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
