will refer to the SGS as the SGS and the Society of Antiquaries simply as the Society. Three-word names get a bit complicated. During the formative years of both societies, Mars Johnson traveled back and forth to London at least three times each year for the legal terms, using these visits to carry out research at the Cotton Library and to maintain contact with his friends at the Fountain and later at the Miter, where he introduced his childhood friend, William Stucley, to them in 1717. It was on one of these trips that Johnson uncovered Cotton Faustina E5, which contains the original proposals for a Society of Antiquaries drawn up by Robert Cotton himself. Johnson and Stucley mined Faustina E5 to compose what they call the original plan and proposals upon it were made for re-establishing the Academy of Antiquaries and Historians. This copy that detailed at the top and in whole down there at the bottom left is annotated by Mars Johnson. And I quote, this is of Dr. William Stucley's handwriting and I preserved it from being torn to pieces by him after he had wrote it fair over. He was an inveterate keeper of everything. At the bottom, Johnson adds a list of the proposed first officers of this new Academy of Antiquaries and Historians. A second fairer copy also in Stucley's hand and possibly created for Johnson is dated Hillary term 1717-18 and carries this note at the end. I declined the offices of Vice President then offered me and of director proposed to me, the former in preference to gentleman more resident in town, the latter in favor of a gentleman much better qualified for it. But made my request that whenever the Society should be fixed and have a library, a museum of their own, that I might be librarian and keeper of their books, papers, pictures and Supelex literaria, which was assured I should have in their time, MJ 1717. There's several points worth noting in this post script. First, that Johnson and Stucley worked together to formulate a structure and set of organizing principles for the Society of Antiquaries they hope to found and that it was probably Johnson who knew the Cotton Library far better than Stucley did and who demonstrated throughout his life a preference for written precedent in all things who began by turning to the Elizabethan Society for inspiration. Second, that Mars Johnson's claim to have been the Society's first librarian is not quite a fabrication as Joan Evans assumed but a kind of half truth, an in principle appointment to an office that in many ways mirrored his role in the SGS and he's actually quoting of course from that library catalog still preserved in the SGS archive but a role that never materialized because the Society quite frankly didn't have the space to keep these things. And finally, that Johnson's experience of organizing the SGS probably influenced the design of the Society of Antiquaries more than we might assume. The Society's first articles, also drawn up by Stucley and Johnson, share a number of common features with those of the SGS. Both societies admitted members on request or proposal but subject to balloting by existing members. Both societies charged an admission fee, one pound or a book of that value in Spalding, half a guinea in London. Both societies charged members regular contributions to fund the Society's activities. Again, one shilling a month in London, one shilling a week in Spalding. Both societies instituted a series of fines for non-attendance, non-payment and non-precipitation which Johnson later admitted that he'd sort of caged from the Royal Society. Both societies employed a common slate of officers, a president, vice presidents, secretary, director and treasurer. Both societies maintained minute books as their primary means of record keeping as opposed to the register and letter book system set up by the Royal Society and both archived correspondence, both written and visual, as a matter of course. And finally, both societies set out to create intellectual resources. At Spalding, members' weekly contributions went toward the purchase of books for the town's libraries for common use. In London, those contributions went, of course, toward the cost of engraving and printing antiquities for the members' benefit and for wider dissemination. There were also more mundane considerations. In June 1718, that is six months after the institution of the Society, Stucley wrote to Johnson that, we have thoughts of taking a room in the temple and laying up liquor in it, as you do. We have bought towards furniture a good picture of Edward III and she'll have several other pictures, et cetera, presented to us. I can't help but see this as a reference to the SGS's own recently acquired room with its store of wine and its recently acquired prints and pictures lining the walls. Clearly, the early members of the Society saw in the SGS at least some kind of model for a desirable social intellectual community or environment in which to work. It's also worth noting that at the time the Society signed its proposals in 1717-18, Stucley had neither visited the SGS nor become a member. Both were still five years in the future. Given that all of these arrangements that I've just mentioned had been tested and modified into workable shape at the SGS over a period of five years, it seems likely that one of Johnson's contributions to the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries was his practical advice on managing something that aspired to be more than a coffee house or a tavern club. Of course, his own experience derived ultimately from having transplanted and formalized the tavern society, the proto society of Antiquaries of the previous decade to Spaulding where he reworked it and returned it. In addition to administrative and organizational arrangements, the two societies also shared members. Of the 22 founding members of the Society of Antiquaries besides Johnson, eight would in time become members of the SGS. Samuel Emerald Gale, Lord Colrain, George Holmes, George Virtue, Brown Willis, Stucley, and Edward Alexander, portrait of whom I have not been able to find. Most of these joined after 1720, the year in which Johnson was introduced to Isaac Newton and advised by Newton to cultivate corresponding members as a means of ensuring a steady flow of information to the regular members who lived in and around Spaulding and attended the weekly meetings. The boom in SGS membership in the 1720s and 30s that jumped from 20 to 200 and from 200 to more than 400 can, I think, be attributed directly to Johnson taking Newton's advice. And again, it's tempting to see Johnson's hand at work in an entry or two entries in the Society's minutes for March 3rd, 1725, when it was proposed that the Society consider whether it be advisable for us to take in gentlemen that are persons of learning and curiosity that live in distant parts of the country who will favor us with a correspondence under the name of honorary members who are not to pay contributions, that is, weekly contributions, nor receive any of the works of the Society, such as affairs do not permit them to come to town. This arrangement is remarkably similar to that of the SGS. Even down to the idea that payment of the weekly fee, though not the membership fee, would be waived for those proposed and accepted as honorary members. The proposal to the Society of Antiquaries also arises at the peak of the SGS's success in recruiting such members and was proposed in the middle of Hillary term, a time of year when Johnson almost always was resident in London with his brothers and attending Society meetings. Far from following the SGS model, however, a fortnight later, the question of honorary members was passed in the negative and it was agreed to that from hence forward, the number of members of the Society shall not exceed 100. And we see here, I think, two different models of ensuring a Society's success and raising its profile, one, the widest reach possible and two, a more selective targeted reach to those most productive members of the antiquarian community. When the Society published a general list of the members of the Society of Antiquaries London from 1717 inclusive to Mykonos 1747, a copy was sent to the SGS. Of the 245 members, Morris Johnson added red stars, which show a bit dark here, to the names of 46 who were or who had been members of the SGS. Although I haven't been able to locate admission dates for all of these members yet, it appears that roughly half followed the pattern of Johnson's brothers, John and Henry, cutting their teeth in Spaulding before going on to be proposed to the Society in London. The other half, mostly those with a title, some kind of notoriety or significant publication credits were probably cultivated by Johnson during those trips to London to raise the SGS's profile and to encourage donations to its library and museum. Regardless of individual members' social standing, however, it was their personal relationships that formed the foundation of what would become a reciprocal relationship between the SGS and the Society. At the most basic level, members of the two societies provided practical assistance to one another. When William Baxter's Guassarium, Antiquitat and Britannicarum was published in 1719, Stucley wrote to Johnson to report that Johnson's personal copy, destined for his library at Ascalfee Hall, was waiting for him at the Royal Society. Stucley also passed on news from Roger Gale, saying that Gale was holding a copy of Thomas Hearn's collection of curious discourses that had been donated to the SGS by Sir Joseph Ailoff and that Gale's edition of the Registrar Menards de Richmond to which the SGS had subscribed was nearing completion. And this is the copy of the collection of curious discourses and this very customary inscription at the top naming the donor and his affiliations and then also ascribing the book to one librarian's balding or another below the title. In 1744, Joseph Ames wrote to thank Johnson for lending him various books from his own and the SGS's libraries and for helping to arrange subscriptions from SGS members for Ames's typographical antiquities. The subscribers list to which includes individual SGS members and a line that simply reads Spalding Society of Gentlemen. As was customary, Ames's affiliation with the SGS was inscribed on the title page below the printed notice of his affiliation with the Society of Antiquaries. You can just about make it out down there above the word London. Along with books, coins regularly traveled between South Link and Sharon London with Johnson arranging loans from the SGS, from his cousin, Bill Pray Bell, and from his own collection to various members of the Society. For example, Martin Fulkes, who was preparing his presentation of a table of English gold coins from King Edward III, from the 18th year of King Edward III to the Society in 1736, and Johnson loaned all of these materials again when Fulkes moved to publish this table in 1745. Members in London who had more ready access to rare books and prints often acted as agents for the SGS and a significant proportion of the SGS's rarest and finest editions only reached spaulding thanks to the efforts of very keen-eyed London members. When James West showed the 30 miniature prints of Hans Hobein the Younger's Dance of Death engraved by Linces Las Holler to a meeting of the Society in 1733, the reception was so warm that he donated one set to the Society, which is now bound and can be found upstairs, and another to the SGS, which is still in sheets. His gift seems to have sparked a minor craze for Holler amongst the SGS members who collected several dozen printed portraits, maps, and works of art by the engraver. Each of these exchanges was facilitated by letters. And despite the Society's decision in 1725 not to admit honorary or corresponding members, the SGS in effect played precisely this role. After 1724, when Mars Johnson wrote to his wife Elizabeth to ask her to pass on the message that the Society of Antiquaries had accepted the SGS members offer to help with the identification of coins, the SGS regularly sent news of antiquarian discoveries to London and received news from London in exchange. This system of relays ensured that news about antiquities and discoveries and historical publications reached the widest possible audience. In September 1738, for example, Roger Gale sent the SGS a letter with a description of a flint arrowhead found in the West Indies where Mars Johnson's son was stationed. When Johnson attended a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on November 23rd, he shared that letter there, which in turn led to a discussion on the use of flint by the ancient Swedes by the botanist and antiquary Johan Jakob Delinius, which Johnson duly transcribed and related to the SGS two weeks later and sent on to Gale in December. In 1742, an even more complex series of exchanges took place when the Yorkshire antiquary Francis Drake wrote to his cousin Thomas in London with a description and sketch of Melrose Abbey taken during his recent travels in Scotland. Francis hoped that the Society of Antiquaries would engrave the print in their regular series. Thomas passed the letter to Roger Gale who annotated it before reading it out at a meeting of the Society. That's the first line just below. You can just about make out Drake on the far right-hand side. Gale presents the letter, then annotates it again based on the responses he's received and sends it to the SGS, wrapped in another letter to Mars Johnson. Johnson himself annotates the letter again, that's the bit in red, and presents it to the SGS members at a meeting on August 19th, 1742. He sends SGS members thoughts to Cambridge and back to Francis Drake in York and files the letter in the SGS archive. The layers upon layers of exchange appear again and again throughout the minute books and correspondence files of the SGS and the Society of Antiquaries. An entry in this Society's minutes for February 22nd, 1732, records that Mr. West brought a large folio manuscript finally illuminated being a translation of Boccaccio's Fall of Princes. Among other illuminations are the pictures of Boccaccio and Petrarch, AD 1409. Exactly one week later, the two societies were by this point meeting at the same time on the same day of the week. This sketch was sent and was presented, excuse me, to members of the SGS and the manuscript described again. Now with the rather puzzling edition that the illuminations in West's manuscript contained, amongst other instruments of war, pictures of mortars. I can only chalk this up to the fact that there were a number of military engineers admitted to membership in the 1720s and 30s and there must be some kind of professional interest. The final example I'll mention is that of the petrified body found in the Isle of Axon near Scunthorpe in 1747. Reported first to the Royal Society, a shoe and petrified hand were eventually brought to the Society of Antiquaries in October 1747. News of this discovery had reached the SGS first, however, by way of William Stuckey, then living at Stamford on the main post road between Scunthorpe and London. Remarkably, 10 years later, Charles Emcott presented the SGS with the other shoe. The SGS Minute Book contains this set of drawings of the Emcott shoe, nearly identical to those in the Society of Antiquaries drawings portfolio. The SGS Minute Book entry includes a reference to George Virtue's comments on the shoe made at that first meeting in 1747. A note that the other shoe and the hand had been given to the Royal Society. The SGS was offered a foot that was in the shoe but I think wisely declined. And the Minute Book also records a reference to a related article printed in Philosophical Transactions number 44. In two paragraphs and these simple drawings, SGS members collated and added to a decade's worth of research to provide a foundation for future investigation. And I think it's this example, the moving back and forth between drawing portfolios, minute books, letters, and physical artifacts. The shoe still survives in the Spaulding Museum. That best demonstrates why these minute books and these paired correspondences remained such vital sources for 18th century scholars and remain vital sources for any of us to engage in 18th century studies in its very broadest sense. You simply don't know what you will find there. Exchanges such as these highlight the ways in which members of the SGS and the Society of Antiquaries sought to assist one another through the sharing of knowledge. And while no one correspondent could provide enough information to sustain either society in aggregate, their exchanges effectively extend the capacity of both. This potential was recognized by successive secretaries of the society. During William Stuckey's secretarieship, personal letters moved back and forth between Stuckey and Johnson, relating news of one society or the other. With Stuckey's departure for Stamford in 1735, Alexander Gordon, who'd become a member of the SGS in March 1734, took over the secretarieship. And in 1736, initiated a more formal arrangement with Mars Johnson in Johnson's capacity as secretary. In return for Johnson's digests of antiquarian matters from the SGS minute books and correspondence, Gordon offered regular updates on the society's activities and provided free copies of each of its publications for the benefit of those SGS members who were not able to make it to London or who were not themselves members. There's some indication actually that Gordon conceived of the SGS not as it was, but as he imagined the Society of Antiquaries. And I refer to three entries in the Society of Antiquaries' minute book. First of July, 1736, this is Gordon. Mr. Bogdani produced a letter from Mars Johnson enumerating several curious things in antiquity, shown at different times to the Society of Antiquaries at Spalding and Lincolnshire, and a later hand, crossing out Society of Antiquaries and replacing with gentlemen's. Two weeks later, when Gordon has initiated a relationship, he refers to the Society of Antiquaries at Spalding again, and a week after that, the Society of Antiquaries at Spalding, which he again corrects. Clearly, the SGS could be seen by different members in very different ways. For members of the Society of Antiquaries, the SGS could be another antiquarian society, a parallel organization. After Gordon's departure for South Carolina, Joseph Ames continued this relationship until his death in 1759, and that is beyond Johnson's lifetime. Ames and Johnson enjoyed a long lasting and mutually beneficial intellectual relationship, and regularly referred to one another as my good brother secretary, or my dear brother secretary, in their official correspondence, emphasizing both their friendship and the importance of their offices within and between their two societies. And I can't help but think, as keen archivers of correspondence, that Johnson and Ames must, on some level, have been building in these very familiar references to one another deliberately. They knew, of course, that their letters would be read and reread and reread. I called this lecture our cell at Spalding, and it's with this long-running in-joke that I'll move toward my conclusion. It was uttered for the first time on the 19th of June, 1718, in the first summer after the Society of Antiquaries' Refoundation. In a letter from William Stucley, Johnson is told, I received yours, and the Society returned their thanks as well for your information about Ely Minster. This is Johnson's final version of a treatise on Ely in manuscript. As that you are so mindful to drink our helps on your club night, which Mr. Gale says is a cell to the mitre. Even as the Society drank at the mitre, the SGS drank in the Parsonage House, a temporary home between stints in remains of Spalding's priory, an actual cell of Croyland Abbey. If Gale wasn't just making a terrible pun either on Ely or the name of the pub, he was probably referring to what he perceived to be Johnson's establishment of a satellite society dependent on the Society of Antiquaries. Within a few years, Timothy Neve, Cousin to Peter Lanneve and Deputy Librarian to the SGS wrote to thank Johnson for the care you show your cell in Spalding. Johnson himself wrote often and affectionately of the cell at Spalding whenever he was away from home. The joke stuck. And when late in his life, Morris Johnson sat down to write the history of the Spalding Gentleman Society. He cast it in exactly these terms, referring to it as a continuation of the educational function of Spalding Priory, overcoming the tragedy that was the dissolution. But the SGS was not quite what Roger Gale had imagined or at least it didn't remain so for long. In 1726, he wrote to Johnson that it is no small pleasure to me that the cell of Spalding is in so prosperous a condition. And I shall not be chagrined if so hopeful a child outdoes its mother as it seems to promise to do. And signs off with my humble service to all the fraternity. This turn of phrase fascinates and charms me, I have to admit. In a single letter, Gale transforms himself from a proud parent of the SGS into its well-wisher and a brother to its members. He joined the SGS two years later and became one of its most frequent and prolific correspondents. So what does all this tell us? First and most obviously, I hope to have demonstrated that the first half century in the history of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Spalding Gentleman Society were closely intertwined, not only through shared structure, official and unofficial exchanges, and the personal relationships of their members who sought to advance and to ensure the futures of both societies, but through the stories they told about themselves as institutions. In order to understand the early history of one society, I would suggest it is essential to understand the history of both. Doing that means focusing on the achievements of Morris Johnson as a scholar and crucially, I think, as a late exponent of manuscript publication. Little of Johnson's work saw print. Two letters in the first volume of Archeologia published 15 years after his death and never intended for print, and a prefatory poem in Stucley's Itinerarium Curiosum, a favor to an old friend. But Johnson's output is staggering. He's the author of dozens of dissertations on antiquarian subjects, ranging from cathedrals to coinage to legal history, a de facto editor of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and probably the first scholar to undertake a comparative study of the texts of Pierce Plowman. His treatises on the Mint at Lincoln, on documentary seals, and on the history of Spalding Priory incorporated the research findings of fellow members of the SGS whom he carefully and conscientiously named in his notes, alongside his assistance from the Society of Antiquaries and the smaller societies in Lincolnshire. All three of these treatises enjoyed wide circulation, reaching not only the Society of Antiquaries, but scholars in Lincoln, York, Edinburgh, North America, and Continental Europe. The range and quality of Johnson's publications was matched by those of other members of the SGS, not least of which Dr. John Green, the secretary who carried out all of Johnson's responsibilities when he was away in London. In 1745, William Bowyer proposed a series of acts and observations of the gentlemen's society at Spalding, a precursor to archeology and parallel publication to the philosophical transactions that sadly proved abortive. Johnson and his co-secretary Green returned to their manuscript publications and to the SGS minute books to edit and cross-reference entries, creating dense, intricate, and quite frequently beautiful texts that synthesize knowledge produced by members of the SGS's far-flung network of local and corresponding members alike. These resources have continued to be used by scholars from Richard Goff in the 1770s to current archeologists and PhD students. That the most heavily annotated sections are those dealing with antiquarian subjects comes as no surprise. These were Johnson's favorites, treated with a curious blend of perfectionism, forward-thinking, and selflessness that characterizes his scholarship and his contributions to both societies and their members. Thank you very much.