England’s power at sea by establishing a navigable waterway in Ireland. Turning his attention to the Shalela Wood of Leinster, Yarranton decries the “great shame it was that such quantities of Timber should ly rotting in these Woods, and could not be come at, the Mountains and Boggs having so lockt them up.”105 These were not any old trees, but sturdy oaks, some mast worthy, that could boost the English navy’s ship-building efforts. It was no coincidence that this timber stood on land in the County of Wexford that Charles II had granted to his loyalist supporters, including Yarranton’s dedicatee, the Earl of Anglessey. When Yarranton predicts that the unimproved land “will never bring the Owners Twenty thousand pounds,” he laments both the nation’s forfeiture of ship timber and his patron’s loss of revenue. The solution, he perceived, was in deepening the River Slane (today called the Slaney), which meandered through southeastern Ireland on its way to the sea at Wexford: “But if the Slane were made Navigable and the Rivulets running into it, these great quantities of Timber might be employed in building Ships for the Royal Navy.”106 The conditional statement exemplifies Yarranton’s dedicatory pledge to exploit “our Climate, the Nature of our soil, and the Constitution of our People and Government,” in this case by making “our” encompass the colonized County of Wexford. England’s Improvement implies an Ireland that is also England’s, and hence improvable. From early in his career, Yarranton recognized the value of traversable rivers, likening them in England’s Improvement to veins: “let them be stopt, there will then be great danger either of death” or injury.107 He was so confident in his project to make the Stour River navigable through part of Worcestershire that he purchased adjoining mines in the hopes that barges would one day carry his coal to forges downstream. Making the Slane navigable, he argued, would allow England to build ships at “three fifths of what the King now pays,” and these ships would be well positioned to “preserve the West India Trade” or sail into the Mediterranean and thereby give “great comfort to all Trade that is used in those seas.”108 It was all a matter of getting to those oaks.
Yarranton summarizes the project through a single sentence that transforms a natural substance (“Timber”) into a manmade product (“Ships”) through an act of industry (“building”). This rough grammatical formula for projection transforms a direct object into an indirect object through the use of a gerund. What’s missing is a subject, an entity responsible for this foretold action. Passive voice construction permits England’s Improvement to extol a complex work of river engineering without calling on anyone in particular to discharge its labor. Perhaps Yarranton feared that such an act of naming would divert the reader’s attention from England, the ostensible beneficiary of improvement, to an individual undertaker who might stand to profit (especially if that undertaker wound up being the polarizing surveyor and engineer Andrew Yarranton). Passive voice enables the projector to talk about improvement without hazarding to assign it a grammatical agent or human face.
Modern writing pedagogy discourages use of the passive voice on the grounds that it conveys diffidence, inaction, even deception. In England’s Improvement, passive construction propels Yarranton’s schemes forward by attributing them a sense of inevitability. His grammar helps create the conditions for believing in his project, which derives plausibility from the fact that it at first obliges nobody to do anything. Yarranton’s sentence is in the conditional mode, but no one is responsible for satisfying any conditions—things simply will “be.” Yarranton evinces similar passive certainty in his later proposal to forge metal in Hampshire using iron stone buried at the mouth of the Stour River and timber from the New Forest: “If two Furnaces be built around Ringwood to cast Guns, and two Forges to make Iron, and the Iron Stone to be brought from the Harbour mouth out of the Sea up the River to the Furnaces, and the Charcole out of New Forest to the works, there being sufficient of decayed Woods to supply four Iron-works for ever; by these means the King makes the best of everything, and builds with his Timber being near and convenient.”109 Furnace construction appears straightforward in this syntax. Forges will “be built” and raw iron “brought” through actions that later solidify into “means” of instrumental value. The omission of subjects makes Yarranton sound authoritative, not evasive. Eventually he attributes action to Charles II, a sovereign who “makes the best of everything,” but in reality makes nothing.
Yarranton proposes to establish linen manufacturing in Warwick, Leicester, Northampton, and Oxfordshire through yet another passively voiced future-conditional sentence, except here, England’s Improvement transmutes the lack of specified agency into a positive gain: the creation of jobs. “And so it will be,” proclaims Yarranton: “There the Flax will grow, and be manufactured easily and cheap; part whitened there, and the Thread and part of the Flax sent down the Navigable Rivers to the several Towns to be woven and spun. And so there will be employ for the great part of the Poor of England. In such Towns where it meets with a settled voluntary Register, thence never will it depart.”110 The cloth spinning project presumes the execution of Yarranton’s other schemes for navigations and land registration. Once in place, these enterprises enable the linen industry to run itself: flax “will grow,” “be Manufactured,” “be sent down” rivers. A former draper’s apprentice, Yarranton predicts that central England would one day surpass Germany as Europe’s largest producer of cloth. He suggests that nimble-fingered children would make the best linens workers, following the example of German industrial schools that taught youngsters how to spin flax, weave bone lace, and make toys. “There the Children enrich the Father,” Yarranton lamented, “but here begger him.”111 In the world of England’s Improvement, “employ” is improvement’s product rather than its animating force. Yarranton transforms children from cost burdens into wage earners, a measure that would stimulate population growth in the region.
Given its capacity to make a speculative future feel like an inevitable extension of the present, passive syntax appears frequently in project writing. The subtitle of Coke’s England’s Improvements promises to disclose “How the Kingdom of England May be Improved.” Fortrey professes “no doubt but the people, and riches of the kingdom might be greatly increased and multiplied” if land were enclosed, mines expanded, and a fishery established.112 “England, may be enriched,” declares William Carter, by banning the exportation of raw wool.113 His England’s Interest Asserted declares that “Cloathing must be purged from its Corruption,” in a syntactical construction that identifies neither what qualified as “Corruption” nor who would take responsibility for decontaminating the trade.114 Reynell treats England as a passive object in his assertion that “this Nation might be greatly advantaged by cutting of Rivers, and making them Navigable.”115 The kingdom, according to Reynell, possesses the means of advancing itself, so there is no need to identify the agents who would actually carry out the work.
After denying the efficacy of its words, England’s Improvement appears also to refuse the agency of its author. This maneuver permits Yarranton to invert the means and ends of his project, imagining labor not as a prerequisite for projects but as projection’s salutary outcome. Passive voice also makes it possible for England’s Improvement to synchronize projects of industry, engineering, and policy reform within a single sentence, producing a momentary sense of coherent organization within a long and varied pamphlet.
Schemes and Schemas
England’s Improvement sprawls across two hundred pages and several fields of professional knowledge, from Irish forestry to London fire prevention. Incorporating such dissimilar material into a single piece of writing challenged Yarranton to make “improvement” encompass many actions and yet remain a legible ideal. He conceived of England’s Improvement not as a miscellany of separate proposals, but a methodical plan for concerted action. This was the goal at least. In its published form, Yarranton’s pamphlet feels neither methodical nor self-contained. To the contrary, England’s Improvement tries readers through its lengthy digressions and deadening repetition. The text speeds through some proposals—particularly those having to do with London—while lavishing minute detail on others. Yarranton defers to knowledgeable experts
