Читать книгу Sociable Knowledge - Elizabeth Yale - Страница 11

Chapter 1

“This Book Doth Not Shew You a Telescope, but a Mirror”: The Topographical Britain in Print

What sort of thing was Britain? This is a difficult enough question to answer in the here and now, when Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England, though for the present still bound together in the United Kingdom, are being driven apart by regional desires for self-governance. In September 2014 another referendum on Scottish independence seemed so likely to pass that in the week before the vote, a jittery Westminster promised the Scots maximum devolution of powers if they rejected independence.¹ Though independence was voted down, as of this writing (October 2014) it remains to be seen whether, and how, those promises will be carried out. The trend is certainly toward a looser union rather than a closer one. In this context, what makes for “Britain” as a nation, a geographical object, a historical entity, a people?

The question of what Britain was was difficult to answer in the seventeenth century, as well. Political, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences divided the peoples of the North Atlantic islands that now comprise Ireland and the United Kingdom. Wales had come under English domination in the early fifteenth century, but the Welsh long maintained a distinctive culture and language. In 1603 Scotland came to share a sovereign with England and Wales, but this did not lead immediately to a more thoroughgoing union of either cultures or political and administrative structures. Throughout the century Ireland remained partially occupied, though neither completely controlled by the English nor integrated into Britain. Tensions between England, Scotland, and Ireland were one of the causes of the British civil war. In 1707, with the union of Scotland and England, it became proper to speak of “Great Britain” existing as a political entity. However, in many ways—not the least of which was the continuing subordinate status of Ireland—this process of union was incomplete, at best.

Before political union became even a partial reality, topographical writers wrestled with the question of exactly what sort of thing Britain was. In his 1675 Britannia, the first British road atlas, John Ogilby listed the various methods according to which the “geographers” organized their books: some followed “the Natural Traduction of Rivers and Mountains, Others the Distinction of People and Inhabitants, Others again more frequently, the Politique Division of Princes.” There was, additionally, the “Itinerary Way,” which Ogilby followed, arranging his survey along the principal roads of England and Wales.² Though topographers recognized the books produced through these diverse methods as kin to each other, part of the same family of inquiry, each book generated a different “Britain.”

Many topographers took the route of defining Britain by geographical contiguity. This included England, Wales, and Scotland but excluded Ireland. Additionally this definition tended to suggest that England, Wales, and Scotland were more unified, both politically and culturally, than they were. Works that followed this path, such as Joshua Childrey’s Britannia Baconica, displayed an ever-present tension between conceiving of individual regions, or kingdoms, as separate objects of study (as attested by numerous internal references to England, Wales, and Scotland) versus envisioning Britain as a whole. They were perhaps most successful at the latter when viewing Britain from an “oceanic” perspective, that is, as an island. This perspective suggests the deep continuities between the topographers’ project and the formation of the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which bore intimate discursive and ideological connections to this image of Britain as an island and seafaring nation.

Was it defined by shared language? This too was unwieldy: by the seventeenth century, English was the dominant language in England and Cornwall and among portions of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh elites, but Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic were still spoken by majorities in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the West Country a few even still spoke Cornish. Looked at through the prism of language, Britain might also include the French territory of Brittany, where the residents spoke Breton, a Celtic language. The diversity of English dialects and accents spoken even within England was a barrier to the formation of a broader English national identity, not to mention a British one, as naturalists recognized.

Shared descent, which topographers attempted to trace through their reconstructions of linguistic history, did not offer an easy solution either. The myth that Britain owed its founding to the wandering Trojan hero Brutus was increasingly being understood as just that, a myth.³ As Colin Kidd has observed, history (as seventeenth-century antiquaries understood it) increasingly suggested that the various peoples of Britain descended from different waves of invaders: Celtic peoples, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, to name a few of the groups who arrived over the millennia and left their mark on the cultural, linguistic, natural, and built landscape of Britain.⁴ Edward Lhuyd, mapping the descent of the peoples of Britain from the histories of their languages, eliminated England entirely and created a Britain defined wholly by relationships between the Celtic peoples.

Beyond these options, Britain might also be defined by commerce and trade ties: topographies of trade held in productive tension local particulars and national visions. Topographers both observed and promoted trade connections, participating in a long process by which local markets across Britain became more interconnected.⁵ Each region of Britain, each county and each nation, had its distinctive products, but these were traded around the islands as a whole and even internationally. In their work on trade, topographers constructed an image of the local as enmeshed in the national.

In addition there was Ogilby’s “politique division of princes,” which in practice often meant defining “Britain” by the extension of English political hegemony and the incorporation (willingly and unwillingly) of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland into the project of building a “British” Empire.⁶ Camden’s Britannia, which was published in six revised and enlarged editions within its author’s lifetime (1551–1623), led the way in this regard. Pitching his work directly at James I in the 1610 English translation, he wrote that “the glory of my country encouraged me to undertake” to “restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity.”⁷ A century later Edmund Gibson’s revised Britannia (1695) covered the same territory.⁸ In the dedicatory letter to John Somers, a counselor to William III, Gibson proclaimed that “Descriptions of Countries” were among the most pleasing of scholarly endeavors, as they allowed one to express “one’s Love for his Native Country.”⁹ In using the name Britannia, a word whose origins lay deep in the classical past, Camden and later authors attempted to proclaim the unity of the peoples and lands of the “Atlantic archipelago.”¹⁰ But from Camden’s perspective, Britain was not a fraternity of equals; Camden’s was an Anglo-centric unity. The 1695 revision, like the original, largely constructed Britain from an English perspective, devoting more attention to England than Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined.

Bookended by the first English translation of Britannia and its revision were a number of projected and completed natural historical, antiquarian, and topographical studies with “Britannia” or “Britain” featured prominently in their titles.¹¹ Although the publication dates of these books spanned a century, they represented an interconnected corpus in that earlier works continued to be read and were often extensively quoted or paraphrased in later works. Most prominently Camden served later writers as both a source of information and a foundation upon which to build. Through the century, the replication (with variations) of Camden’s text across different “authors” helped to establish it as a somewhat stable version of the topographical Britain, one oriented toward an English readership.¹² Regional writers with a narrower focus, such as Richard Carew, author of a 1602 study of Cornwall, continued to be cited as well. In his Britannia Baconica (1660) Joshua Childrey quoted both Camden and Carew for material beyond his own sphere of local knowledge. Indeed, Childrey quoted the thirteenth-century topographer Gerald of Wales, hinting at the deep historical continuities between early modern writings and medieval, as well as classical, precedents.

This chapter maps the lineaments of the topographical Britain. Natural historical and antiquarian writing offered a range of possibilities for conceptualizing Britain as an object of learned inquiry. It also drew on and intervened in contemporaneous debates about Britain as a political object, both explicitly and implicitly. The two, in fact, were not separate projects: because naturalists and antiquaries took into their remit languages, settlement patterns, trade, the distribution of natural resources, and local customs, in defining Britain as an object of topographical inquiry, they sketched its political and cultural outlines as well. Though topographers may have had dreams of a comprehensive, unified account of British nature and antiquities—a “whole body and book” that could serve as the foundation for a unified country—their works presented a more mixed picture, reflecting the political and social discourses of the day.

In particular, in their work topographers writing in the Britannia tradition attempted to hold in productive tension the competing forces that bound and drove apart England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Their ideal was a national vision composed of local particulars, rather than national visions that regularized or stamped out local particulars. Though regional diversity could function to stymie the formation of “Britain,” topographers attempted to understand it as a source of unity, whether that meant mapping local contributions to the national economy or looking for the hidden connections between the Celtic languages and peoples. This did not mean that topographers were univocal in their concept of Britain. Some chose loyalty to their individual region, or even county, over loyalty to “Britain,” never mind England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. In some cases English naturalists wrote about Wales, Scotland, and Ireland without knowing much about local particulars in those places. In some cases they were aware of this and apologetic about it—in the 1610 English translation of Britannia, dedicated to James I, Camden was reluctant to hold forth on Scottish antiquities—out of respect, he claimed, for those whose knowledge was deeper and more detailed. In other cases they were ignorant and hostile, often within the same book—Camden’s attitude toward Catholic Ireland reflected this combination.

Part of the work of this chapter is thus parsing out what “national” and “local” meant to topographical writers of diverse backgrounds following diverse lines of inquiry. In doing so, I hope this chapter complicates a tempting narrative: that the formation of “Britain” as a nation was a process driven solely by the English, or perhaps the English in concert with the Scots.¹³ Certainly the English took the largest role in defining the topographical Britain and liked to see themselves as the driving imperial power behind the creation of Great Britain.¹⁴ Latter-day historical scholarship on early modern topographical and antiquarian scholarship has also tended both to privilege the English perspective and isolate the English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish traditions from each other, deemphasizing connections between them and perhaps unintentionally reinforcing a narrative of English dominance.¹⁵ What this chapter argues, however, is that Welsh, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish naturalists were by no means passive bystanders in the debates about the topographical Britain; rather they were crucial contributors (though the Catholic Irish and Highland Scots were largely, though not entirely, shut out of the process).

Ultimately, I argue that the images of Britain that these topographers created, in both their unity and their disunity, were grounded in the dispersed collaborative medium in which they worked, their correspondence. The quotation of this chapter’s title speaks to this relationship between printed visions and topographical investigators joined in correspondence. As explored in greater detail below, Joshua Childrey, in his Britannia Baconica, argued that his book reflected to Britons an image of themselves: “This book,” he wrote, “doth not shew you a Telescope, but a Mirror.”¹⁶ Visions of Britain such as Childrey’s were reflections of the correspondence through which they came into being. In the mirror of print, naturalists’ and antiquaries’ correspondence was made visible.

A Shared Landscape

One seemingly straightforward path to defining Britain led along the seashore, the idea being that the geographically contiguous lands of Wales, England, and Scotland could be considered “Britain.” This approach had the advantage of seeming natural: the limits of Britain were those set by the sea. Yet it faced several complications, including political tensions between Scotland and England and English topographers’ limited knowledge of Scotland and Wales. Digging into these works, we also see tension between the national definition of the topographical object of study and the natural historian’s project of collecting information about nature in order to theorize about the causes of natural phenomena. Naturalists hailed Britain as a microcosm of the world, offering in itself versions of all the rarities of nature that could be found abroad. Yet, as this description implies, natural phenomena (and their causes) were not necessarily unique to Britain. Naturalists found themselves adducing supporting examples from outside their texts’ declared geographical boundaries. Britain, as represented in these texts, was never a stable topographical object.

Defining “Britain” as a contiguous geographical unit involved both drawing links between the various regions of Britain and distinguishing Britain from other countries, particularly those in Europe: topographers looked both inward and outward. Joshua Childrey took this approach in his 1660 Britannia Baconica. Childrey encouraged readers to open their eyes to the wonders in their own country. Addressing gentle readers, he asked, “And what is there worth wonder abroad in the world whereof Nature hath not written a Copy in our Island? I would have those that know other Countreys so well, not to be strangers to their own, which is a compendium of all others.”¹⁷ He promoted his book in terms that appealed to his fellow Britons’ pride. Why travel abroad when Britain offered everything one might want in the way of natural curiosities and rarities? Childrey’s metaphor—Britain was a “compendium of all others”—suggests an image of Britain’s landscape as a book in which knowledge that was otherwise scattered was brought together and summed up. He offered his “Portable-book” as a guide to those wonders, a take-along index to the landscape-as-compendium.¹⁸

In contrasting the wonders of Britain with those on offer in other countries, Childrey defined Britain as a geographical unit in opposition to those countries, and he projected an alliance, based on shared geography, between Britons scattered across that land. This alliance included not just the gentry but also the “vulgar,” to whom Childrey also recommended the book. Britannia Baconica would broaden their minds by showing them how many strange and wonderful things could be found at their own doorsteps: as noted in the introduction, the book was not a “Telescope, but a Mirror,” Childrey wrote, “not about to put a delightful cheat upon you, with objects at a great distance, but shews you your selves.”¹⁹

Childrey so deeply identified Britons with their topography that his book was a mirror that showed them not their land but themselves. This identification of Britons with Britain is not wholly surprising coming from someone writing from within a chorographical tradition, as Childrey was. Chorographers sought to draw links between the characteristics of the land and the people living on it. However, Childrey expanded this chorographical mode of thinking beyond the local, applying it in a national context. It was not just that the Welsh were products of Wales or Northumbrians products of Northumbria: all were products of Britain.

Reflecting these aims, Childrey described natural rarities across England, Scotland, and Wales. He organized his Britannia Baconica regionally: England and Wales were broken up by counties; and Scotland was treated on its own. Yet he also drew links between similar natural phenomena that occurred in different regions, suggesting the ways in which people scattered across Britain might see each other as neighbors. These links were part of Childrey’s efforts to theorize about the causes of natural phenomena. As he passed through Kent, Childrey proposed that medicinal springs and iron mines (and hot springs and silver and tin mines) were causally linked, bringing as supporting evidence mines and springs in near propinquity to each other in Bath, Devonshire, Cornwall, Wales, Bristol, and Gloucestershire.²⁰ He also offered descriptions of natural phenomena that encouraged readers to visualize Scotland, Wales, and England as a unified geographical space. Often these had to do with the seas surrounding Britain. Ocean tides reached notoriously far up the Thames, for example, because the “floods” (currents) that ran east from Cornwall and south from Scotland met at the mouth of the Thames “with very great noise and rippling,” and the sea swelled into the river.²¹ Elsewhere, several times in the book, Childrey mentioned the great schools of herring that circuited “our Island” and “round about Britain.”²²

Imagined from the outside, as an island, England, Scotland, and Wales were unified as “Britain.” Yet viewed from within, Childrey’s Britain was variegated, particularized terrain. His description of Scotland clocked in at just six pages, much less extensive than his account of England and Wales, and it was not broken down into counties.²³ He also tended to refer to “England” and “Scotland,” rather than Britain, as the national backdrop against which he illuminated the distinctive features of each county. For example, he noted that the quality of the air in Suffolk was “so good, that it is by some Physicians thought to be the best in England.”²⁴ Similarly in his description of Northumberland he observed that “by Bywell Castle is a great store of Salmons: As indeed there is in most of the North of England, and in Scotland.”²⁵ That Childrey described the individual nations as the relevant context for comparison, rather than, say, “Northern Britain,” suggests an ongoing disunity within his conception of Britain.

For all that Childrey attempted to draw national boundaries around his subject, the world beyond those boundaries kept seeping in. The nationalist aim of presenting a guidebook to Britain’s wonders was in conflict with the Baconian injunction to collect local particulars as broadly as possible. In adducing supporting evidence for the relationship between medicinal springs and iron mines, Childrey reached beyond British boundaries, including examples from Saxony on his list. Similarly when discussing a town that had been swallowed by the sea in Sussex, he mentioned further examples not only from Scotland but also from the Low Countries.²⁶ Inspired by Bacon, Childrey hoped to theorize from individual instances to “universal maxims.”²⁷ For that purpose non-British examples were also useful. Britannia Baconica, defined as a portable guidebook to Britain’s natural wonders, constantly escaped the limits of the first word of its title in service of the aims suggested by the second. At the same time, these non-British examples had the effect of reinforcing Childrey’s claim to the reader that there was no need to seek abroad for wonders, as they could all be found in England, Scotland, and Wales.

Trade

Topographers, especially those more focused on natural history, took a strong interest in trade. They mapped regional contributions to the broader national economy and helped to promote regional resources that they saw as underexploited. Indeed trade was one of the ways in which national and local could be held in productive tension, as goods were produced locally but circulated nationally, and even internationally, contributing to the overall economy of Britain. Comprehensive natural histories, such as Childrey’s Britannia Baconica, and regional histories, such as Carew’s earlier Survey of Cornwall, devoted considerable space to the distinctive natural resources, and natural products, that each region supplied. This interest in trade was front and center in the conceptualization and research of such works: in 1682 the Scottish physician Robert Sibbald circulated a set of queries for a natural history and description of Scotland in which the first questions were, “What the Nature of the County or place is? And what are the chief products thereof?”²⁸ In foregrounding economic activity, naturalists such as Childrey, Carew, and Sibbald did not merely participate in ongoing processes of regional and national integration that characterized the early modern British economy; they attempted to use natural history to help guide and spur forward those processes.

The improvement of trade was a fundamental justification for the pursuit of natural history because nature was the foundation of trade. Nature, rightly husbanded, was the source of the goods that men traded. A good understanding of natural history was fundamental to economic prosperity. Samuel Hartlib, writing at mid-century, espoused one version of this belief, linking Protestantism, prosperity, and natural history in a unified millennial vision that all prosperity derived ultimately from nature:

Now to advance Husbandry either in the production and perfection of earthly benefits, or in the management thereof by way of Trading, I know nothing more usefull, than to have the knowledg of the Natural History of each Nation advanced & perfected: For as it is evident, that except the benefits which God by Nature hath bestowed upon each Country bee known, there can be no Industrie used towards the improvement and Husbandry thereof; so except Husbandry be improved, the industrie of Trading, whereof a Nation is capable, can neither be advanced or profitably upheld.²⁹

Trade was linked to nature through husbandry. The improvement of husbandry required an accurate, detailed knowledge of nature, that is, in Hartlib’s words, of the providential distribution of God’s “benefits” across a nation. From that foundation of knowledge, industry could be applied to the improvement of husbandry and the production of goods from nature increased.³⁰ Profitable increase in trade would follow.

Following the Restoration, many topographical writers and publishers maintained Hartlib’s link between natural history, husbandry, and trade, though they may have eschewed his millenarian Protestantism.³¹ John Aubrey, in the preface to his Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, bundled together “scrutinie into the waies of Nature” and “Improvement in Husbandry.” He saw interest in both of these as recent developments. Before the civil war, he wrote, both had been regarded as presumptuous and ill-mannered—even sinful, in the case of “scrutinie into Nature”—even when improvements increased profits, because the improver was setting himself up as “more knowing than his Neighbors and forefathers.”³² When John Ogilby published his Britannia, or, an illustration of the Kingdom of England and dominion of Wales (1675), he justified it in terms of how it reflected and enhanced British imperial power and (not unrelatedly) encouraged domestic trade in Britain. Ogilby dedicated his Britannia to Charles II, proudly proclaiming that it had been the practice of peoples of all great empires—the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Assyrians—to survey and document their principal thoroughfares. Britain likewise, to improve its “Commerce and Correspondency at Home,” required such a survey.³³

Ogilby’s book was an exercise in nation-making: he linked trade, communication, and empire to each other and predicated their expansion on the diffusion of accurate knowledge of the roads.³⁴ Just as Childrey did in Britannia Baconica, Ogilby yoked the oceanic and the national. Ogilby placed this survey squarely in the context of broader British imperial and commercial ventures, noting that his efforts to “Improve Our Commerce and Correspondency at Home” paralleled Charles’s efforts to ensure that Britons would have open to them “all those Maritin Itineraries, Whereby We Trade and Traffique to the several Parts and Ports of the World, through the Two and Thirty Points or Bearings of the Universe”³⁵ (a mariner’s compass had thirtytwo bearings marked on it). His ambition was to provide tools that made roadways navigable and opened them to commerce and correspondence on a national scale, to match Britain’s trade beyond its shores.

Trade linked the local and the national: natural resources and the goods they were fashioned into may have had local origins, but they circulated in national and international economies. Childrey discussed numerous goods in these terms. Stroud, in Gloucestershire, was a center for scarlet-dyed cloth because the water there was peculiarly suited to the dying process. Walfleet in Essex sent oysters to London, while Suffolk “yields much Butter and Cheese,” though the Cheshire cheese made all other cheese seem inferior by comparison. Great numbers of herring were fished every year in September along the shores of Norfolk, and Leicestershire produced “the best Limestone in England.”³⁶

Topographers took an active role in encouraging the integration of local and national economies. They sought to identify and promote local resources that could be mined, processed, or in some way improved upon and offered up for consumption across Britain. In a letter written while on his Welsh progress, Lhuyd noted the discovery in Merionethshire in northwestern Wales of a new kind of marble “which when polished represents a number of small Oranges cut across; the reason whereof is an infinite quantity of Porus or Alcynoium stuck through the stone.”³⁷ The stone was strikingly attractive and “might serve very well for inlaying work, as tables, windows, cabinets, closets etc and would make curious salt cellars.”³⁸ Lhuyd went on to close this letter with a request that if his correspondent knew any merchants who dealt in alum or copper ore, he would let them know that the counties of western Wales were rich in both.³⁹ Lhuyd sought to bring these natural resources to the attention of those with the expertise and financial resources to exploit them.

Language: Uniting and Dividing

Naturalists and antiquaries were intensely interested in the linguistic topography of Britain. They cataloged place names, variations in local dialects and local slang, the vocabulary and grammar of Celtic languages, and the historical relationships between Celtic languages, which could be established by studying surviving Celtic-language manuscripts. Most basically they sought to map linguistic difference and similarity across Britain, both historically and in the seventeenth-century present. In this section I focus on linguistic differences in seventeenth-century Britain, and in the next I turn to the connections between linguistic topography, history, and descent.

Linguistic differences were observed as both causes and markers of social and cultural disunity. In The survey of Cornwall (1602), Richard Carew noted that by the late sixteenth century, knowledge of Cornish was in precipitous decline: “English speach doth still encroche vpon it, and hath driuen {Cornish} into the outermost skirts of the shire.”⁴⁰ Most everyone, Carew wrote, knew some English, and fewer and fewer knew any Cornish. However, when approached by an outsider—an English person—the Cornish were likely to pretend total ignorance of English: “and yet some so affect their owne, as to a stranger they will not speake it: for if meeting them by chance, you inquire the way or any such matter your answere shalbe, Meea nanidua cowz asawzneck, I can speake no Saxonage.”⁴¹ In Carew’s telling, the Cornish pretended ignorance of English in order to maintain boundaries between themselves and perceived outsiders.

Naturalists were interested in linguistic difference in part because they recognized it as an impediment to national commerce and correspondence. Indeed in the preface to his comparative dictionary of Celtic languages, the first volume of his Archaeologia Britannica, Edward Lhuyd felt the need to begin with an apology for even attending to such a subject because “Diversity of Languages is Generally granted to be rather an Inconveniency than the Contrary.”⁴² Naturalists sought ways to bridge these gaps, or at least make the various local dialects and languages legible to travelers, particularly those who went from the orbit of London, Cambridge, and Oxford to more remote parts of Britain. In 1674 John Ray published A collection of English words, not generally used, a compendium of words peculiar to the north, south, and east of England. This collection offered definitions of local dialect words that Ray had collected in his travels around Britain in the 1660s with his fellow naturalists Francis Willughby, Nathaniel Bacon, and Phillip Skippon. It was published with catalogs of English fish and bird species and some notes on mining, ore processing, metal work, and alum- and salt-making that had been similarly gathered from conversations with miners and craftspeople during their travels.

In the letter to the reader that prefaced the volume, Ray focused on the northern dialects’ unintelligibility to southerners: “in many places, especially of the North, the Language of the common people, is to a stranger very difficult to be understood.”⁴³ He believed that his collection therefore would be of some use to travelers in the north of England. Ray’s publication of this dictionary, and his justification for it, suggested that regional differences within England were sharply felt. It also implied that his ideal reader was someone from the center (for example, London, Cambridge, Oxford) traveling in the north. Yet Ray also included southern and eastern dialect words, indicating on some level that this was also a project designed to encourage mutual intelligibility and was not just about making the periphery intelligible to the center—or that even in the home counties the “language of the common people” contained dialect words unfamiliar to the educated.

Ultimately such aids would help naturalists see past the accidents of local linguistic variation (which might assign one species a diversity of names) to the underlying reality of nature, allowing them to classify species rationally and universally according to an agreed-upon set of characteristics.⁴⁴ Naturalists across Europe were thus interested in documenting and understanding local vernaculars.⁴⁵ One might see a similar motivation in Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue (1675), which listed words, broken down by category, in English, Greek, and Latin. The categories were not unlike those found in county natural histories—Ray began with words related to the heavens and worked his way through words related to plants and animals, human bodies and human health, and culture, society, and the built environment (the main difference was that Ray included a section listing words related to God and religion). When collecting words in the Celtic regions of Britain, Edward Lhuyd used the lists in the Dictionariolum trilingue as his standard vocabulary.⁴⁶

Ray’s focus on regional English dialects suggests two insights about the nature of the project of fashioning Britain as a scientific object. First, naturalists were not universally (or always) interested in Britain as a whole. In their work they frequently privileged one region over another. Because many of these naturalists were English first, England was of course the privileged region. There was more at work here, however. In Ray’s presentation of England as a linguistically diverse space, we see that it is not necessarily appropriate to read seventeenth-century England as unified—politically, linguistically, scientifically, or otherwise.

Furthermore, insofar as one reads the formation of Britain as a colonial process—one in which the English extended their hegemony over Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—it is in some cases more appropriate to identify the northern counties (and the West Country, which included Cornwall, though Ray did not discuss their dialects) with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Cultural and political hegemony was extended from London and its environs to the rest of England: although Ray included in A collection of English words dialect words from southern and eastern England, in the letter to the reader he framed his project as an aid to southerners attempting to understand northern dialects, and not the other way around.⁴⁷

Language, History, and Descent: Britain Without England

Tracing human descent through history was another way of mapping the boundaries of the British “nation.” Naturalists-antiquaries started from the proposition that relics of human relations lay strewn across the languages of Britain, and therefore linguistic topography offered a key to the history of human descent and settlement in Britain. For example, ancient Celtic place names suggested a history of Celtic peoples in a location, whereas Scandinavian place names—or regional dialect words with Scandinavian origins—suggested a history of Viking settlements. Getting more deeply into the structure of the languages could show historical and contemporary similarities between the grammars of Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, and Cornish that could be used to define the historical connections between present-day speakers of those languages. In his Villare Anglicanum, a dictionary of English place names, John Aubrey proposed that if it were possible to trace the etymology of some Welsh words to Greek, this would be “good Evidence (without being beholding to Historie) that there was a time, when the Greeks had Colonies here.”⁴⁸ Such an effort was doomed, but it does indicate what the naturalists hoped to gain from the study of language: evidence for the movement and settlement of peoples that was somehow independent of conventional historical evidence. The topography of languages promised to escape history, to provide an independent check on the chronicles and myths that Britons had been living with since the Middle Ages. In this section I trace topographers’ efforts to map the history of the people they referred to as the ancient “British,” often understood (at the time) as the ancestors of the modern Welsh, largely through the study of the Celtic languages.

The relationship between historic inhabitants of Britain and the then modern-day composition of its population was a subject of active debate among naturalists, antiquaries, political writers, and historians. This question had crucial implications for relations between the various kingdoms and regions and each group’s understanding of itself (this continues to be true into the present).⁴⁹ Political writers, in particular, sought to shore up the foundations of the English constitution—and the liberties enshrined therein—by locating its origins in the histories of the peoples of Britain. Common descent could be used to unite the various peoples of Britain: where established, it provided the basis of a common cultural and national identity. However, awareness of differences in origins tended to divide the peoples of Britain—each individual group made strides, perhaps, toward “a more or less coherent” sense of a history that defined them as a nation, but it was difficult, if not impossible (and may or may not have been desirable, depending on one’s perspective), to spin a unified historical narrative about the peoples of the British Isles and Ireland.⁵⁰

Topographical writers’ understandings of the ancient British and estimations of their contributions to the formation of Britain and the British landscape ranged from utterly dismissive to proudly appreciative. In The most notable antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stone-Heng (1655), the first printed treatise on Stonehenge, the architect Inigo Jones argued that the ancient British peoples were entirely too rude and barbarous to have constructed a monument as complex as Stonehenge. Jones’s book offered a particularly striking example of the link between English estimations of the ancient Britons and English prejudices against the “Celtic” peoples of early modern Britain.⁵¹ According to Jones, the ancient Britons were utterly devoid of the understanding of art, science, or mathematics that would have equipped them to build Stonehenge.⁵² Instead, Jones contended (totally wrongheadedly) that the Romans constructed Stonehenge according to classical architectural principles. John Aubrey, on the other hand, writing at roughly the same time, identified Stonehenge as a Druid temple, defining his Druids as “the most eminent Priests [or Order of Priests] among the Britaines.”⁵³ Aubrey, who claimed Welsh ancestry, saw affiliations between similar ruins scattered across Britain. He sought out and where possible incorporated accounts of ancient British monuments in North Wales and Scotland into Monumenta Britannica, his study of British antiquities.⁵⁴ Aubrey’s interpretation of stone circles as Druid temples became immensely popular through the eighteenth century when it was promoted by the antiquaries William Stukeley and William Borlase.⁵⁵

In political history as well, opinions of the ancient British were neither wholly negative nor wholly positive, though over time this field turned more decisively away from them as progenitors of the English constitution. Earlier writers had made the argument that Britain’s foundations could be located among the ancient Britons, shrouded in time immemorial. However, by the late seventeenth century, historians, especially those of the proparliamentary and Whiggish type, came to believe that the Saxons were the true progenitors of English liberties. This argument, which was founded in a century of increasingly sophisticated antiquarian scholarship on Saxon England, had been popularly made in Nathaniel Bacon’s oft-reprinted An historicall discourse of the uniformity of the government of England, which was first published in 1647.⁵⁶ Those on the Royalist side of things, on the other hand, tended to emphasize more the inheritance from the Normans. Even those who still sought to locate the foundations of English liberties in ancient Britain argued that little could be known about their governance, given the lack of surviving written documents. Regardless of which side one took, the shift to seeing the transfer of power from Saxons to Normans as a key moment in the history of the English constitutions led English writers to minimize the contribution that the Welsh made to the national polity, both as a people in the then present day and in their past incarnation as the ancient British.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, these arguments had a topographical basis: the boundaries of the medieval Saxon and Norman territories mostly mapped onto present-day England, which meant that the English claimed a direct line of descent from these peoples, but not the ancient Britons, whose descendants lived in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.⁵⁸

Working amid this complex backdrop, Edward Lhuyd took the option of defining Britain from its geographical edges. In 1695 he issued proposals for a “British Dictionary, historical and geographical.”⁵⁹ Partly inspired by his work on the 1695 revised edition of Camden’s Britannia, he proposed a study of the natural history, antiquities, languages, and customs of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany. This project consumed the last fifteen years of Lhuyd’s life and was built around extensive travel—he was on the road for four years—and a questionnaire that he issued to the clergy and gentry in an edition of four thousand copies. He planned a multivolume treatise but in the end finished only the first volume, a comparative study of “British” languages, before death cut his labors short in 1709. Based on the strength of this treatise, Lhuyd has come to be regarded as one of the originators of the modern study of these languages, now more commonly identified as “Celtic” languages.⁶⁰

Lhuyd’s definition of “Britain” was complex and shifting. In his 1695 prospectus, he focused primarily on Wales.⁶¹ In these proposals Lhuyd defined “British” as the Welsh, Cornish, and Armorican, or Breton, peoples. Yet his project had implications for understanding British history beyond the early modern geographical boundaries within which those peoples lived. As was not uncommon, Lhuyd believed that these were the descendants of one group present on the isle at the time of Julius Caesar, that is to say, prior to the Romans’ arrival in Britain. Roman and early medieval Saxon invaders drove the “British” to the more remote margins of the “Atlantic archipelago.” Their language was likeliest to be preserved uncorrupted in Wales, which had been less exposed to “Foreign Languages introduc’d by Conquest.”⁶² Yet Lhuyd did not necessarily believe that the ancient “British” were the only original inhabitants of Britain. In the proposals Lhuyd maintained a separation between the “British” and the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, though he did see them as historically and linguistically related.

Lhuyd’s conception of “Britain” and “British” as objects of historical and topographical study continued to develop over the course of his research and seems to have expanded by the time he published the linguistic component of the Archaeologia Britannica in 1707. The title page proclaimed that the Archaeologia Britannica was a study of the “languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain” based on travels in “Wales, Cornwal, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland.”⁶³ The book was a compilation of comparative dictionaries and grammars of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Irish, which Lhuyd regarded as very similar, if not identical, to Highland Scots. Even within this volume, however, “Britain” and “British” were shifting signifiers. He sometimes glossed “Ancient Scots” as “Northern British.” Yet at the same time he maintained a separation between the “British” language as spoken in the south—in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany—and the “Scotish” spoken in the north and west—in Scotland and Ireland. He tended to associate “Scotish” with the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Britain who had been pushed aside by the “Britans” just as the “Britans” were pushed aside by the Romans and the Saxons.

Yet despite these fractures in Lhuyd’s concept of “Britain” and “British,” one thing was clear: the only way to understand the history of these languages and, through the languages, the history of the various peoples inhabiting Great Britain was by studying all of them; they had spent centuries jostling along together, pushing each other about, and borrowing from each other’s languages, and their histories were intimately connected.⁶⁴ Lhuyd mapped the geography of languages in order to elucidate these historical relationships. In a letter written while traveling through the Highlands of Scotland, Lhuyd noted that “most names of places throughout the kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland relish much of a British origin; though I suspect that upon a diligent comparison … we shall find that the antient Scots of Ireland were distinct from the Britains of the same kingdom.”⁶⁵

Lhuyd’s comment, with its suggestion that language groups affiliated with both the “antient Scots” and the “Britains” were present in Ireland, hints at the complexities involved in tracing the movements of ancient peoples, not to mention in trying to link those peoples to present-day groups. In the vocabulary notebooks he kept while traveling in Scotland, he logged common words in at least two Scottish dialects; he also hoped to capture key words in at least three different Irish dialects.⁶⁶ Lhuyd systematically analyzed these data in order to deduce the relationships between the languages, requiring at least five to six specific examples using “core vocabulary” (that is, the words from Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue) to show that any given difference between the languages was a consistent rule.⁶⁷ Following this method, Lhuyd first established the division between the “P-Celtic” and “Q-Celtic” language families broadly recognized today.⁶⁸ P-Celtic includes Breton, Cornish, Welsh; Q-Celtic, Scots and Irish Gaelic. Extensive comparative study was the only way to uncover relationships such as this.

Lhuyd cast the “Britains” spread across Great Britain and Ireland as people with deep connections to each other. Yet this was not a group whose shared identity was already widely recognized, either by the English or by each other. Relationships between and among the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish veered from contentious to nonexistent. Little in the way of a shared sense of identity united “Britains” in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall.⁶⁹ The word “Celtic” as a collective term for these peoples was only beginning to gain currency in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in part because of Lhuyd’s work. For many of the “Celtic” gentry and nobility, culture and a sense of identity were rooted in local topography and history.⁷⁰ If they looked beyond the local, it was to England, especially London and Westminster, rather than toward each other. This can be seen in a political context—for example, in the process of negotiation that led to the union of Scotland and England in the very year that Lhuyd published the first volume of the Archaeologia Britannica.⁷¹ Leading Scottish politicians looked to the relationship between England and Ireland not in solidarity but primarily as an example of unwelcome colonial dependency. The orientation toward England was also visible in the histories of Britain that emerged from both Wales and Scotland: to the extent that they argued for any sort of historical connections between the parts of Great Britain, it was either between Wales and England or between Scotland and England. Among the “vulgar,” those whose horizons were encompassed by parish and village society and who spoke English either not at all or as a second language, local identities and local relationships were even more paramount.⁷² In addition, while the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish gentry and clergy displayed enthusiastic interest in local antiquities, natural history, and languages, they did not generally see local topography (or their own identity) as a component of a “British” whole.⁷³ Lhuyd, in seeking to trace the relationships between the “British,” actively constructed that shared identity through the creation of linguistic, cultural, natural, and material histories that could serve as its foundation. He created his “Britain” as both a topographical object and a political object.

Lhuyd further articulated in his 1707 Archaeologia Britannia a vision of the Welsh/British as the “First Planters of the Three Kingdoms,” the first founders of colonies, in the British Isles.⁷⁴ Latching onto this language of planters and colonies, he crafted a vision of Celtic history appropriate to the dawn of a British imperial age. In this he echoed John Speed, who referred to the ancient Britains as the “first Planters and Possessors” of the island of Britain.⁷⁵ Such a phrase was redolent with rich associations to projects for imperial expansion and the crafting of the British Empire. Lhuyd’s use of the word “planters” suggests something of the political overtones his work carried. Planters were those who established colonies—another word Lhuyd used, as a label for the earliest human settlements in Britain.⁷⁶ In the wake of rebellions in Ireland, led first during Elizabeth I’s reign and then again at mid-century during the War of the Three Kingdoms, the English established plantations in Ireland. Land was transferred from rebellious Irish subjects, both native Irish and Old English, Catholic descendants of Norman invaders who were mostly settled in the southeast around Dublin.⁷⁷ English colonists in the Americas, from Massachusetts Bay to Virginia, were planters.

Planting implied control of territory and settled cultivation of the land, at least partly in the image of Adam and Eve, the first planters; its associations were agricultural, political, and biblical. Planters fixed themselves firmly in the land. Not all of the peoples who had visited Britain had done this, in Lhuyd’s view. In his additions to the 1695 edition of Camden, he firmly rejected the possibility that medieval Vikings had constructed the massive stone circles that could be found across Britain: they were but “roving Pirats,” roaming from place to place rather than establishing the communities that could build such monuments.⁷⁸ Planting implied civilization: seventeenth-century English planters in Ireland and in the Americas went forth to tame “wild” lands and gradually remake local populations, environments, and culture in England’s image.⁷⁹ In Ireland this included importing the structures of English governance and English Protestantism.⁸⁰ Land was divided by counties, replacing traditional lordships; courts of assize were instituted; and Gaelic inheritance laws were replaced by English ones.⁸¹ English and Irish were encouraged to blend, but only on English terms: under Cromwell’s leadership the Catholic Irish were made to worship in Protestant churches.⁸² The virtuoso William Petty’s numerous schemes for “civilizing” the Irish by encouraging marriage between English planters and Irish women were meant to transmute the Irish into English.⁸³

Lhuyd’s description of the ancient Britons as “planters” and their dominions as “colonies” implied that the Celtic peoples—Welsh, Scottish, and Irish—had a natural role to play in the eighteenth-century expansion of the British Empire. Statements such as this were historically used to promote the contribution of the Celts, specifically the Welsh, to the expansion of the “British” Empire; in the sixteenth century, for example, John Dee argued for the legitimacy of Elizabeth I’s claims to possessions in the Americas by tying them to the lands supposedly discovered by the twelfth-century Prince Madoc, who, according to legend, crossed the Atlantic.⁸⁴ In this reading, the English owed the Welsh thanks for the “British Empire.” Lhuyd went even further, raising up not only the Welsh but also the Celts of Ireland and Scotland (as well as Cornwall and Brittany, though to a lesser degree). Yet this position was one that Lhuyd arrived at only after direct study of the remains of the past, as he prepared his contributions to the revised Britannia. He initially found it difficult to overcome the notion that any antiquities that appeared to reflect a sophisticated culture could be attributed to the ancient Britons, and not, say, the Romans.⁸⁵ This is not surprising, given Lhuyd’s immersion in English antiquarian and natural historical culture, and the widespread English image of the Celts, especially the Catholic Irish, as barbaric and uncivilized. But awareness of the climate in which he worked renders Lhuyd’s reference to the ancient Britons as “planters” all the more striking as a statement of fellowship.

Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica was not universally well received when it was finally published in 1707. The critiques spoke to divisions between England and the rest of Britain and, possibly, to divisions between the Celtic regions. Wits laughed that the fruit of so many years of study, and so much expense by Lhuyd’s subscribers, should be an etymological dictionary of Celtic languages. The sniping, which echoed traditional English attacks on the Celtic languages, particularly Welsh, started before the book was officially published. Lhuyd, though he acknowledged that few agreed with him, argued that Welsh was a comparatively ancient language and that certain words in ancient Latin and even Greek could be traced back to the original British (John Aubrey, had he still been alive, would have been sympathetic to this claim).⁸⁶ Lhuyd addressed the critiques defensively in his introduction, claiming that his detractors’ invidious partiality clouded their judgment. They claimed that only “half a dozen” or “half a score” individuals in the nation could possibly be interested in the subject of Celtic antiquities and languages. Lhuyd observed that if their critique were serious and impartial, they would have to admit that there were closer to “Three or Four Hundred” such individuals: still a small number, but enough to support the production of a book such as Lhuyd’s Glossography.⁸⁷ Lhuyd was silent as to broader motives fueling his unnamed critics’ censures, but a defense orchestrated by the Royal Society revealed that questions of national partisanship were an issue. In a letter published by Hans Sloane in the Philosophical Transactions shortly after the book’s publication, the antiquary William Baxter gave an account of the book and then turned to a defense of Lhuyd as a scholar: “I cannot conclude without taking notice of one Calumny that has been whisper’d about by Men of Passion or Intreague, viz. That this Book is design’d to serve a certain Interest. I therefore think my self oblig’d in Justice, to certifie to the Publick, that after a careful perusal of all the Parts of this Work, I cannot discern a Syllable any where that in the least tends to favour any Party, or is any way concern’d in any National Distinction.”⁸⁸ Baxter, who corresponded with Lhuyd on antiquarian matters, defended his impartiality and attempted to distance his work from the political context of the early eighteenth century, in which questions of “national distinction” and the relationships among England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were very much at issue. In his correspondence Lhuyd carefully tracked the publication of Baxter’s review, hoping that, by providing a good character for his book, Baxter would help him move more copies of it.⁸⁹

However, devoting serious attention to the “British” languages and antiquities was a political act, and it was interpreted as such by Lhuyd’s critics as well as his admirers. Whether they offered praise or critique, correspondents, some of whom had been contributing to the project since Lhuyd first canvassed for subscription over ten years prior, spoke to the questions of what bound and what divided the Celtic regions of Britain. The Irish antiquary Roderic O’Flaherty questioned whether Lhuyd was right to include separate prefaces in Welsh, Irish, and Cornish: “whereas one in a hundred can reade one of the 3 & one in a 1000 (if any) expert in all 3,” would it not have been better to present the material in these prefaces in English, a language “common to the 3 nations”?⁹⁰ A Welsh correspondent wrote in enthusiastic praise, using the revised Welsh orthography Lhuyd had invented for the Archaeologia. He suggested that consistent use of Lhuyd’s orthography, which, among other things, eliminated “double consonants at the beginning of words,” would garner the Welsh more respect from the English, who were liable to “disrespect and pour scorn on our language and its writing.”⁹¹ Yet another Welsh correspondent gently mocked Lhuyd’s innovate orthography, poking fun in particular at the ways in which over the years Lhuyd had altered his own name as he developed his spelling conventions: “Lluyd, alias Lhuyd, alias Lhwyd, alias Llwyd, cum multis aliis aliarum. for all this, I am well assur’d, that my Friend is the same, and that whatever diminuations he may make of his Name, his Reputation is still entire, & still a growing.”⁹²

On the one hand, Lhuyd’s line of inquiry, which traced the histories of the Celtic peoples through their languages and treated those people (and their histories) with dignity, was deeply important to many of his Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and Scottish correspondents (nitpicky criticisms as well as praise testified to this). Yet, on the other hand, the only shared language among readers scattered across the Celtic nations was English. Only in English could Lhuyd and his correspondents speak across regional and linguistic boundaries. Neither was the “national distinction” conferred by Lhuyd’s project clear: there were some who believed that his reform of Welsh orthography granted new dignity to the language, while others believed it misguided, if not silly. As we will see more closely in Chapter 5, which explores how Lhuyd built up the correspondence through which he gathered information and financing, and received these responses to his book, the project was conditioned from the very start by questions of “national distinctions” between the Celtic regions.

England’s Britain

In defining “Britain” through the histories and languages shared by the Celtic peoples, Lhuyd swam against the tide of studies working from an English perspective. Not surprisingly, these other natural histories and antiquarian studies were largely written by Englishmen. Unlike Lhuyd’s Britain, England’s Britain was defined not by shared ethnicity but by the exercise of power. Britain was those territories that the English government—either king, Parliament, or some combination of the two—controlled or sought to control. The Britain thus produced was shot through with conflict and compromise. It heavily emphasized a Protestant vision, which meant that Ireland’s status within the topographical Britain was particularly problematic. Yet by no means was England’s Britain constructed solely by the English: in various ways and under various terms, Welsh, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish scholars contributed to the construction of England’s Britain. When these works ventured onto Irish territory, though, the native Catholic Irish figured largely as objects of study and scorn, rather than as participants in the topographical project.⁹³

Given his genre-defining power, Camden is a fit starting point for an exploration of the topographical Britain as it developed from an English perspective.⁹⁴ The title page of Philemon Holland’s 1610 English translation of Britannia indicated that it was a “chorographicall description of the most flourishing Kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland.”⁹⁵ However, “England” appeared in larger type than “Scotland” and “Ireland,” and Wales (not to mention Cornwall) was subsumed into England, appearing nowhere on the title page. This structure aligned with the era’s political reality, in which the English monarch was king of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland but Wales was a dominion, for political purposes, considered part of England. In certain respects Camden’s Britannia emphasized the geographical unity of Britain, particularly the three nations of the main island. In part because Camden treated Wales almost as a part of England, Wales received more extensive coverage than Scotland and Ireland. Wales was physically integrated as well: Camden organized his book as a trip around Britain, taking the reader through Wales on his way from western to northern England.

Camden’s approach to Scotland (repeated in both the 1610 translation and Gibson’s 1695 revised edition) suggested a view of the Scots as respected equals, rather than subordinate partners, in the project of Britain. As a relative stranger to Scotland, Camden began by apologizing for even attempting to discuss the topography of that nation. Yet “Scotland also ioieth in the name of Britaine,” and so he hoped that the Scots might give him leave to include their nation in his book. What was more, England and Scotland were now united under one “most sacred and happie Monarch,” James VI and I.⁹⁶ Camden hoped that his Britannia could provide a foundation for their further political unity and help contribute to ending any discord that persisted between the two “otherwise invincible” nations.⁹⁷ Camden’s statement came at a time when the Crown had only recently been unified, and James I had pushed for but failed to secure a more thoroughgoing political union from Parliament in 1606–1607. England and Scotland shared a head but not a body, and in promoting Anglo-Scottish union, Camden’s proclamation reflected a hope rather than a firm reality.

In bringing together the human and natural histories of the diverse peoples and landscapes of Britain into one book, English naturalists and antiquaries implicitly (and sometimes explicitly, as in Camden’s case) made the case for a unified British polity. In the revised 1695 edition, Edmund Gibson altogether dropped from the title page any divisions between the realms of Britain: his Britannia was a survey of Britain, full stop.⁹⁸ Within the book Gibson’s English contributors represented British cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identities, especially as expressed at the borders between regions, as products of the historical mixing and mingling of different peoples. In the additions for Cumberland, in the north of England, Hugh Todd reproduced a letter from William Nicolson to the antiquary William Dugdale. In the letter Nicolson, who was born in Cumberland and went on to become the Anglican bishop in the northern Irish town of Derry, explicated an inscription on a baptismal font that had been written in “Danish” runes. He wrote, “Only the Language of the whole seems a mixture of the Danish and Saxon Tongues; but that can be no other than the natural effect of the two Nations being jumbled together in this part of the World. Our Borderers, to this day, speak a leash of Languages (British, Saxon, and Danish) in one; and ’tis hard to determine which of those three Nations has the greatest share in the Motly Breed.”⁹⁹ Though evidence for it could be found across Britain, historical contact between peoples was especially visible in the border zones, where it produced “motley breeds” who clearly could not trace their ancestry back to a single group.

Yet divisions and tensions remained. The continued Anglo-centrism of the 1695 Britannia was visible in its coverage: each English shire received an extensive description, while the treatments of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were often brief, even cursory, by comparison. Remarks on these three regions were sourced from one individual each, while remarks on English counties were supplied by upward of twenty local gentlemen and clerics.¹⁰⁰ On the other hand, Edward Lhuyd and Robert Sibbald, who provided most, if not all, of the remarks on Wales and Scotland, were welcome, respected contributors to the revised Britannia. Getting their contributions right was important to them, as evidenced by the pains they took in their labors. Their work illustrates the complexities faced by Welsh and Scottish naturalists who participated in Anglo-centric topographical projects.

In their work Lhuyd and Sibbald displayed a kind of dual national consciousness, giving voice to allegiances to both Wales and Scotland, respectively, as well as to Britain. Lhuyd invested himself deeply in the construction of a British identity that tended to exclude the English. Yet he also expended enormous effort in fulfilling his obligations to Gibson, undertaking a special summer tour through Wales to collect material for the project and providing additions more extensive than those given by any other individual contributor.¹⁰¹ He also undertook to retranslate the entire section on Wales from Camden’s 1607 Latin edition.¹⁰² This double labor of translation and supplementation was a heavier burden than that shouldered by most of Gibson’s contributors.¹⁰³ Lhuyd’s efforts made a difference: it was not a given that Wales would be included on his terms. In July 1694, with printing under way, the English printer Awnsham Churchill, who worked with Gibson as a co-undertaker for the project, threatened to cut some of the material on Wales from the finished volume. (In seventeenth-century book parlance, undertakers managed the production of books by subscription, overseeing both financial and editorial aspects of the process.) Lhuyd sought the help of Martin Lister in persuading Churchill not to do so.¹⁰⁴ Through his enthusiastic participation in the Britannia project, Lhuyd promoted Wales to a broader British readership, one that included the English, and worked to elevate its status as part of a broader Britain. Gibson, in his introduction to the revised Britannia, praised Lhuyd’s diligence, suggesting that given competent encouragement (that is, funds), he could do a fine job with any county in England.¹⁰⁵ Perhaps this was the highest form of praise Gibson could offer.

Sibbald, similarly, held allegiances to both Scotland and Britain. In 1682 Charles II appointed Sibbald geographer royal for Scotland (he also served Charles and his brother James as a royal physician). Sibbald was charged with producing maps, a natural history, and a study of the antiquities of Scotland. The warrant for his appointment emphasized the contribution that accurate, detailed geographical knowledge would make to husbandry and trade.¹⁰⁶ The warrant’s emphasis, however, was very much on His Majesty’s kingdom of Scotland, not on Scotland within a broader British context. Yet Sibbald, like Lhuyd, was enmeshed in a pan-British correspondence: at various periods in his life he lived in London, and he corresponded with virtuosi in England and Scotland who shared his interests.¹⁰⁷ As an Episcopalian for most of his life (with the exception of a brief period during which he identified as Catholic), Sibbald, unlike many Scots, was generally aligned with rather than opposed to the Anglican Church.¹⁰⁸ Sibbald also collaborated with Gibson on the 1695 Britannia, providing new material for the sections on Scotland and the outer British Isles. In his additions Sibbald documented the crossborder links between England and Scotland, noting, for example, that in the shire of Teviotdale, people supported themselves by trading cattle, sheep, and wool with the English across the border.¹⁰⁹

Sibbald’s engagement in the project of constructing the topographical Britain can be seen in his promotion of a newer etymology for “Britain,” one in keeping with the fundamental precept of natural history, that knowledge of nature was the foundation of trade, economic improvement, and British political and cultural identity. The medieval Brutus myth, which suggested that the British were descended from a hero of the Trojan War, had been dying even in Camden’s day. Camden had promoted an etymology that traced Britain to the ancient British word for “blue” because some of the ancient inhabitants of Britain—the Picts—had painted their bodies blue with plant-based dyes.¹¹⁰ This derivation was reprinted in the 1695 Britannia (much of the 1695 copy was taken from Holland’s 1610 translation, rather than being retranslated).¹¹¹ Later in the book, however, Sibbald discussed an alternative etymology of Britain in his essay on the “Thule of the Ancients.” This was included near the end of the 1695 Britannia in the section that dealt with Britain’s outer northwestern islands. In this essay Sibbald attempted to pin down the physical island that corresponded to “Thule,” an island that, for classical Greek and Roman writers, marked the northwestern edge of the known world. Toward the end Sibbald repeated a claim, which he credited to the seventeenth-century French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart, that Britain was derived (via Greek) from the ancient Phoenician word for “Land of Tinn,” on the theory that tin was the most important product that Mediterranean civilizations would have obtained from Britain through trade.¹¹²

One might see Sibbald’s etymology as a descendant of the Brutus myth, in the sense that it retained a whiff of the prestige of the classical origins story while updating it to make it plausible for a late seventeenth-century audience. Sibbald was not the only one to link the ancient British to the ancient Phoenicians, who were, like the early modern British, seagoing traders: the disreputable antiquary Aylett Sammes went him one better in his Britannia antiqua illustrata (1676), claiming that the customs and language of the early British were deeply shaped by commercial contact with the Phoenicians.¹¹³ Aubrey’s and Lhuyd’s attempts to read ancient British as a species of ancient Greek and Inigo Jones’s to impute Roman origins to Stonehenge also come to mind as efforts to create a lineage in which the British were linked to, if not descended from, ancient Mediterranean peoples.

But Sibbald’s story about linguistic history and national identity put trade, specifically trade in products derived from the land, center stage as a defining feature of British identity.¹¹⁴ Sibbald’s etymology sidestepped complicated questions about descent and relationships between historical and present-day British peoples—early modern discussions of the Brutus myth inevitably led to questions about which of the British peoples were the descendants of Brutus, with the result that some were excluded from the national mythology. Neither did this etymology denigrate the past inhabitants of Britain, as did Camden’s story about the blue-painted Britons. Though Sibbald well knew that tin was chiefly a product of one region of Britain, Cornwall, in this etymology, through the alchemy of international trade, all of Britain became identified with it.

Sibbald and Lhuyd’s work demonstrates that English, Scottish, and Welsh naturalists-antiquaries were capable of defining Britain as common ground. Ireland’s relationship to Britain, as represented in English topographical studies, was more vexed, as it was in life. Britain-as-projection-of-English-hegemony was most visible when English naturalists came to Ireland. On a most basic level, Ireland was divided from England, Scotland, and Wales by the sea; though the latter three could be defined “naturally” as one nation, it was more difficult to include Ireland in this way. The English had a long historical tradition of viewing the Irish as the other—the barbarians—against which they defined their own civility. In the early modern era, as this othering took on religious overtones with the rise of intense anti-Catholicism in Protestant Britain, it was increasingly taken up by the Welsh and the Scots as well.¹¹⁵

When Camden came to describe Ireland in detail, he depicted it as an island with a unique human and natural history that could not be fully covered by the label of Britain, as Scotland and England were, much less subsumed into England, as Wales sometimes was. In both the 1610 translation of Camden and its 1695 revision, discussion of Ireland was set off from the rest of the book by an interlude that represented the sea crossing to Ireland. At this point the name “Britain” was used to refer exclusively to England and Scotland. Furthermore, Ireland was never depicted as a potential equal, England’s partner in the matter of Britain, as Scotland was. Camden did not open the section on Ireland with a grand proclamation about the strength and peace to be found in political unity between England and Ireland. Instead he emphasized the wildness and incivility of the native Irish (as opposed to the “English-Irish,” settled in the Pale): contradictorily, they “love idlenesse and withal hate quitnes.”¹¹⁶ In Holland’s translation, Camden mourned that the Romans had never conquered Ireland, for surely they would have brought civility with them. He marveled at the contrast between the Irish medieval past, when Ireland boasted a vibrant, learned monastic culture (they had taught the English their letters), and now, when it was “rude, halfe-barbarous, and altogether voide of any polite and exquisite literature.”¹¹⁷ Other writers were even more extreme in their descriptions of the ancient Irish. Speed, in The theatre of the empire of Great Britain, touched on the diet of the ancient Britons. Based on descriptions collected from ancient writers, including Strabo, Solinus, and Pliny, he emphasized their “temperance of diet.” This he contrasted with the ancient Irish, who were cannibals. Accusations of cannibalism were commonly bandied about in the early modern European world as a way of marking off boundaries between civilized and uncivilized; in this particular case, Speed attributed the claim to St. Jerome.¹¹⁸

Overall, Camden’s history of Ireland put forward the argument that the conditions and actions of the native Catholic Irish easily justified their subordination to English rulers. Though Camden saw some bright spots in the Irish past, for him, the island began and ended in barbarousness, which he consistently opposed to the civility of the Romans and the English. Touching on more recent history, Camden devoted an entire chapter to the sixteenthcentury conflict between the Irish Earl of Tyrone and the English.¹¹⁹ He characterized the conflict as a “rebellion … begun upon private grudges and quarrels intermedled with ambition” that spread across Ireland under the “pretense of restoring libertie and Romish religion.”¹²⁰ He regarded its English suppression as the basis for “firme peace, as we hope, for ever established.”¹²¹

These kinds of prejudices were replicated, and even more closely linked to projects for English imperial control of Ireland, in subsequent English topographical writings. In Gerard Boate’s 1652 Irelands Naturall History, published by Samuel Hartlib and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, the native Irish hardly figured at all. According to the title page, the book was published “For the Common Good of Ireland, and more especially, for the benefit of the Adventurers and Planters therein.”¹²² In the dedication Hartlib expounded enthusiastically on the promise of the title page: a natural history of Ireland would be the greatest aid to the planters, soldiers, and adventurers colonizing Ireland in the wake of Cromwell’s conquests. Hartlib represented Ireland as a realm cleared for the free settlement of not only the Protestant English but Protestants from the Continent as well—exiled Bohemians and other refugees from the Thirty Years’ War.¹²³ Neither the native Irish nor the Catholic Old English had a role to play in this new Ireland—in Hartlib’s Protestant vision, they were not even subordinate; they were invisible. Natural history, prosperity, and Protestant English colonization of Ireland were further linked in the Down Survey of Irish land, which William Petty conducted for Cromwell. Petty surveyed landownership as well as the quality and productivity of the land county by county in preparation for the transfer of much of that land from its Irish Catholic owners to soldiers in Cromwell’s army.¹²⁴ Petty, though less anti-Catholic in theological terms than Hartlib, nonetheless saw Roman Catholicism as an impediment to the increase of trade in Ireland, as Adam Fox has observed.¹²⁵ Petty also maintained the link between topographical knowledge, the improvement of trade, and English imperial dominance in Ireland (and elsewhere).¹²⁶ Through the Restoration he plied Charles II and other influential members of the court with reports, grounded in his new methods of “political arithmetic,” encouraging the Crown to take a strong hand in displacing Irish Catholics with Protestant English planters.¹²⁷

However, the story of the establishment of Ireland’s place within England’s Britain cannot be told solely in terms of English efforts to establish imperial dominance. The case of William Molyneux indicates that further complexities inhered in the production of topographical studies of Ireland. Molyneux was from a wealthy, Protestant Anglo-Irish family with roots in Calais. As a student at Trinity College Dublin, he became interested in natural philosophy and mathematics. After a stint in London studying law at the Middle Temple, he returned home, where he founded the Dublin Philosophical Society, modeled on the Royal Society, in 1683. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux maintained an extensive correspondence with British naturalists. As secretary of the Dublin Philosophical Society, he exchanged letters and meeting minutes with the Royal Society and the Oxford Philosophical Society.¹²⁸

Topography was one of Molyneux’s many scientific interests. He served for a time as surveyor-general and chief engineer for Dublin, and he took responsibility for the Irish sections of the bookseller Moses Pitt’s English Atlas.¹²⁹ Pitt’s Atlas was to be a luxury product, a complete, up-to-date atlas of the world in eleven volumes, but only four volumes were ever published. Expected to include six hundred plates, the project failed on account of exorbitant production costs of as much as one thousand pounds per volume, compounded by financial losses Pitt incurred through his misadventures in real estate development.¹³⁰ In promoting the project, Pitt advertised the support of Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Royal Society, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The maps, made from plates that had been engraved earlier in the century for Dutch cartographer Johannes Janssonius’s Atlas major but partially recut based on the latest available knowledge, were to be accompanied by reams of historical and topographical information, at least some of it newly collected. Leading scholars, including Christopher Wren, John Pell, Robert Hooke, Thomas Gale, and Isaac Vossius, signed on to advise Pitt and monitor his progress.¹³¹

Though it fell far short of Pitt’s projections, this was intended as a prestige product, meant to demonstrate the heights to which English knowledge of the world, and English printing, had ascended by the late seventeenth century. In participating in this project, then, Molyneux worked in concert with English mapmakers, virtuosi, and printers. In the early 1680s he issued a set of queries requesting information for the account of Ireland.¹³² Respondents were largely Anglo-Irish and Protestant, reflecting the makeup of Molyneux’s correspondence. Molyneux did work with at least one Catholic Irish, rather than Anglo-Irish, antiquary, Roderic O’Flaherty of County Galway, author of a 1685 treatise on Irish history. O’Flaherty’s involvement in the project spawned an ongoing correspondence; O’Flaherty also worked closely with Lhuyd on the Irish Gaelic portions of the Glossography, mailing him printed sheets of the dictionary heavily annotated with his remarks and offering extended critiques of the entire book in his letters.¹³³ Nevertheless, Molyneux and most of his respondents saw themselves as participants in a Protestant, Anglo-centric “Britain,” an allegiance reflected in the questionnaire that Molyneux circulated. As noted on the questionnaire, interested persons could pick up their free copies at the bookshop belonging to Dudley Davis in Dublin. A brief advertisement followed: patrons could also purchase at Davis’s shop William Dugdale’s Antient usage in bearing of such ensignes of honour as are commonly call’d arms (1682), which was published with a “Catalogue of the Present Nobility and Baronets of England, Scotland, and Ireland.”¹³⁴ Given a small space to insert an advertisement for other books he carried, the bookseller chose this one, suggesting he presumed a readership who saw, either in actuality or aspirationally, the British nobility as their appropriate social context.

Yet how much was a shared culture worth, when it came down to it? In the 1690s the English Parliament handed down a series of laws and judgments restricting Irish trade. Among other things, the English sought to limit Ireland’s woolen exports to England in order to protect the English trade in woolen fabrics. The Irish Parliament, which was in a weakened state following the revolution of 1689 and subsequent warfare in Ireland, refused to approve the new statutes, but their rejection of them did not halt their implementation.¹³⁵

Molyneux registered vocal opposition to these laws in The case of Ireland’s being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated, published in 1698. He marshaled historical precedent to support the argument that though subjects of the same king, England and Ireland possessed independent representative institutions, and the English Parliament had no jurisdiction over Ireland. He argued that Ireland was not a colony of England but, like Scotland, an independent kingdom with whom England shared a king, properly governed by the king in concert with a Protestant Anglo-Irish Parliament.¹³⁶

Molyneux’s claims to coequality with England were founded on the sort of arguments about human descent and the definition of Britain that featured prominently in topographical works. By no means did Molyneux argue that the majority Catholic Irish should have any part in governing Ireland: though Molyneux had corresponded with Irish antiquaries such as O’Flaherty, he nevertheless wrote strictly in defense of the “Protestant Interest of Ireland.”¹³⁷ The Protestant Anglo-Irish were descended from “English and Britains” who had “from time to time” crossed the Irish Sea and seized power over the Irish.¹³⁸ Molyneux argued that the Anglo-Irish, therefore, as the descendants of the English conquerors of Ireland, could claim the same rights and liberties maintained by the English in England.¹³⁹ The Anglo-Irish were no less English than the English, no less British than the British. Indeed, Molyneux was not averse to a closer political union with England, one that would admit Anglo-Irish representatives to the English Parliament, though he thought it unlikely.¹⁴⁰ He was correct in this assumption. His arguments for Anglo-Irish liberty were condemned in England: the English were by no means willing to grant that liberties flowed from shared descent, especially when Anglo-Irish liberties conflicted with English trade.¹⁴¹

Conclusion

In both its unities and its divisions, topographical writing was a mirror in which Britons could see themselves reflected. It attempted to instill in readers a sense of “Britain” as a shared political, linguistic, cultural, and geographical space. However, collectively topographical works displayed a profound uncertainty as to who and what should be included in Britain and Britishness. This was not merely a result of the different methods that topographers followed, as per Ogilby. No matter which method one followed—linguistic, historical, economic, geographical—topographical studies exposed competing forces uniting and dividing Britons. Topography may have been a cracked mirror, but the Britain it reflected came prefractured.

Topographical writers revealed the Scots, Welsh, Anglo-Irish, Catholic Irish, and English as peoples with deeply rooted independent cultural, linguistic, and political traditions. Yet, as topographical writings also recognized, Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales shared equally long histories of political, commercial, and cultural contact, even integration. Connection and contact—through trade, conquest, intermarriage, or the kind of social and educational mingling that occurred in London and the university towns—only intensified in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many naturalists and antiquaries were at the forefront of this movement, getting into contact with each other through travel, correspondence, and the reading of each other’s books.

In some ways topographical writers participated in a “colonial” dynamic, in which the non-English British affiliated themselves both with English versions of Britain and their own “native” traditions (while some English writers felt free to pay minimal or no attention to the non-English parts of Britain). Molyneux, Sibbald, and Lhuyd participated in the project of constructing Britain from an English perspective. Yet they also resisted it, or at least maintained strong ties to their own piece of Britain, however they defined it.¹⁴² Their national visions—and identities—were neither strictly in concert with English versions of the same nor wholly oppositional. Neither were they consistent across projects, as can be seen particularly in Lhuyd’s career. So too were their identities and practices as scholars hybrid, fluid, and contextual. This can be seen, again, in Lhuyd’s career in his dual use of English and Welsh in his correspondence. One might compare the complex, shifting colonial identities and national visions expressed by Spanish Creole clerics-scholars in New Spain in the eighteenth century, described by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, as they worked to define the history of the New World with and against Enlightenment historians of empire writing in Spain.¹⁴³

Molyneux’s work as a topographical investigator and as a defender of Anglo-Irish liberties highlights the complexity of “British” identities and loyalties. It also shows how histories of human descent in the British Isles, a familiar concern in topographical writing, could be deployed in attempts to negotiate national relationships in the late seventeenth century. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux collaborated with London-based scholars, making points of contact with England and Englishness and even with Britishness. So too did others in his Anglo-Irish milieu—Dugdale’s catalog of the nobility, advertised on Molyneux’s questionnaire for the English atlas, was, after all, a register of the English, Irish, and Scottish nobility. Yet it was these points of contact, these engagements, that were, for Molyneux, arguments for why Ireland could not be fully ruled by England and subsumed within Britain. The distinctiveness of Ireland as a kingdom within Britain, coequal with England, was rooted, for Molyneux, in Anglo-Irish claims to being fully English. As such, the Anglo-Irish, Molyneux believed, were subjects of the British king but were not bound by a Parliament in which they had no representation.

Both Molyneux and Lhuyd met with resistance to their attempts to graft their parts of the “British” nation into relationship with England and empire. This resistance was symptomatic of the limits, set largely though not entirely by the English, that Welsh, Anglo-Irish, and Scottish naturalists met when they participated in the project of defining Britain. Lhuyd, although he had his supporters in the Royal Society, was mocked when he spent his scholarly energies (and his subscribers’ money) on writing into being a Britain without England.

The failure of Molyneux’s arguments is particularly striking given the overall aims of topographical writing. Molyneux’s statement that shared liberties flowed from common descent foundered in the face of the English Parliament’s insistence on protecting English trade. In their books seventeenth-century naturalists often rhetorically depicted a Britain knit together by trade ties that crisscrossed regional and national boundaries. Many of them set natural history as the chief cornerstone of the improvement of trade—and thus of Britain as a nation and of British identity. Yet when it came down to it, local particulars could not be nationalized quite so easily. Topographical writing was inevitably deployed in the service of particular arguments and political visions that imagined (and enacted) allegiances that included some “Britons” and excluded others. The political equality and economic freedoms that Molyneux sought for the Anglo-Irish depended on the total subordination of the Catholic Irish. There was no master vision of the land that could serve as unified and unifying ground, the basis for an economy that would knit together a Britain in which the local and the national were held in tension to the satisfaction of all. Nor could there be.

Printed topographical works were deeply marked by the scientific correspondence that was the context of their creation. Britons spread across Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland came in contact with each other through correspondence. They created a shared forum for assembling and debating topographical knowledge, one that, though largely populated by English scholars, was by no means totally dominated by them. Neither was this a shared forum in which individuals were encouraged to abandon their locally rooted perspectives. In fact topography, which presented national visions amalgamated out of local particulars, demanded that individuals maintain their local and regional allegiances, their pride in knowing their land. The tensions in topographical writing—its dream of producing a whole “body and book,” a national vision of Britain, its production in reality of many different, though sometimes overlapping, visions—were present in its necessarily collaborative mode of construction.