Britannica, Edward Lhuyd felt the need to begin with an apology for even attending to such a subject because “Diversity of Languages is Generally granted to be rather an Inconveniency than the Contrary.”42 Naturalists sought ways to bridge these gaps, or at least make the various local dialects and languages legible to travelers, particularly those who went from the orbit of London, Cambridge, and Oxford to more remote parts of Britain. In 1674 John Ray published A collection of English words, not generally used, a compendium of words peculiar to the north, south, and east of England. This collection offered definitions of local dialect words that Ray had collected in his travels around Britain in the 1660s with his fellow naturalists Francis Willughby, Nathaniel Bacon, and Phillip Skippon. It was published with catalogs of English fish and bird species and some notes on mining, ore processing, metal work, and alum- and salt-making that had been similarly gathered from conversations with miners and craftspeople during their travels.
In the letter to the reader that prefaced the volume, Ray focused on the northern dialects’ unintelligibility to southerners: “in many places, especially of the North, the Language of the common people, is to a stranger very difficult to be understood.”43 He believed that his collection therefore would be of some use to travelers in the north of England. Ray’s publication of this dictionary, and his justification for it, suggested that regional differences within England were sharply felt. It also implied that his ideal reader was someone from the center (for example, London, Cambridge, Oxford) traveling in the north. Yet Ray also included southern and eastern dialect words, indicating on some level that this was also a project designed to encourage mutual intelligibility and was not just about making the periphery intelligible to the center—or that even in the home counties the “language of the common people” contained dialect words unfamiliar to the educated.
Ultimately such aids would help naturalists see past the accidents of local linguistic variation (which might assign one species a diversity of names) to the underlying reality of nature, allowing them to classify species rationally and universally according to an agreed-upon set of characteristics.44 Naturalists across Europe were thus interested in documenting and understanding local vernaculars.45 One might see a similar motivation in Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue (1675), which listed words, broken down by category, in English, Greek, and Latin. The categories were not unlike those found in county natural histories—Ray began with words related to the heavens and worked his way through words related to plants and animals, human bodies and human health, and culture, society, and the built environment (the main difference was that Ray included a section listing words related to God and religion). When collecting words in the Celtic regions of Britain, Edward Lhuyd used the lists in the Dictionariolum trilingue as his standard vocabulary.46
Ray’s focus on regional English dialects suggests two insights about the nature of the project of fashioning Britain as a scientific object. First, naturalists were not universally (or always) interested in Britain as a whole. In their work they frequently privileged one region over another. Because many of these naturalists were English first, England was of course the privileged region. There was more at work here, however. In Ray’s presentation of England as a linguistically diverse space, we see that it is not necessarily appropriate to read seventeenth-century England as unified—politically, linguistically, scientifically, or otherwise.
Furthermore, insofar as one reads the formation of Britain as a colonial process—one in which the English extended their hegemony over Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—it is in some cases more appropriate to identify the northern counties (and the West Country, which included Cornwall, though Ray did not discuss their dialects) with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Cultural and political hegemony was extended from London and its environs to the rest of England: although Ray included in A collection of English words dialect words from southern and eastern England, in the letter to the reader he framed his project as an aid to southerners attempting to understand northern dialects, and not the other way around.47
Language, History, and Descent: Britain Without England
Tracing human descent through history was another way of mapping the boundaries of the British “nation.” Naturalists-antiquaries started from the proposition that relics of human relations lay strewn across the languages of Britain, and therefore linguistic topography offered a key to the history of human descent and settlement in Britain. For example, ancient Celtic place names suggested a history of Celtic peoples in a location, whereas Scandinavian place names—or regional dialect words with Scandinavian origins—suggested a history of Viking settlements. Getting more deeply into the structure of the languages could show historical and contemporary similarities between the grammars of Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, and Cornish that could be used to define the historical connections between present-day speakers of those languages. In his Villare Anglicanum, a dictionary of English place names, John Aubrey proposed that if it were possible to trace the etymology of some Welsh words to Greek, this would be “good Evidence (without being beholding to Historie) that there was a time, when the Greeks had Colonies here.”48 Such an effort was doomed, but it does indicate what the naturalists hoped to gain from the study of language: evidence for the movement and settlement of peoples that was somehow independent of conventional historical evidence. The topography of languages promised to escape history, to provide an independent check on the chronicles and myths that Britons had been living with since the Middle Ages. In this section I trace topographers’ efforts to map the history of the people they referred to as the ancient “British,” often understood (at the time) as the ancestors of the modern Welsh, largely through the study of the Celtic languages.
The relationship between historic inhabitants of Britain and the then modern-day composition of its population was a subject of active debate among naturalists, antiquaries, political writers, and historians. This question had crucial implications for relations between the various kingdoms and regions and each group’s understanding of itself (this continues to be true into the present).49 Political writers, in particular, sought to shore up the foundations of the English constitution—and the liberties enshrined therein—by locating its origins in the histories of the peoples of Britain. Common descent could be used to unite the various peoples of Britain: where established, it provided the basis of a common cultural and national identity. However, awareness of differences in origins tended to divide the peoples of Britain—each individual group made strides, perhaps, toward “a more or less coherent” sense of a history that defined them as a nation, but it was difficult, if not impossible (and may or may not have been desirable, depending on one’s perspective), to spin a unified historical narrative about the peoples of the British Isles and Ireland.50
Topographical writers’ understandings of the ancient British and estimations of their contributions to the formation of Britain and the British landscape ranged from utterly dismissive to proudly appreciative. In The most notable antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stone-Heng (1655), the first printed treatise on Stonehenge, the architect Inigo Jones argued that the ancient British peoples were entirely too rude and barbarous to have constructed a monument as complex as Stonehenge. Jones’s book offered a particularly striking example of the link between English estimations of the ancient Britons and English prejudices against the “Celtic” peoples of early modern Britain.51 According to Jones, the ancient Britons were utterly devoid of the understanding of art, science, or mathematics that would have equipped them to build Stonehenge.52 Instead, Jones contended (totally wrongheadedly) that the Romans constructed Stonehenge according to classical architectural principles. John Aubrey, on the other hand, writing at roughly the same time, identified Stonehenge as a Druid temple, defining his Druids as “the most eminent Priests [or Order of Priests] among the Britaines.”53 Aubrey, who claimed Welsh ancestry, saw affiliations between similar ruins scattered across Britain. He sought out and where possible incorporated accounts of ancient British monuments in North Wales and Scotland into Monumenta Britannica, his study of British antiquities.54 Aubrey’s interpretation of stone circles as Druid temples became immensely popular through the eighteenth century when it was promoted by the antiquaries William
