SOURCE: An introduction to The Last of the Astrolgers by William Lilly, The Folklore Society, 1974, pp. vii-xii.

In the following excerpt, Briggs gives a brief biographical overview of Lilly.

Every century is a period of change, but the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England saw greater revolutions of thought and social structure than any before them since those two crucial periods when the Roman eagles left Britain and when the Normans conquered England. They are only comparable to the changes that the older ones amongst us have witnessed in the present age. If the sixteenth century saw the Tudor succession, the impact of the New Learning, the Reformation, the rise of Bureaucracy and the Middle Classes and the shift from Feudalism to Plutocracy, the seventeenth saw the crystallisation of Parliamentary theory and procedure, the proliferation of sects, the final destruction of the medieval world picture, the rise of...