Jonathan Oldbuck is the leading character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary. In accordance with Scottish custom he is often addressed by the name of his house, Monkbarns. He is devoted to the study and collection of old coins, books and archaeological relics, and has a marked tendency to misogyny due to disappointment in an early love affair. His characteristics have been traced back to several men known to Scott, and to the author himself, an enthusiastic antiquary. Many critics have considered him one of Scott's finest creations. His role in the novel Jonathan Oldbuck is the laird of Monkbarns, a country house on the north-east coast of Scotland. Returning from a trip to Edinburgh he falls in with a young Englishman calling himself Lovel, befriends him, and spends time showing him the local historical sights, though Oldbuck’s antiquarian gullibility is comically exposed by an acquaintance, the beggar Edie Ochiltree. Oldbuck quarrels with an old friend, an antiquarian dilettante called Sir Arthur Wardour, but they are reconciled after Wardour narrowly escapes death by drowning. He proposes that Lovel write a long historical poem to be called The Caledoniad, and offers to write the scholarly notes to it. They are invited on a trip to the ruins of Saint Ruth's Priory, where the party discuss a treasure rumoured to be buried there. When another member of the party, the fraudulent German alchemist Herman Dousterswivel, succeeds in getting money from Wardour to finance a search for the treasure Oldbuck warns his friend against the charlatan. Without Dousterswivel's help Oldbuck and Wardour discover a hoard of silver ingots. Oldbuck begins to find his troubles multiplying. On the one hand his hot-headed young nephew Hector M'Intyre, who has been shot by Lovel in a duel, is convalescing at Monkbarns and upsetting the smooth running of the household; on the other hand one of his tenants, the fisherman Steenie Mucklebackit, is drowned. Oldbuck attends his funeral, and on a later visit to the dead man’s father’s cottage encounters the Earl of Glenallan, awakening painful memories. We learn that Oldbuck had once loved a certain Eveline Neville, who had preferred to secretly marry Glenallan, but the marriage had ended with the wife’s suicide, the husband's nervous breakdown, and the spiriting away of their only son. Now, after many years, Glenallan wants to find this son, and Oldbuck agrees to help him. He also has