Harold Bayley was a British writer and researcher of symbolism. Public information about him is limited, and neither his dates nor his full educational background are known. One of his works is held in this collection, Archaic England. Judging from the available material, his writing focused on interpreting symbolic language and the symbols of ancient cultures; he also wrote The Lost Language of Symbolism. His approach tended to trace the traces of early human thought in images, rituals and words, and his prose is marked by a naturalist's habit of drawing on wide-ranging evidence. Such subjects found readers in early twentieth-century British intellectual circles and had some influence on later popular writing about symbolic systems and ancient beliefs.
