Well, I bow to your greater knowledge of Richard Colt Hoare, VBB, but may I just add that I think it a mistake to judge people like RCH by modern 'academic' standards. Colt Hoare was living at a time when digging up barrows was seen as a perfectly legitimate way of learning more about the past; by today's standards, of course, he was wrong to do that but by the standards of his day he was not.

Richard Colt Hoare may have been 'a toffee nosed snob' and he may have leeched and ponsed off his contemporaries (I don't know enough about the man to argue the case one way or another) but, looking at his overall corpus of work and the general contribution he made to his areas of interest, I'd say he seems to have left to posterity something of value.

Perhaps it's sometimes a little too easy to sniff at the shortcomings and inadequacies of our predecessors and a little harder to see those same shortcomings in ourselves.

Just a thought.