The scholarship of the Oxford School and their successors coincided with the revival and eventual re-establishment of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the earliest minutes of which defined its remit as ‘the subject of Antiquities; and more particularly … such things as may illustrate or relate to the History of Great Britain’, including ‘Antient Coins, books, sepulchres or other Remains of Antient Workmanship’. Although the early membership – including Wanley, William Elstob, the herald Peter le Neve, the archivist George Holmes and Thomas Madox, Historiographer Royal – reflects the textual and philological interests of the Oxford School, by the time the Society formally constituted itself in January 1718 its members reflected a more diverse range of interests. It was the antiquaries who excavated and examined the physical and documentary remains of Anglo-Saxon England, and who encouraged the study of the Anglo-Saxon period to a wider and more socially diverse audience. Eighteenth-century antiquarian culture was less partisan than the clerical, university and legal networks of earlier decades, and membership of institutions such as the Society of Antiquaries ‘was never a matter of political or religious affiliation’. Also in contrast to the specialist philological interests of the Oxford School, by the early eighteenth century antiquarianism had become ‘a common pastime, a leisure activity, for the gentry and aristocracy’. Fellows of the Society included clergymen, lawyers, doctors, artists, and members of the nobility and gentry from across the country. As Rosemary Sweet writes, ‘to examine the figures who made up the antiquarian community of the eighteenth century is to consider how a large proportion of those who comprised the social and intellectual elite of this period understood the past, its interpretation and its meaning for contemporary life’. Recent research by Sweet and Daniel Woolf, among others, has highlighted the scholarly methods and contributions of early modern and eighteenth-century antiquaries, whose methods ‘foreshadowed many aspects of the modern pursuit of historical objectivity’. Eighteenth-century antiquaries laid the foundations of modern literary studies and of art and architectural history.