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Chapter 2

Putting Texts, Things, and People in Motion: Learned Correspondence in Action

The construction of Britain in printed topographical works went hand in hand with the rise of correspondence as the forum for creating knowledge about British nature and antiquities. In promoting new ways of thinking about national identity, topographers, naturalists, and antiquaries communicated habits of thought and being that they had learned by working together via correspondence. Through correspondence, each individual interwove his local knowledge with that possessed by others scattered across Britain. They debated shared questions, though they did not always arrive at shared answers. Travel and letters allowed naturalists to understand the national as the local: to echo Joshua Childrey, mutual correspondence made it possible for each scholar to feel that all of Britain was at his “own door.”

In practice, this correspondence was a complicated dance, the steps of which were the constant movement of letters, books, papers, and specimens by post and carrier and people by horse, foot, carriage, and boat. In a 1692 letter to Anthony à Wood, John Aubrey, describing his travel plans and the locations and destinations of various sets of his papers, summed up these exchanges: “I have here sent II of my volumnes which I intend to print: and desire your perusall, and castigation; as also Mr Collins of Magd{alene} Coll{ege}: to whom pray remember me. {manicule in margin} I desire to heare of your receipt of the my MSS. that they may not miscarry. Tomorrow I goe to Mr Ray {into?} Essex for a weeke. About the middle of Aug: I am for Chalke & Wilton: and thence to Oxford about the beginning of Septemb{er}./ My Surrey is now in Dr Gales hands, before it goes to Mr Ch{arles} Howard & Mr Jo{hn} Evelyn. Pray let me heare from you.”¹ Aubrey’s letter illustrates different ways of transporting information, things, and people. First, there was his letter to Wood, probably enclosed with his manuscripts and sent to Oxford via carrier (though letters mailed alone usually traveled by post). Next were the manuscripts. One manuscript had been sent by carrier to Wood; another, Aubrey’s Perambulation of Surrey, went to Thomas Gale, the headmaster of St. Paul’s School in London, with whom Aubrey sometimes lodged. The latter manuscript would make its way, by either carrier or a personal messenger, to Howard and then Evelyn, both of whom had family connections to Surrey. Third, Aubrey himself traveled: first to John Ray, in Essex, and then on to Wiltshire, where he would stop at Broad Chalke, his brother’s farm, and Wilton, the estate of the Earl of Pembroke, until finally he would come to Oxford. At each stop along their paths, letters, manuscripts, and man would be drawn into conversations with both old and new friends and readers. These conversations, in turn, would be reinscribed into new letters as Aubrey and others drew on them as sources for new observations to communicate to correspondents. Through personal travel and the circulation of letters and books, knowledge was collected and inscribed into the books of nature, old friendships maintained, and new ones forged.

The material goods of early modern knowledge making—which included plant and animal specimens as well as letters and papers such as Aubrey’s—were fragile and difficult to transport. Indeed in the days before well-developed systems of regular mail coaches and sound roads, people could be difficult to transport. The travel diaries of Celia Fiennes (1662–1741), for example, testify to the muddy, often impassible roads and draughty, pestilence-ridden inns that greeted travelers across Britain, and it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a truly national road system was built.² Yet naturalists (and their materials) were scattered across Britain from Dublin to Aberdeen; from the high mountains of northern Wales to the basement of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; from estates in Wiltshire to villages in Essex; from the naval yards at Deptford to the Royal Society’s meeting rooms in Gresham College. To make natural history and antiquarian studies, people and things had to travel. The threading of correspondence across Britain was necessary to the realization naturalists’ and antiquaries’ intellectual ambition, the construction of “the whole body and book” of British natural history and antiquities.

This chapter reconstructs the ways in which naturalists moved books, papers, specimens, and themselves, creating an image of a seventeenthcentury British scientific correspondence. I consider naturalists’ and antiquaries’ communications with each other from both material (how and why did things and people move around?) and social (how and why did naturalists maintain relationships across great distances?) perspectives. I show how naturalists and antiquaries circulated not just information but also material goods, estimates of each other, and “service” (favors and promises of favors).

While some of the social and intellectual aspects of the diffusion of knowledge in early modern Europe have been elaborated by historians of science, they have rarely been coupled to the material realities of communication.³ In particular, this chapter grounds the “diffusion” of ideas and information in the movement of letters, books, packages, and people between towns, cities, and countries by horseback, horse- or ox-drawn carts, and riverboats and sailing ships.⁴ The main sources for this reconstruction are naturalists’ letters, which eloquently express their frustrations and anxieties regarding long-distance communication and travel but also (by their very being) demonstrate the successes of their efforts. Their letters offer a wealth of information on the social links—no less vital than the material ones—along which information, goods, and favors traveled.

These links spanned England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, connecting naturalists in city, town, and country. Indeed, though the wider world defined by burgeoning British imperial and commercial ties is not the focus of this book, correspondence extended wherever British merchants and colonists traveled. Naturalists built their correspondences within the context of a wider world of British communication and information exchange, a world in which polite correspondents kept each other up to date on the latest news as a way of maintaining social ties and circumventing purveyors of printed news, which they regarded with some suspicion.⁵ Naturalists sought long-distance contacts as a way of stitching together their individual patches of local topographical knowledge. The quilt they formed was necessarily incomplete and partial, with some of the pieces quite loosely joined together. Each individual, with his own particular interests within the larger field and his own collection of correspondents, held a different section of it. But each section overlapped with others, in terms of the connections between their interests and the connections between their sets of correspondents. As we saw in Chapter 1, these connections did not, of course, prevent dissension about exactly what constituted “Britain” as a topographical object of study. However, these connections were the medium through which naturalists and antiquaries articulated their visions of Britain as a scientific object. They may have sometimes differed on how they defined the nation, but they shared the goal of uniting local particulars under a national vision of the land. Furthermore a naturalist’s or antiquary’s correspondence as a material and social formation was at the heart of the vision of the nation that he projected in his printed works.

“An Active and Large Correspondence”

Rich material, social, and intellectual links made up a scientific correspondence. Naturalists identified a correspondence as the sum of these links. More than just an exchange of one or two letters, a correspondence was a fruitful relationship that persisted over time. As early as 1643 Samuel Hartlib, in a pamphlet addressed to Parliament, called for a “Correspondencie for the advancement of the Protestant Cause.”⁶ In the late 1690s Edward Lhuyd’s star had risen high enough that he received an offer of “correspondence” from August Quirinus Rivinus in Leipzig, who offered to give him news of German fossil discoveries.⁷ Their exchange was to be founded on material, not just intellectual, exchange: the Leipzig naturalist opened his offer with a gift of “3 or 4 books and some Formd Stones.”⁸ Though he was concerned that Rivinus had not behaved well by John Ray, Lhuyd accepted the offer; given the opportunities opened by such an exchange, it was worth navigating potential social difficulties, including the possibility that a correspondent would not deal frankly or fairly with one. Like this one, a correspondence could be between two people, but more often it referred to the sum of interactions between many people linked to one another through the exchange of letters. Elsewhere, Lhuyd referred to John Woodward’s “boast” of a “correspondence with five hundred persons … beyond the seas.”⁹

An “active and large correspondence” was a necessity, both for the gathering and production of knowledge that went into books and for selling those books. Martin Lister, for example, relied heavily on a broad correspondence to send him material—specimens as well as information—for his landmark Historiae conchyliorum, a multivolume natural history of shelled animals (including mollusks and gastropods) published between 1685 and 1692. Correspondents, including Hans Sloane, Edward Lhuyd, John Ray, Samuel Dale, and Thomas Townes, the latter a physician posted in the Caribbean, sent him species from across Britain and the British Atlantic world.¹⁰ Success in print too required an extensive correspondence. Henry Oldenburg ran into trouble when he contracted to print the Philosophical Transactions with an Oxford printer who had an insufficient correspondence. Richard Davies took over the job from Royal Society printers John Martyn and James Allestrey when plague closed London printing shops in 1665. But in his first go, Davies sold only three hundred of one thousand copies printed. Oldenburg’s profit was based on sales, so a failure to sell seven hundred issues represented a serious loss.¹¹ A chastened Oldenburg wrote, “If he not be a man of an active and large correspondence, I had done much better, never to have committed it to him.”¹² The possession of an “active and large correspondence” was crucial for booksellers and others seeking to move books because print was distributed through the social links of correspondence.

In some ways, as Lhuyd, Oldenburg, and Lister’s experiences demonstrate, the correspondence was akin to our “social network.” But it was not identical to it. Neither can “correspondence” or “the correspondence” be simplified down to one thing (of course neither can the social network; the term has many different valences). There was “a correspondence,” in the sense of letters passed back and forth primarily between two persons; there was a bookseller’s commercial correspondence, the “active and large correspondence” described by Oldenburg; and there was the naturalist’s correspondence, the connections from which he collected information. The correspondence could encompass both weak and strong ties, as described by David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook.¹³ Weaker ties might predominate more with international correspondence or with commercial correspondence.

However, the connections that made up the British correspondence were tighter and more personal, differentiating it from some (though not all) modern-day social networking and the broader early modern international scientific correspondence, of which it was, in some sense, a subset. It depended more on face-to-face interaction and the frequent exchange of long letters. The elite class was smaller and more compressed, and naturalists and antiquaries played multiple roles within it. In addition they were gentry, clergy, nobility, and advisers to the monarch and his ministers. For example, John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys, and John Evelyn had intimate audiences with Charles II and his advisers; Pepys, as a naval administrator, met with them regularly. Others played leading roles in their counties. Additionally for British naturalists, scholarly correspondence was at least sometimes “commercial” correspondence, in the sense that naturalists gathered information, financed books, and exchanged specimens for money through their correspondence.

Among British naturalists, face-to-face interaction was usually the basis for correspondence. That is, correspondence began between two or more people who knew each other, initially at least, through local, face-to-face relationships. “Weak ties” were still important for the communication of topographical knowledge of Britain, especially when it came to information exchange between the metropolitan center and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet even these kinds of ties often got their start when Scottish, Irish, and Welsh naturalists traveled to London, Oxford, and Cambridge and then met in person. The Aberdeen naturalist George Garden opened his first letter to Henry Oldenburg by fondly recalling their meeting in London the summer before: “I am very sensible,” Garden wrote, “of the great civility, wherewith you were pleased to entertain Master Scougall and me, when we waited on you last Summer; and shall be ready on all occasions to give you that account you then desired of things philosophical that may occur here, to promote that noble design you have in hand.” Garden went on to give an account of a man with something “peculiar in his temper, that inclines him to imitate unawares all the gestures and motions of those with whom he converseth,” whom he and Oldenburg had discussed when they first met.¹⁴

Naturalists regarded correspondence as a poor substitute for direct interaction, especially when it came to establishing a relationship. Introducing oneself by letter to someone whom one had not met in person was generally regarded as rude. In 1676 John Aubrey recommended to Robert Plot that he consult with Sir Jonas Moore on some matter. Plot, however, begged off: “As for S{i}r Jonas Moore’s assistanse in my affaire,” he wrote to Aubrey, “as I doubt not but it will be very considerable, so I take it as a very great Honour that He will bee pleased to afford it me: but to write to Him in my owne behalfe, especially being altogether unknown to Him too, I must confesse I have not the confidense: I must therefore only begg of you, that you would be pleased to preserve some memory of me in Him till opportunity shall give me leave to waite on Him in London which I hope may be within a little time.”¹⁵ It was preferable to approach a potential patron first in person rather than through a letter, though an intermediary might make one known, or “preserve some memory of” one in the person one sought to meet, before that meeting took place.

Despite this preference for face-to-face relationships, gentlemen “personally unknown” to each other could be united through correspondence, after a fashion. Correspondents distinguished, though, between personal acquaintances made face-to-face and those made through letters. Robert Plot and John Ray corresponded in 1691, yet in a letter to Edward Lhuyd, Ray disclaimed acquaintance with Plot’s character, writing in response to Lhuyd’s negative report, “He is a Gentlema{n} personally unknown to me.”¹⁶ Because he so trusted Lhuyd’s “judgmt & Charity” (and because Lhuyd’s judgment confirmed Ray’s experience), Ray was inclined to trust Lhuyd’s estimation of Plot, which was generally negative. (To his former assistant curator, Plot was a tight-fisted, grasping creature, eager for preferment but stingy toward those below him.) Letters between two gentlemen personally unknown to each other might be transmitted by a third person acquainted with both parties. Sometimes this occurred even when two people ran in the same circles but were perhaps not great friends. For example, in February and March 1680/81 Aubrey funneled multiple requests for stacks of Robert Plot’s natural history queries through Edward Tyson, who acted at the time as Plot’s informant on the goings-on of the London scientific virtuosi.¹⁷

Correspondence was also a means of creating or maintaining “virtual” face-to-face presence. Writing to Lhuyd in the fall of 1692, John Ray noted, “I presume Mr Aubrey is by this time returned to London, though I have not as yet received any notice thereof from him.”¹⁸ Recall also Robert Plot’s request to John Aubrey to “preserve some memory of me in” Sir Jonas Moore until such time as he was capable of introducing himself. In this way letter writers attempted to insert themselves as virtual presences in others’ in-person interactions.

They also used their correspondence to spark and frame further conversations. With an extensive correspondence, a naturalist could multiply his presence by gaining access to other people’s connections, which might be very distant from him in geographical or social terms (or both). Edward Lhuyd disseminated the printed proposals for his study of British languages, natural history, and antiquities through his correspondence, asking that his friends personally distribute proposals among their acquaintances, both in face-to-face meetings and in their correspondence. To Martin Lister, he wrote, “I’ll send you more papers to morrow, but I would have them onely put into such hands as are proper. For my Paper is not calculated for a bookseller’s shop, nor to lye in a Coffee; because people that understand not the matter, will think it unreasonable.”¹⁹ Because the project was so large (in the end there were almost two hundred subscribers distributed across Wales and England), Lhuyd was unable to seek out and talk with each and every potential supporter; however, he still felt it important that proposals be disseminated via personal contacts. If encountered by the general run of customers in a coffee shop or a bookstore, his project might be misunderstood and its chances for success damaged. Working through individuals, one was surer of approaching someone who would already be kindly disposed to the undertaking. Lhuyd’s associate could appropriately frame it and its value (both to the individual subscriber and to the larger community of the learned) in a conversation or a letter. In this case building financial support for the project was as much about limiting the wrong kinds of conversations, such as the mocking and dismissive kind one often saw in coffee shops, as it was about fostering the right kinds.

Lhuyd’s example also suggests that when seeking support for a project, naturalists worked through textual and conversational channels simultaneously. This may have been particularly important when working through intermediaries, as they might forget or misstate the details of a project. The presence of the printed or written text had the potential to communicate the original author’s meaning more clearly and accurately. But it would not do for potential patrons to encounter the text unless it was appropriately framed in a conversation or a letter: establishing the right social context for the reading of a text was just as important as clearly conveying information in that text.

Going Postal

The material foundation of “an active and large correspondence” was the government-run postal system. This system, which allowed naturalists to send and receive letters in a regular and timely manner and with reasonable confidence that they would arrive at their destinations, developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁰ Although the royal post was established early in the reign of Henry VIII, it was primarily designed to carry official correspondence until 1635, when Charles I opened the royal mailbags to private communications. Under Henry VIII postal routes were laid along major thoroughfares, such as the road from London to Dover, with horses and riders ready at intervals to relay the mail.²¹ The precise routes that were laid fluctuated, however, with the needs of the Crown; posts along the road to Ireland were more carefully staffed during times of political trouble and rebellion, for example.²² The royal mail sometimes carried private letters, especially toward the end of the sixteenth century, but official correspondence was always prioritized.²³ Private postal services were established as well; for example, English merchants organized the Merchant Adventurers post in the mid-sixteenth century. London immigrant or “Stranger” communities organized their own posts for communication with friends and associates on the Continent.²⁴ Much letter carrying, however, went on according to no organized system, as servants, family members, private carriers, and even travelers headed in the right direction would be pressed into service to deliver letters. There was no unified postal system to which all had access. Correspondence could easily miscarry and be opened by someone other than the intended recipient(s), for good or for ill. Correspondents carefully crafted the missives they sent through this insecure, patchwork system with these expectations in mind. Individuals relied on personal relationships to secure delivery of letters: the name and identity of the individual letter carrier—say, a trusted servant—could be an important guarantor of a letter’s transmission and, to its recipient, its authenticity.²⁵

Although none of these issues was eliminated by Charles I’s reforms, conditions for sending and receiving correspondence within Britain did become increasingly uniform. As a means of private communication, mail became somewhat more accessible, more trusted, and more impersonal. Posts were laid according to regular, well-maintained routes from London to the north and west, and they ran all day and all night. Spurs led off the main roads to connect provincial towns.²⁶ Although the speed of the post continued to vary somewhat, depending on the weather, the quality of the horses kept at each postal station along the route, and the diligence of individual postmasters, round trip from London to Edinburgh was supposed to be six days.²⁷ The carriage of foreign letters was assimilated into the national post by a 1657 act of Parliament that also incorporated Ireland into the British postal system.²⁸ By the late seventeenth century the British post was a wellestablished royal bureaucracy, a valuable state monopoly.

On a practical level, how did an individual send and receive letters? What kind of knowledge did one need? At the very least, in order for a letter to reach a correspondent, one had to know where to send it. This may seem a trivial thing; after all, in the twenty-first-century world we have a multitude of options for communicating across distances: we can send a letter, an e-mail, a fax, or a telegram; we can pick up the phone or dial through our personal computer to reach a friend on her land line, mobile phone, or computer. In early modern Britain, by contrast, in order to communicate with someone, one had to know his or her physical location or at the very least where that person received letters (which might not always be a home). In the days before public directory listings, phone books, or Google searches, the only way to get an address was to ask someone, either the person directly or someone who knew that person. The act of communication entailed a minimum degree of acquaintance with the recipient of one’s letter. No seventeenth-century letter was directed to “the resident” or “current occupant” of a house.

Compared to their twenty-first-century counterparts, the addresses on seventeenth-century letters varied wildly. They only sometimes included street names. There were no street numbers; in cities and towns lodgings or businesses were identified by the signs hanging outside buildings (and a sign did not necessarily bear any intrinsic connection to the trade carried on inside the building—for example, booksellers Abel Swall and Awnsham Churchill operated shops under the signs of the unicorn and the black swan, respectively).²⁹ In the country an address might simply be the name of an estate or a house. After the Restoration even London coffeehouses served as points for sending and receiving mail (though no one guaranteed the privacy of letters sent and received therefrom).³⁰ John Aubrey variously received letters addressed “For John Aubrey Esq fellow of the Royall Society, to be left with Mr Bridgeman, at Mr Gregorys in Linco{l}ns Inne fields, next dore to little Turne Style the Diall house / London” (all that in one address); “These to John Aubrey Esqr at Mr White’s house Chymist in Holywell Parish in Oxford”; and “To his verie lovinge friende Mr John Awbrey at his fathers howse in Broad-chalke close to / WILTSHIRE. Leave these at the holly Lambe in {Sarum}.”³¹ According to the latter, the letter was to be left at the “holly Lambe,” a public house in Salisbury (with the city referred to in the address by its Latin name). Rather than using numbers, such addresses defined the recipients’ locations in reference to local establishments and landmarks and the people who lived in and owned those places. Not even Aubrey’s name was stable but rather fluctuated from Aubrey to Awbrey and back again depending on his correspondent’s whim. Letter carriers were expected to have, or acquire, a minimum degree of personal knowledge about the people sending and receiving letters. Who took the letters at the inn at the sign of the Holy Lamb in Salisbury? Where in Holywell Parish, an area of Oxford just west of the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum buildings, did Mr White, the chemist, keep his shop? Restoration letter carriers needed to know these things.

Correspondents were not particularly surprised when letters failed to reach their destinations. To hedge against this possibility, many letters opened with a summary of the sender’s last letter. An exchange between Aubrey and the Aberdeen antiquary and professor James Garden illustrated the balance that correspondents struck. Between June 1694 and March 1695 a number of letters Aubrey sent to Garden failed to reach their destination. In the letter that finally reached Garden, dated 9 March 1694/95, Aubrey expressed a fear, not that his letters had been misdirected, but that Garden might be dead since he had failed to respond to any of the previous letters. Since Aubrey sent this last letter, his hopes and fears must have been balanced somewhere between the possibility that none of his previous letters had arrived and that his correspondent was dead. The postal system was reliable but not so reliable that multiple letters sent from London to Aberdeen could not go missing, as Garden confirmed was the case in his reply to Aubrey.³²

Despite advances over the course of the seventeenth century, in the 1690s there were still reaches of Britain that remained unconnected to the postal system, especially in the dark and stormy months of winter. For months at a time in his travels through the wilds of Wales and Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, Edward Lhuyd was unable to post letters detailing his progress to his patrons and friends back home in Oxford and London. Lhuyd’s solution was to save up material for less frequent but fatter letters home. In December 1699, six months after his last letter, he wrote to Martin Lister, “This comes heartily to beg your pardon for so seldome writing; the chief occasion whereof was my rambles of late through countreys so retir’d, that they affoarded neither post nor carrier; as not having much communication (this time of the year especially) with the cultivated parts of the kingdome.”³³ Lhuyd wrote from Bathgate, a town near Edinburgh, after some months’ sojourn in the Highlands. His correspondence with the physician Tancred Robinson had been similarly impeded.³⁴

International correspondence operated according to different rules. While naturalists’ correspondence within Britain tended to travel point to point (that is, between individuals), international correspondence was typically funneled through “intelligencers,” such as Henry Oldenburg and Samuel Hartlib. Intelligencers were individuals possessed of a particularly “active and large correspondence.” They occupied a privileged position within the community of naturalists. Acting as information brokers, they transmitted letters from one person to another, and when they received a letter that they judged to be of broad interest, they copied and shared it with a wider audience (a generally accepted practice at the time). They could negotiate for naturalists the practical difficulties of sending mail internationally, the primary one being that there were no stable, public international systems for mail delivery. The main international mail delivery systems were privately run by business concerns; as early as the sixteenth century the Fugger family, for example, ran regular mails connecting their various offices, delivering private mail as well as business correspondence.³⁵ Intelligencing on an international scale was thus close kin to commerce, relying on similar protocols. Naturalists contracted out to intelligencers a certain kind of “local knowledge.” If correspondence was funneled through an intelligencer, correspondents needed to keep track of only one address rather than many. When Oldenburg accompanied Robert Boyle’s nephew on his Grand Tour in 1657–1658, all of his correspondence with Boyle and the boy’s mother, Lady Ranelagh, was sent and received through Samuel Hartlib.³⁶ Famously, Oldenburg acted as a conduit for communication between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens.³⁷ Intelligencers seized on opportunities to become more than just relay stations. Oldenburg, for example, used his position as middleman to attempt to smooth over differences and mediate between naturalists locked in fierce disputes. Some intelligencers attempted to transform their work into a source of income, though these plans tended to come to naught. Hartlib sought to formalize his role through the creation of the “Office of Address,” a Parliament-funded bureau for the exchange of information about new mechanical inventions, improvements in husbandry and agriculture, and employment opportunities. Parliament promised a stipend but was not forthcoming with the money. The Royal Society once promised to cover the “Expence of letters” and even provide “something of an honorarium besides” for John Aubrey “to keepe a Correspondence with my numerous company of ingeniose Virtuosi in severall Counties.”³⁸ But these promises seem to have been castles in the air. Although an intelligencer’s services were essential to the functioning of the learned correspondence, it was a challenge to make them pay.

The Carrier’s Trade: Moving Books and Papers

While letters traveled by post, packages were sent by carrier.³⁹ Carriers traveled many of the same routes as the Royal Mail but were organized and managed privately. Although some carriers were solely devoted to the business, it could also be a side occupation. Farmers, for example, seeking profitable employment for themselves, their horses, and their wagons turned to carrying in the off-season. In some parts of England, wagons came into fashion only in the first half of the seventeenth century; before that goods were moved over land in two-wheeled carts.⁴⁰ In the farther reaches of Britain—the Welsh Marches or Derbyshire, for example—carrier wagons were likely to be replaced by packhorses, which could better navigate treacherous, narrow roads.⁴¹ Rates were regulated by local authorities. In the early 1690s Parliament passed an act specifically obligating justices of the peace, also responsible for overseeing local road maintenance, to regulate carrier fees in their domain.⁴² In 1692 justices of the peace in the West Riding of Yorkshire set rates from London to towns no farther north than Leeds (a distance of about two hundred miles) at one pence per pound.⁴³ Typically each town had a carrier who waited one day a week (or more, depending on how many packages a particular area generated each week) at a local public house to accept packages for delivery.⁴⁴ Carriers typically had a fixed route connecting a provincial town with London or another urban center. A guide published in 1637, The carriers cosmographie, listed all the carriers in inns near and in London, what days of the week they could be found at the inns, and where they carried goods.⁴⁵ In the 1690s the apothecary John Houghton regularly published a table of carrier routes, drop-off points, and charges in his weekly periodical, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. Destinations from London were primarily market towns and regional centers such as Nottingham, Colchester, Cambridge, Derby, and Warwick.⁴⁶ Coaches, which carried people, were differentiated from carriers, who transported goods. One issue of Houghton’s Collection lists fifty-six different carriers and twenty-nine coaches; perhaps there was more of a need to move goods than people in the late seventeenth century.⁴⁷

Carriers were plagued with the same problems that affected the mail. Detailed local knowledge was required to send and receive packages by carrier. Such information was neither reliably nor regularly made known beyond localities (as the publication dates of The carriers cosmographie and Houghton’s Collection attest). In a letter to William Musgrave requesting back issues of Philosophical Transactions, the physician Robert Peirce gave Musgrave detailed instructions for sending them by the Oxford-Bristol carrier, who passed through the village of Marshfield once or twice a week. Packages and letters would reach Peirce via “a foote man” who delivered letters that had been left at the post inn in Marshfield.⁴⁸ Peirce’s instructions make it clear that one could not assume that one’s correspondent possessed basic knowledge about how to send a package between two towns less than one hundred miles apart. This was so because carrier routes, as well as correspondents’ addresses, were often vague, ill-publicized, or unstable. This was so even in Peirce’s instructions: he thought the post inn was called “the Starre,” but he was not sure.⁴⁹ Local, personal knowledge of how packages were delivered in a particular community was paramount, and the system could tolerate a fair degree of fuzziness.

Naturalists were sometimes suspicious of their carriers, not trusting them to transmit precious books and boxes safely. On 18 November 1691 the botanist John Ray received a jarring letter from his friend John Aubrey. Aubrey inquired after the manuscripts of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire he had sent to Ray for his perusal in September of that year. By the time Ray read the letter, he had already read and annotated his friend’s book in the comfort of his home in the village of Black Notley in Essex and had remitted it to the local carrier—who made the round trip between Essex and London once a week—with careful instructions to return it to Aubrey. Somehow, however, the package failed to make it into Aubrey’s hands, as an alarmed Aubrey informed Ray by letter. One can imagine Aubrey’s state when the autograph manuscripts representing over thirty years’ work went missing on the road from Essex to London. Ray responded in haste:

Sir, Your Letter dated Novemb. 12 came not to my hands till this day noon. Had you sent it by Post I had received it last Friday. Upon reading of it, finding that you had <not> received your Manuscripts I was much surprised & startled. I sent them inscribed according to your Directions this day fortnight, & inclosed therein an open Letter to you. Such an Accident as this never yet befell me, & ’tis too soon now. The Carrier is now gone up to London, so that I cannot examine him about it…. If it be not casually drop’t out of the wagon, I doubt not but we shall retrieve it. The losse of it would be inestimable.⁵⁰

Although Ray was correct that the manuscripts had simply been delayed rather than lost, both Ray and Aubrey were deeply alarmed. The two books Aubrey lent to Ray were unique and irreplaceable manuscript texts containing annotations, drawings, and botanical samples not included in the only other extant copy, an autograph copy that Aubrey deposited in the library of the Royal Society in 1691.⁵¹

Naturalists and antiquaries were occasionally cheated by their carriers. The most common stratagem was to claim upon delivery that the recipient needed to pay more postage even though the sender had paid the posted fee. Aubrey opened a 1679 letter to Wood with a screed against a lying carrier: “I recd your welcome ltr of Dec. 23. and this day the pacquet. but the Carrier is a knave. the carriage that you payd for was blotted-out and 4d more was inserted for me to pay. I grudge not the money, for the gladness of the ltr; but am vex’t at the abuse.”⁵² Aubrey, though vexed, had little choice but to pay the four pence if he wanted to receive his letter.

Another problem that sometimes cropped up was a lack of local knowledge on the part of a carrier. When a carrier did not know the addressee of a package, he would hold on to it until someone came to pick it up. Edward Lhuyd at times ran into this problem in Oxford: packages addressed solely to him sometimes failed to arrive. He wrote to John Aubrey, “for the generality of the people at Oxford doe not yet know, what the Musaeum is; for they call the whole Buylding the Labradary <or Knackatory> & distinguish no farther. That nothing miscarried soe directed to Dr Plot was because the person was known better than the place, but things directed to me or Mr Higgins commonly stay’d at the carriers till we fetch’d them.”⁵³ In this instance, the carrier’s knowledge was more personal than institutional: he knew Plot, the old keeper, well enough but not Lhuyd or where to send a package addressed to the museum. So that a recipient would know to look out for a delivery, naturalists usually sent word by post when a package was on its way. Correspondents hoped that carriers would know enough to deliver packages, but they had strategies for keeping the system functioning when carriers lacked that knowledge.

To get around the problems that plagued shipments by carriers, naturalists sometimes sent important packages by trusted friends rather than unnamed carriers. In a letter to Aubrey, Robert Plot promised, “And as for the booke that I have {one of Aubrey’s manuscripts}, I will take care to send it not by any Carrier, but some faithfull friend, that knows how to value so great a treasure.”⁵⁴ The book that Aubrey loaned Plot—in which Plot found “many things in it much to my purpose, though not <very> many in Oxfordshire”—probably contained notes that Aubrey had made as a natural historical and antiquarian surveyor for John Ogilby’s projected Britannia.⁵⁵ Naturalists also bargained with carriers. In their correspondence regarding Royal Society matters in the early 1680s, Francis Aston and Robert Plot watched carrier charges carefully, and with good reason. After being charged an exorbitant eighteen pence for the delivery of the shipment of “the earth in the little box,” Aston asked Robert Plot to “bargain for the carriage, and set it down on the Bundle for a direction” before sending anything to him from Oxford by carrier.⁵⁶ They could also work through existing commercial networks. William Molyneux worked out an arrangement with a Dublin bookseller to ensure regular delivery of issues of Philosophical Transactions to the Dublin virtuosi. It would have been “difficult to supply some few single persons with this book by itself.”⁵⁷ But issues could be included in the four or five “parcells of books” the bookseller received each year.

Despite frustrations with knavish carriers and worries that papers could be lost, naturalists depended on their carriers. Notes and asides in their letters indicate just how much. In 1683 and 1684 many of the letters that Aston wrote to William Musgrave and Plot contained some reference to a packet of books or papers being sent by carrier. During these years, the three served overlapping tenures as secretaries of the Royal Society.⁵⁸ Their correspondence dealt largely in the official business of the society. This included determining the contents of each issue of Philosophical Transactions, then printing in Oxford, as well as exchanging scientific news garnered from all over Britain and the Continent, giving accounts of each society’s meetings, and distributing sets of queries for large-scale demographic and natural historical projects that required hundreds of informants, such as William Petty’s demographic study of parish christenings, marriages, and deaths.⁵⁹ Almost invariably each of Aston’s letters included a postscript saying that he was also sending a bundle, or a roll, or a parcel of papers by the next carrier.⁶⁰

Movers and Shakers: Making Things Travel

Sometimes circulating the material goods of knowledge was as easy as crossing the street. One day in 1683 John Aubrey decided to show his friend Elias Ashmole a “Barberian Lyon” skin given him by Edmond Wyld, a merchant acquaintance with business in northern Africa (“Barberian” is a reference to “Barbary,” or present-day North Africa):

I obtained some time since of my worthy friend Edmond Wyld Esq. a Barberian Lyon’s skin…. When I carried [it] in my hand from my Lodging to Mr. Ashmole’s office (a crosse-alley between the 2 streets) there was a great mastiffe belonging to that alley (that I did not presently see), that came smelling after it with great astonishment, the people of the alley called to me, and told me of it: and asked what it was, for they never saw the dog doe so {that is, follow anyone down the street} before, though they (sc. Coach-makers) bring in quantities of tanned skinnes for their use.⁶¹

Aubrey stepped out to show a rare lion’s pelt to his friend Ashmole, a collector of such things, and a large dog followed him down the alley between his rooms and Ashmole’s office: just another day in the life of the virtuoso, but an incident Aubrey felt worth sharing in a letter to his Oxford-based friend William Musgrave, then a secretary of the Royal Society.⁶² The ease with which Aubrey could step down the alleyway to Ashmole’s office suggests why so many naturalists and so much scientific activity were concentrated in London. Though an experience could be retailed in a letter, collaboration was much easier when people and resources were short walks away from each other.

Yet not all collaboration could happen in London. Natural history and antiquarian studies took place in farm and field and provincial town; learned activity was distributed across Britain. In addition it required natural and antiquarian materials, such as Aubrey’s lion skin, as well as books and papers. The stuff of natural history included living plants, seeds, dried and pressed leaves, flowers, and roots; formed stones and other mineral specimens; and dead and preserved animals or animal parts, such as pelts and bones. Antiquaries picked up in the course of their travels old coins, fragments of ruined buildings (ancient Roman as well as more recent monastic varieties), urns, Saxon weaponry and jewelry, and sketches of ruined buildings, monuments, and ancient earthworks. As explored in this section, naturalists and antiquaries had to find ways to move all this stuff through their correspondence.

The impulse driving naturalists to collect and move massive amounts of materials was twofold. In the first place, naturalists were increasingly interested in both systematization and understanding the regional distributions of naturalia. Some gentlemen collectors still built their collections primarily for show, filling them with the rarest and most unusual specimens. Ashmole, for example, sought to highlight objects “extraordinary in their Fabrick” as well as those that might prove useful to medicine, manufacturing, or trade.⁶³ However, naturalists increasingly prioritized systematic collecting.⁶⁴ In order to develop systematic, complete accounts of nature, they needed to collect not only extraordinary natural specimens but also a multitude of more run-of-the-mill specimens. To understand regional distributions, they also needed to know where these specimens came from. These priorities can be seen in the great catalogs of plants, insects, fishes, and birds produced by John Ray, in part from notes and drafts left by Francis Willughby.⁶⁵ Edward Lhuyd assembled a collection of formed stones in order to produce a systematic field guide to British formed stones for the use of other naturalists.⁶⁶ In instructions to plant collectors in northern Wales (discussed more extensively below), Lhuyd requested ten to twelve samples each of herbs of ordinary size and fifteen to twenty of very small species (possibly because small plants were more easily damaged in transit).⁶⁷ The queries Lhuyd sent out before his natural history collecting expedition through the Celtic regions of Britain and France indicated the range of systematization. Lhuyd distributed about four thousand query sheets, blanketing every Welsh parish and parts of Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany.⁶⁸ Lhuyd asked his respondents in every parish to identify for him antiquities, fish, animals, plants, formed stones, rocks, and manuscripts. Lhuyd asked not for the most notable specimens but for representative specimens from every single parish. Only then could nature be mapped across the nation.

Lhuyd, in fact, regarded the “exotics” that filled some gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosity with disdain because systematic accounts of nature could not be made from them—nor could they be used to map regional distributions of plants and animals. They were surprisingly uniform across different collections. They were also sourced from a more international market. For example, Lhuyd wrote in 1699 of a collection recently purchased by the University of Edinburgh that it contained relatively few specimens representing the natural production of the individual collector’s “own country.”⁶⁹ In order to differentiate kinds of organisms and go about the project of constructing a British natural history, it was necessary to collect as many specimens as possible and, if possible, multiple specimens of each kind, from within Britain, and to document where they were collected.

Although naturalists collected as broadly as possible, their collections were inevitably imbalanced. As he became more homebound, Ray’s collection of insects, for example, tilted toward species he and his daughters could collect within walking distance of his home in Essex. This imbalance was the second term of the equation regulating the exchange and circulation of specimens. By collecting multiple specimens of individual species, naturalists ensured that they had extras on hand to trade with fellow naturalists.⁷⁰ In addition, naturalists sometimes circulated unique specimens with the expectation that the originals would be returned. Through exchange, naturalists built the kinds of collections upon which systematic treatises could be built. Through circulation, naturalists at least gained the sight of various specimens, though not permanent ownership of them.

In the late seventeenth century Lhuyd drafted a set of instructions for collecting plants from the mountain and coastal areas of northern Wales. The instructions requested that plants be collected along the streams and rivulets at the top of Cader Idris and specified that a “trusty fellow” who could navigate the treacherous upper reaches of the mountain while “observing punctually” an exacting set of directions for what to collect and how to collect it should be chosen for the job.⁷¹ This person was unlikely to be Lhuyd’s literate correspondent; as Lhuyd observed elsewhere, an “illiterate shepheard” was more likely to have the necessary familiarity with mountain tops.⁷² Notably, though Lhuyd’s instructions for collecting plants were largely written in English, plant names were given in Welsh (in which Lhuyd was fluent). Lhuyd used the terminology with which his readers, and the “trusty fellow” chosen to scale the mountain, would have been familiar. Collecting plant specimens across Britain required moving across languages, using the names familiar to the places in which those plants could be found. In other words, doing natural history on a national scale required familiarity with regional linguistic topographies.

The “trusty fellow” was specifically instructed to “gather nothing that grows lower than a quarter of a mile of the Top.” Given the changeability of Welsh weather and the precariousness of the footing at the top of the mountain, his task was not without some danger. The collector was warned to go only “as high as he can with Safety” but to push that limit as far as possible. Collectors were also to “be directed to a baich or sandy place where Môrgelyn grows” (“Môr-gelyn” was a “Tea-plant”) as well as the interior of Harlech Castle, a Norman castle that by the seventeenth century was “a place much talkd of” not for its defensive capabilities but on account of the plants growing in its ruins. At each place the collector gathered multiple samples of the roots, leaves, and branches of all the plants, being “cautious in picking up the very least thing his eyes can discover.” The collectors were paid one farthing for each distinct species collected. The plants collected from Cader Idris alone “can not amount to less than 2 shillings.”⁷³

Once the collector had returned with the specimens, he handed them off to a packer, who prepared them for shipment by carrier. The packer was addressed throughout the instructions in the second person, and it was he who was to select and supervise the collector and the carrier. The instructions to the packer and carrier were as follows:

You must get a box of an indifferent size; such as you might guesse would scarce contain them; then lay in some mosse at the bottom of it lightly besprinkle’d with water. Soe lay in the shrubs & greater plants first, pressing them down with your hands pretty close; then a little mosse lightly wetted; & soe the rest of the plants, putting here & there a little mosse upon them as you lay ’m in. When all are put in fill up the box with Mosse: that they may have noe room to be dishevld in the Carriage & besprinkle it lightly with water: Soe nayle it up securely, boreing some small holes in several parts of the cover, wherein the Carrier must besprinkle a handful or two of water every night; & see the box layd in a sellar or some cool place. They should be gather’d one or two or at farthest 3 days before the Carrier sets out.⁷⁴

These directions for packing and shipping the plants were based on procedures developed by Jacob Bobart, the Younger, the head gardener at the Oxford Physic Garden, and had been used to transport plants to Oxford from France, Italy, and Germany.⁷⁵ For the plants to be shipped successfully—that is, for them to be more alive than dead when they arrived at the Physic Garden—the carrier had to follow pretty specific instructions. To the carrier, who was used to transporting less finicky goods such as wool, grain, manufactured items, and perhaps books, these requirements may have taken some getting used to, especially the request to “besprinkle a handful or two of water every night; & see the box layd in a sellar or some cool place.”⁷⁶ Thus preserved and cared for, nestled in their beds of damp moss, the plants would safely make their way from Cader Idris to the sheltered beds and glass houses of the Oxford Physic Garden. Similar procedures could be used to transplant live snails as well: Lhuyd sent some via carrier to Martin Lister, at work on his Historiae conchyliorum, in a “small strawberry basket” packed with wet moss.⁷⁷

As these examples show, collecting and sending specimens were more complex than sending and receiving a letter or a packet of papers. First of all, more people were involved—in addition to the carrier, collectors and packers were needed. Furthermore those people needed to follow specialized, carefully elaborated procedures in order to ensure that the plants were successfully transported. When carrying a packet of papers, a carrier needed to know only the address of the recipient. When delivering plants, a carrier also needed to know how to care for his living freight. He had to take on some of the knowledge of the naturalists and become skilled in tasks that gardeners and botanists took for granted.

Naturalists expended much effort managing exchanges such as these because writing was insufficient as a means of conveying information. They had to see and physically handle specimens. This was evident in a 1691–1692 exchange between John Ray, Lhuyd, and Jacob Bobart, who had gathered a collection of Oxfordshire insects. Lhuyd, as one of Ray’s contacts, served as an intermediary between Bobart and Ray. Ray wanted to see the insects in order to determine if there were any species found in Oxfordshire that he had not seen in Essex—this would add to the completeness of the natural history of insects on which he was working (published posthumously in 1710 as Historia insectorum). Ray was frustrated by efforts to describe the insects in letters, writing to Lhuyd that “by Descriptions I doubt we shall hardly scarce come to a right understanding of one another.”⁷⁸ Ray was unable to travel so far as Oxford to see the specimens because of chronic illness, one of the symptoms of which was painful sores on his legs. In response to these concerns, Bobart devised a way of securing the insects in a case such that they might travel without being harmed. Although we do not know exactly how the insects were transported unharmed, Ray’s correspondence provides us with a wealth of affective information that gives us insight into the importance and difficulty of transporting specimens over long distances. In his correspondence with Lhuyd, Ray freely expressed both his worries about transporting the insects and his joy when he opened the box and viewed the collection.

For over a year Lhuyd and Ray wrote back and forth about Bobart’s collection of insects, worrying about and working out the particulars of transport. Ray fretted that the collection would be damaged in transport by wagon. The insects would fare well enough on the first leg of the trip, by boat down the Thames from Oxford to London. But, Ray wrote, “I fear they cannot be so fixt & put up but they must receive some damage in carrying & recarrying by the jotting of the Wagon” that would take them from London to Black Notley, near Braintree in Essex.⁷⁹ Bobart, however, devised a method for securing the individual insects and, through Lhuyd, insisted on sending them. Ray acquiesced, requesting that Lhuyd send them through his London bookseller, Samuel Smith.⁸⁰

The box of insects arrived at Christmas, a timely gift. To Lhuyd, Ray wrote,

That very day that your L{ette}r came to hand, the Box of Insects was also brought me, so that you were not out in y{ou}r conjecture. The several insects were so well fixt, that, to my admiration, there was not one of them stirred by the shaking & jolting of the wagon, but came as entire as they were sent out. I wish I may have as good successe in remitting them. Upon opening of the box I was mightily taken, I might say enravished, with the beauty of the spectacle, such a multitude of rare creatures, & so curiously conserved. Truly the ingenuity & industry of the Collector Mr Bobert is highly to be commended, & he encouraged to proceed.⁸¹

One phrase in Ray’s description hints at how the insects were preserved: they “were so well fixt” that the “shaking & jolting of the wagon” had not disturbed them. The use of the word “fixt” suggests that the insects were pinned in place or attached to some kind of backing, but it is difficult to glean more precise information from Ray’s description. Ray wrote most volubly about his emotional response to the collection. “Admiration,” “taken,” “enravished,” “beauty,” “spectacle,” “curiously”: as Ray tried to describe the experience of opening the box and seeing, and studying, the insects, his vocabulary soared above its usual restrained tones. It was almost as if the successful transport of the collection was a miracle in itself, one due solely to “the ingenuity & industry of the Collector Mr Bobert.” Ray’s emotions here might be thought of as the inverse of Aubrey’s when Aubrey contemplated having lost the manuscripts of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire. Ray, doubtful that the collection would survive transport, must have opened the box with some trepidation. His trepidation was erased as he was “taken” and “enravished” by the sight of the preserved insects. Here was a transportation success of the highest order. Even in success we see how fragile the material links between naturalists were: because Ray never quite expected the insects to arrive intact, his admiration—his enravishment—at the sight of the collection was all the more overwhelming.

These examples, the instructions to plant collectors on Cader Idris and the successful shipment of Bobart’s collection of insects, provide a view of the individual, material links that made seventeenth-century natural history possible. The successful prosecution of seventeenth-century natural history required certain systems to be in place. These were both structural—the national road and river network on which packages traveled—and personal—the carrier and his team of horses; the river pilot; Samuel Smith, Ray’s bookseller and agent in London; and Bobart, whose personal expertise guided the safe shipment of the cases of plants and insects. The national network developed largely for commercial use, to bear loads of raw and finished materials (food, such as butter, eggs, and grain; raw wool and finished cloth; fuel, such as coal and wood) around the country, but once in place, it could just as well support the collecting games of curious naturalists.

Moving People

In the seventeenth century, travel, even within Britain, was no small matter. In his Celtic travels Edward Lhuyd was more than once mistaken for a spy or a tax collector, handled roughly, and thrown in jail; in the remoter reaches of Britain, he was unable to reach friends through the mail. John Ray, incapacitated by old age and painful sores on his legs, was unable to make the journey from Essex to Oxford.

Despite these difficulties, though, naturalists and antiquaries traveled avidly and planned prospective trips even more avidly. They did so for two reasons. The first motive was similar to that driving the exchange and circulation of specimens and objects. Naturalists traveled in order to observe nature firsthand and build the comprehensive collections of plant, animal, and mineral specimens upon which their work was based. Antiquarians also traveled with the aim of developing their collections. They gathered descriptions and sketches of ancient monuments, transcribed chronicles and other texts in out-of-the-way libraries, and dug up such relics as Roman coins and long-buried bones. But travel was not just about collecting specimens and observing nature. It had a second, social, raison d’être: naturalists and antiquarians also journeyed to talk with each other, to establish and renew the bonds of friendship and correspondence.

Edward Lhuyd, in subscription proposals for his study of the natural history, antiquities, and languages of the Celtic regions of Britain, best summed up naturalists’ intellectual reasons for travel: “It’s well known, no kind of Writing requires more Expences and Fatigue, than that of Natural History and Antiquities: it being impossible to perform any thing accurately in those Studies, without much Travelling, and diligent Searching, as well the most desert Rocks and Mountains, as the more frequented Valleys and Plains. The Caves, Mines, and Quarries must be pry’d into, as well as the outward Surface of the Earth; nor must we have less regard to the Creatures of the Sea, Lakes, and Rivers, than those of the Air and Dry Land.”⁸² Lhuyd described the difficulties (and the joys, quite possibly) of natural historical travel: the naturalist traveled all the most arduous roads, over rocks, mountains, and deserts, and into caves, mines, and quarries.

Antiquarian research also required substantial travel. Lhuyd’s linkage of natural history and antiquities led the way here, in that the firsthand research increasingly prized in both natural history and antiquarian circles was accomplished only through travel.⁸³ Lhuyd’s predecessor at the Ashmolean, Robert Plot, in proposing a journey through Wales and England in search of “curiosities of both Art and Nature,” wrote,

And first, whereas it was a considerable part of the Business of John Leland with all imaginable Care to collect and preserve the ancient MSS. Books of the Abbeys and Monasteries then upon their Dissolution, and that notwithstanding his industrious Performances great numbers there were that never came to his Hands; and such as did, quickly after his Death, through the Iniquity of the Times, being dispers’d again, great part of the MSS. in England are, as it were, lost to the World, lying secretly in Corners and in private Hands, no Man knowing either what MSS. there be, or where to find them: it shall be one of the principal Ends of my Journey to search all the Publick Libraries of Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, of the Colleges in each University, and other Publick Libraries wheresoever, and make distinct Catalogues of them all. And as for such MSS. as shall be found in private Hands, it would not be amiss if the University of Oxford would imploy me to buy up (if they cannot be begg’d) as many as can be purchas’d for the Bodlejan Library; and where they will by no means be parted with to procure leave (if worth while) that an Amanuensis may transcribe the whole, or at least have the Perusal and Liberty to make Abridgements, as Leland did of many. But if neither of these will be admitted, ’twill be some satisfaction that they are added to the Catalogues of the rest, to inform Men that there are such Books, and in what libraries and in whose Hands they are.⁸⁴

As Plot’s description of his plan indicated, travel, for natural historians and antiquarians, required a certain willingness to be invasive. Not only did they peer into quarries and trek to the tops of mountains; they also invited themselves into the private libraries of gentlemen and the public libraries of bishops. Plot anticipated difficulty from the gentlemen (though not the bishops): he hoped to buy up or transcribe manuscripts in private hands but realized that he might be granted neither sufficient funds nor access to the manuscripts and would have to content himself with simply making note of them in a catalog.

Given the material and social obstacles facing the traveler, how did natural historians and antiquaries manage their expeditions? Realizing that they were likely to encounter suspicion and resistance, travelers sought credentials that would encourage those they met to accept and assist them. Letters of recommendation were the typical remedy. Plot, noting that John Leland traveled as an official emissary of Henry VIII, desired a similar commission from Charles II: “And as for such MSS. or other Curiosities that shall be found in private Hands, a Recommendation from his Majesty must needs prove so effectual, that I shall surely be admitted to the perusal or making an Abridgement of any MSS. and of having a Sight and Examination of all other Rarities either of Art or Nature.”⁸⁵ The king’s word, though, was not sufficient for Plot; he also planned a sort of letters-of-reference pyramid scheme. He obtained a general letter of recommendation (it might as well have been addressed “To whom it may concern”) signed by Ralph Bathurst, Oxford’s vice chancellor; John Wallis, professor of geometry; and James Hyde, one of Charles II’s personal physicians, among others.⁸⁶ He planned to take this letter and other, more personalized letters of recommendation to the most ingenious people in every county and ask them in turn for letters to the next level of ingeniosity that the counties offered.⁸⁷ Plot’s general letter of commendation was handwritten on parchment, which was more durable than paper and so better able to withstand the rigor of travel.

Through their correspondence traveling naturalists smoothed the path before them by cultivating local connections in advance of trips. In one letter to Martin Lister, Edward Lhuyd sought several different letters of introduction in preparation for his travels in Ireland and Scotland. Lhuyd wrote from Wales six weeks before embarking to Ireland. He asked Lister to point him toward “some acquaintance there who may direct us to make the best of our time” as well as particular introductions to a Dr. Wellase, mentioned in Lister’s previous letters, “and any other particular friend in Ireland.” He further recalled that John Campbell, the second Earl Breadalbane (1662–1752), had promised letters of introduction to Lister if he ever traveled to the Scottish Highlands. As that was the next leg of Lhuyd’s trip after Ireland, he begged Lister to see if that promise could be extended to him.⁸⁸

In order to make the most of their travels and win access to private lands and private libraries, naturalists such as Lhuyd had to win the confidence of people who were not naturalists. The average landowner in the Scottish Highlands was unlikely to be impressed with Edward Lhuyd himself or a letter of introduction bearing Martin Lister’s signature. But the signature of John Campbell, as Lhuyd recognized, could easily open doors. Campbell’s value lay in both his stature and his local renown. He was not just any lord but one known locally in the Highlands. A naturalist’s connections, no matter how prominent, were worthless if they were not recognized by the locals to whose libraries and resources he sought access.

Other letters of Lhuyd’s confirm the importance of cultivating prominent local connections above all else. In preparation for sailing to Brittany, the last leg of his trip through Celtic-speaking regions of Britain and France, Lhuyd wrote to his friend Thomas Tonkin.⁸⁹ Lhuyd had heard that Tonkin’s father-in-law corresponded with a gentleman at the port of Morlaix, where Lhuyd planned to land. Lhuyd specifically asked “his favour therefore, in getting me recommended to some scholar well acquainted with the British language, and antiquities; and then I hope to shift for myself.”⁹⁰ Lhuyd had letters of introduction to two abbots in Paris, but these, he recognized, would be nearly useless in Brittany.

Sometimes even quality letters of introduction could not protect a traveler. After only three weeks in Brittany, which he spent hard at work collecting notes on the Breton language (“Armorican” to Lhuyd), his studies were interrupted by the intendant des marines of Brest. The intendant sent a messenger to Lhuyd’s lodgings to arrest him on suspicion of treason:

The messenger found me busy in adding the Armoric words to Mr Rays Dictionariolum Trilingue with a great many letters and small manuscripts about the table, which he immediately secured, and then proceeded to search our pockets for more. All these papers he ty’d up in a napkin, and requiring me to put three seals thereon, added three more of his own. I told him I had brought letters of recommendation to the Theologal of the City, who is the third person in the Diocese; upon which he went with me to him. The gentleman own’d it, and deliver’d him the letter, adding another in our behalf to his master, the Intendant, and a third to a captain of a man of war at Brest. Having secur’d our papers, he granted us the favour of going to Brest before them, a-part, that the country might not take notice of our being prisoners.⁹¹

By Lhuyd’s account, the messenger found him busy catching up on his philological note taking. He used the vocabulary lists in Ray’s trilingual dictionary as a basis for his own collections of Celtic words and compiled his vocabularies in a copy of Ray’s book, working from notes taken over the course of his travels. In that moment he was working on adding the Breton words to his master copy. This activity of writing, which required a profusion of “letters and small manuscripts,” was immediately suspicious as spy work. Despite letters from a high-ranking cleric (the “Theologal”), Lhuyd was held on suspicion of being a spy for just under two weeks in the jail in the castle at Brest. Initially refused an allowance for food and having only letters of credit with local merchants rather than cash to pay for his own, Lhuyd bargained with some Irish soldiers at the castle to pass him viands through the groundfloor window of his jail cell.⁹² He was released after an interpreter studied the papers that had been seized—many of which were written in Welsh and Cornish—and determined that “they contain’d nothing of Treason.” Lhuyd was aided in part by the interpreter’s vanity. Though unable to read Welsh and Cornish, he was “loath to own himself puzl’d; so told {the French officials} in general, without any exception, none of my papers related to Statematters” (which they did not, being primarily Welsh and Cornish poetry, word lists, and other philological resources, but how could the translator know that?).⁹³ Lhuyd was released, and his papers were given back to him, but he was ordered to return immediately to England. Although he had originally intended to travel on to Paris, where his patron Martin Lister had important contacts, Lhuyd turned around and took the next boat back to England.⁹⁴

As Lhuyd’s experience indicates, the difficulties facing the naturalist and antiquarian traveler were often social in nature. When traveling, naturalists and antiquarians frequently dealt with officials and other locals who had little knowledge of or respect for their credentials. Compared to these problems, bad roads and terrible weather seem hardly to have been worth remarking upon. Lhuyd rarely mentioned these inconveniences, instead dwelling on the negotiations and introductions that ensured access and assistance from local landowners. Letters of introduction to or from local notables were necessary but sometimes not sufficient to ensure access and protect them against harassment. The traveling naturalists and antiquarians struggled to gain access to private land and private libraries. Once access was granted, they had to convince private gentlemen to permit them to copy, take away, or buy samples of what they found on those gentlemen’s land and in their libraries. Beyond access to things, there was also access to information. Lhuyd noted this in his proposals for the natural history of Wales, when he spoke of the necessity of carrying money along to pay small sums to local workers, particularly miners, for information, such as details surrounding the collection of specimens.

For the traveling naturalist, such as Lhuyd, patronage was dispersed across many correspondents, acquaintances, informants, and subscribers, and yet he still had to find ways to align his interests with patrons who were not, at heart, naturalists. This made his situation both like and unlike that described in many classic studies of patronage in science and the arts, which focused on court patronage and the absolute (or would-be absolute) ruler.⁹⁵ At the court all energy was focused on the ruler, and status and power were measured in one’s distance therefrom. The concentration of patronage in the absolute ruler meant that clients sought to align their interests with the ruler at all times in order to maintain patronage, which could create courts devoted to specific sciences or areas of investigation. Driven by the interests of the Landgraf, for example, the court of Hesse-Kassel under Prince Moritz (1572–1632) was a center of research into alchemy, Paracelsian thought and practice, chemical medicine, and the associated hermetic arts.⁹⁶ Courtly patronage could also lead to the cultivation of certain styles of doing science: according to William Eamon, curiosity and virtuosity emerged in this period as scientific virtues precisely because they were the virtues that the learned prince sought to display in encouraging scientific activity at his court.⁹⁷

Lhuyd’s situation was like that of the client of an absolute ruler in that he had to find ways to align his interests with those of his patrons, that is, his subscribers and those who assisted him as he traveled. This is reflected in the way he framed his appeals to subscribers, both in the initial subscription proposals for his research and in the questionnaires he issued. However, with over two hundred subscribers, he was not beholden to any one individual. The dispersal of patronage thus set Lhuyd on a somewhat more equal footing with his patrons than, say, the average alchemist in the court of Hesse-Kassel. He was not free from the necessity of designing and promoting his research to appeal to the shared interests of his subscribers. But, because Lhuyd needed no one of his subscribers in particular, he was free not to tailor his research to any of their individual needs. If one gentleman would not give his shilling, within limits, Lhuyd could find another.