it nonetheless establishes a kind of order between the projects it unveils. When, for instance, England’s Improvement presents linen as the product of synchronized efforts to register land and cut rivers, it suggests that projects create their own conditions of possibility. This idea of reciprocity enables Yarranton to depict momentous changes in society as the result of incremental measures. Yarranton links one scheme to the proliferation of others in his description of how a land registry would reshape rural England: “the free Lands of England being put under a Voluntary Register by Act of Parliament: From the Credit whereof spring Banks, Lumberhouses, with all Credits necessary to drive Trade, Cut Rivers, the Fishery, and all things else that Moneys are capable of; and it will drive away the great fears and complaints rooted in the hearts of the People, as the decay of Trade, the growing power of the French, and much more.”116 The prepositions “by,” “from,” and “with” establish causal bonds between each measure. Appropriately enough, the former navigations engineer employs a hydrographical metaphor to liken the land registry to a spring that feeds the streams of lumber mills, river embankments, trade, and a fishery. The metaphor breaks off with the more literal suggestion that new institutions will enhance England’s global stature, neutralize the threat of French invasion, cheer a fearful and quarrelsome populace, and “much more.” Improvement is imagined as the outflow of interdependent enterprises whose benefits exceed articulation. The land registry will do much good, and through its tributary schemes, “much more.”
Yarranton’s prepositions and water imagery establish spatial relations between projects to imply their harmonious interworking. Other projectors asserted improvement’s reciprocal nature more directly. Samuel Fortrey observed with aphoristic brevity that “people and plenty are commonly the begetters of the one of the other, if rightly ordered.”117 Carter identifies a “Connexion of Trades one to another,” predicting that England’s short-sighted exportation of raw wool would bring the poor to “desperate straits” and make them “uncapable of paying rent.”118 The cloth maker Joseph Trevers incorporates English commerce through the trope of the “body politique,” in which “one member depends upon another, and is serviceable to the other” producing “natural Harmony and Correspondence, even so doth one Trade, or occupation closely, and necessarily depend upon another.”119
Thirsk traces a similar course of mutual causation in the writings of fen improvers. She observes that a growing market for coleseed oil in the early seventeenth century “was linked with drainage projects, which gave fresh encouragement to yet another group of inventors and projectors—those who were commending their designs for windmills and drainage engines.”120 A hunger for oil drives the mechanical inventions that would eventually turn the fens into plantable land. One oil projector, John Taylor, employs the same logic of “fresh encouragement” in his Praise of Hemp-Seed (1620), which recounts how hemp cultivation both demanded and returned “labour, profit, cloathing, pleasure, food, Navigation: Divinity, poetry, the liberall Arts, Armes, Vertues defence, Vices offence, a true mans protection, a thiefs execution. Here is mirth and matter all beaten out of this small seede.”121 An entire civil society congeals in the kernels of this crop, claims Taylor, who reasons that hemp could nourish commoners, inspire artists, and punish criminals. Likewise, Richard Weston’s A Discours of Husbandrie Used in Brabant and Flanders (1650) argues that implementing horticultural methods “not practised in England” would catalyze trade and create new employment opportunities.122 Weston advises Commonwealth cultivators to plant the signature crops of the continent’s lowlands, including flax, turnip, and clover. Then these planters could “send for som Workmen out of Flanders, that understand the Manufacture of Linnen Cloth, and make your own Flax into Linnen Cloth.”123 The profits derived from finishing textiles would return “publick benefit to the Kingdom” in the form of profits that would subsidize the repair of highways and the construction of canals. Weston’s Discours promises to make English subjects better farmers, then industrialists, and finally, sponsors of public works. His agricultural projects pledge to capitalize on English land and expand the range of lives that the countryside could sustain.
Yarranton often makes the culmination of one project the impetus for another, though he does not always do this. For instance, England’s Improvement employs a paragraph break to mark the shift between his discussion of the registry and plan to log Irish and English forests:
And if this doth not convince the Reader, that hereby we shall beat the Dutch without fighting, and pay our Debts without Moneys, I have no more to say.
Besides the Advantages aforesaid, let me tell you that I have found out two places, one in Ireland, the other in England: In that in Ireland are great strange quantities of Timber to build Ships, and places to build them.124
Language and typography place the logging proposals “besides” the purported benefits of the property register, rendering these two ideas adjacent but apart from one another. The new timber scheme nonetheless abides by its own internal logic of self-necessitation: “great and strange quantities of wood” become accessible only when workers make the Slane and Avon Rivers passable to ships. A cache of fleet-ready timber needs reengineered rivers to become boats. Conversely, the future navigability of the Slane and Avon depend on their proximity to forests, whose wood motivates the moving of land and water.
Yarranton depicts the project through a crude map (see Figure 2). The top of the map displays forest groves owned by English aristocrats, including Anglesey, who would stand to profit from the extraction of Irish timber. The bottom shows a finished ship under English ensign sailing out the broad-mouthed Slane River past Wexford into the open sea. The forest’s status as ships in potential could not be more obvious. The absence of dockyards, logging camps, and any other traces of labor implies that Irish forests, like Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest, might simply “rush into [the] Floods” on their own accord.125 Yarranton’s syntax lacks the prosodic compression of Pope’s later scene, but it relies on a similar animating conceit: “those Woods may with ease and at very cheap Rates be brought down the Slane to Wexford.”126 Cartography and grammar conspire to reduce rural wilderness to its industrial possibilities, possibilities that the single outbound ship implies are already being exploited.
Yarranton’s chain of projects stretches beyond the text of England’s Improvement. The multitude of benefits (and beneficial projects) signaled by the phrase “much more” would eventually motivate him to compose a “Second Part” to England’s Improvement, published in 1681. This continuation contained, among several additional proposals, “advice” for employing “Six thousand young Lawyers, and Three thousand Priests … who now have neither practice nor cure of Souls.”127 Yarranton recognizes that the institution of a land registry would clear parochial court dockets, deny lawyers lucrative casework, and make England sufficiently prosperous and self-content to repel the enticements of Roman Catholicism.128 Despite his tongue-in-cheek concern for jobless lawyers and papists, Yarranton nonetheless demonstrates his willingness to deal with the repercussions of his scheming and to solve, even fancifully, problems of his own making. The patterns of causation that drew together Yarranton’s projects outstretch the document that originally called them into being.
Universal Interest
Yarranton purports to voice collective values through the first word of his title, “England’s,” his strategically addressed dedicatory letters, and passively voiced predictions. He advances schemes that benefit broad constituencies, transforming the need for labor into a beneficial occasion of “employ.” A desire to employ the poor, to make enterprise serve its undertakers, was “one of the axioms of project writing,” according to Samantha Heller, who demonstrates how economic planners of the sixteenth century promised to make use of England’s idle and destitute subjects.129 The inventor Hugh Plat (1552–1608) typifies this caring rhetoric when he sets out to “procure great loue and securitie to the rich,
