page_title: Aylett Sammes
section_title: Celtic theories
hierarchical_section_title: Aylett Sammes / Works / Celtic theories
caption_attribution_description: English: Representation of a wicker man, from Aylett Sammes, Britannia antiqua illustrata (1676).
context_page_description: Aylett Sammes was an English antiquary, noted for his theories of Phoenician influence on the Welsh language.
context_section_description: While the specific historical theories brought forward by Sammes were discounted by his contemporaries, his book was a contribution to a number of debates of the time, and its effect on iconography was major. The representations of Celtic druids had been developed from beginnings in Conrad Celtes and the Jani Anglorum (1610) of John Selden. Inigo Jones had made a druid stage design (1638) for Lodowick Carlell's The Passionate Lovers, drawing on earlier pageant representations of Ancient Britons, as a Wild Man. Further iconographic sources drawn upon were of the Green Man and hermits. As represented  in Britannia Antiqua Illustrata the druid is a composite of "wild" and "holy". John Wood, the Elder was prepared to take Sammes seriously, in theorising about Stonehenge.
  The influence of these representations of druids continued until the 19th century and the Costume of the Original Inhabitants of the British Islands (1815) of Samuel Rush Meyrick and Charles Hamilton Smith.
caption: Representation of a wicker man from Britannia Antiqua Illustrata (1676).
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