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In 1726, Stukeley relocated to [[Grantham]], Lincolnshire, where he married. In 1729 he was ordained as a cleric in the [[Church of England]] and appointed vicar of [[All Saints' Church, Stamford|All Saints' Church]] in [[Stamford, Lincolnshire|Stamford]], Lincolnshire. He was a friend of the [[Archbishop of Canterbury]] [[William Wake]], who encouraged him to use his antiquarian studies to combat the growth of [[deism]] and [[freethought]] in Britain. To this end, Stukeley developed the belief that Britain's ancient [[druid]]s had followed a [[monotheism|monotheistic]] religion inherited from the [[Patriarchs (Bible)|Biblical Patriarchs]]; he called this druidic religion "Patriarchal Christianity". He further argued that the druids had erected the stone circles as part of serpentine monuments symbolising the [[Trinity]].
In 1747, he returned to London as rector of [[St George the Martyr, Holborn]]. In the last part of his life, he became instrumental in British scholarship's acceptance of [[Charles Bertram]]'s forged ''[[Description of Britain]]'' <ref>"''The Description of Britain'', also known by its [[Latin]] name ''{{lang|la|De Situ Britanniae}}'' (''On the Situation of Britain''), was a [[literary forgery]] perpetrated by [[Charles Bertram]] on the historians of [[English history|England]]. It purported to be a 15th-century<!--sic--> manuscript by the [[England in the Late Middle Ages|English]] monk [[Richard of Westminster]], including information from a lost contemporary account of [[Roman Britain|Britain]] by a [[Roman Empire|Roman]] [[dux|general]] (''{{lang|la|dux}}''),<!--Not necessarily dux Brittaniarum--> new details of the [[Roman roads in Britain]] in the style of the [[Antonine Itinerary]], and "an antient map" as detailed as (but improved upon) the works of [[Claudius Ptolemy|Ptolemy]]. Bertram disclosed the existence of the work through his correspondence with the antiquarian William Stukeley by 1748, provided him "a copy" which was made available in [[London]] by 1749, and published it in Latin in 1757. By this point, his Richard had become conflated with the historical [[Richard of Cirencester]]. The text was treated as a legitimate and major source of information on [[Roman Britain]] from the 1750s through the 19th century, when it was progressively debunked".</ref> and wrote one of the earliest biographies of Sir [[Isaac Newton]]. Stukeley's ideas influenced various antiquaries throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in addition to artists like [[William Blake]], although these had been largely rejected by archaeologists by the second half of the 19th century. Stukeley was the subject of multiple biographies and academic studies by scholars like [[Stuart Piggott]], [[David Boyd Haycock]] and [[Ronald Hutton]].
== Biography ==
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