neither wholly negative nor wholly positive, though over time this field turned more decisively away from them as progenitors of the English constitution. Earlier writers had made the argument that Britain’s foundations could be located among the ancient Britons, shrouded in time immemorial. However, by the late seventeenth century, historians, especially those of the proparliamentary and Whiggish type, came to believe that the Saxons were the true progenitors of English liberties. This argument, which was founded in a century of increasingly sophisticated antiquarian scholarship on Saxon England, had been popularly made in Nathaniel Bacon’s oft-reprinted An historicall discourse of the uniformity of the government of England, which was first published in 1647.56 Those on the Royalist side of things, on the other hand, tended to emphasize more the inheritance from the Normans. Even those who still sought to locate the foundations of English liberties in ancient Britain argued that little could be known about their governance, given the lack of surviving written documents. Regardless of which side one took, the shift to seeing the transfer of power from Saxons to Normans as a key moment in the history of the English constitutions led English writers to minimize the contribution that the Welsh made to the national polity, both as a people in the then present day and in their past incarnation as the ancient British.57 Not coincidentally, these arguments had a topographical basis: the boundaries of the medieval Saxon and Norman territories mostly mapped onto present-day England, which meant that the English claimed a direct line of descent from these peoples, but not the ancient Britons, whose descendants lived in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.58
Working amid this complex backdrop, Edward Lhuyd took the option of defining Britain from its geographical edges. In 1695 he issued proposals for a “British Dictionary, historical and geographical.”59 Partly inspired by his work on the 1695 revised edition of Camden’s Britannia, he proposed a study of the natural history, antiquities, languages, and customs of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany. This project consumed the last fifteen years of Lhuyd’s life and was built around extensive travel—he was on the road for four years—and a questionnaire that he issued to the clergy and gentry in an edition of four thousand copies. He planned a multivolume treatise but in the end finished only the first volume, a comparative study of “British” languages, before death cut his labors short in 1709. Based on the strength of this treatise, Lhuyd has come to be regarded as one of the originators of the modern study of these languages, now more commonly identified as “Celtic” languages.60
Lhuyd’s definition of “Britain” was complex and shifting. In his 1695 prospectus, he focused primarily on Wales.61 In these proposals Lhuyd defined “British” as the Welsh, Cornish, and Armorican, or Breton, peoples. Yet his project had implications for understanding British history beyond the early modern geographical boundaries within which those peoples lived. As was not uncommon, Lhuyd believed that these were the descendants of one group present on the isle at the time of Julius Caesar, that is to say, prior to the Romans’ arrival in Britain. Roman and early medieval Saxon invaders drove the “British” to the more remote margins of the “Atlantic archipelago.” Their language was likeliest to be preserved uncorrupted in Wales, which had been less exposed to “Foreign Languages introduc’d by Conquest.”62 Yet Lhuyd did not necessarily believe that the ancient “British” were the only original inhabitants of Britain. In the proposals Lhuyd maintained a separation between the “British” and the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, though he did see them as historically and linguistically related.
Lhuyd’s conception of “Britain” and “British” as objects of historical and topographical study continued to develop over the course of his research and seems to have expanded by the time he published the linguistic component of the Archaeologia Britannica in 1707. The title page proclaimed that the Archaeologia Britannica was a study of the “languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain” based on travels in “Wales, Cornwal, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland.”63 The book was a compilation of comparative dictionaries and grammars of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Irish, which Lhuyd regarded as very similar, if not identical, to Highland Scots. Even within this volume, however, “Britain” and “British” were shifting signifiers. He sometimes glossed “Ancient Scots” as “Northern British.” Yet at the same time he maintained a separation between the “British” language as spoken in the south—in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany—and the “Scotish” spoken in the north and west—in Scotland and Ireland. He tended to associate “Scotish” with the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Britain who had been pushed aside by the “Britans” just as the “Britans” were pushed aside by the Romans and the Saxons.
Yet despite these fractures in Lhuyd’s concept of “Britain” and “British,” one thing was clear: the only way to understand the history of these languages and, through the languages, the history of the various peoples inhabiting Great Britain was by studying all of them; they had spent centuries jostling along together, pushing each other about, and borrowing from each other’s languages, and their histories were intimately connected.64 Lhuyd mapped the geography of languages in order to elucidate these historical relationships. In a letter written while traveling through the Highlands of Scotland, Lhuyd noted that “most names of places throughout the kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland relish much of a British origin; though I suspect that upon a diligent comparison … we shall find that the antient Scots of Ireland were distinct from the Britains of the same kingdom.”65
Lhuyd’s comment, with its suggestion that language groups affiliated with both the “antient Scots” and the “Britains” were present in Ireland, hints at the complexities involved in tracing the movements of ancient peoples, not to mention in trying to link those peoples to present-day groups. In the vocabulary notebooks he kept while traveling in Scotland, he logged common words in at least two Scottish dialects; he also hoped to capture key words in at least three different Irish dialects.66 Lhuyd systematically analyzed these data in order to deduce the relationships between the languages, requiring at least five to six specific examples using “core vocabulary” (that is, the words from Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue) to show that any given difference between the languages was a consistent rule.67 Following this method, Lhuyd first established the division between the “P-Celtic” and “Q-Celtic” language families broadly recognized today.68 P-Celtic includes Breton, Cornish, Welsh; Q-Celtic, Scots and Irish Gaelic. Extensive comparative study was the only way to uncover relationships such as this.
Lhuyd cast the “Britains” spread across Great Britain and Ireland as people with deep connections to each other. Yet this was not a group whose shared identity was already widely recognized, either by the English or by each other. Relationships between and among the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish veered from contentious to nonexistent. Little in the way of a shared sense of identity united “Britains” in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall.69 The word “Celtic” as a collective term for these peoples was only beginning to gain currency in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in part because of Lhuyd’s work. For many of the “Celtic” gentry and nobility, culture and a sense of identity were rooted in local topography and history.70 If they looked beyond the local, it was to England, especially London and Westminster, rather than toward each other. This can be seen in a political context—for example, in the process of negotiation that led to the union of Scotland and England in the very year that Lhuyd published the first volume of the Archaeologia Britannica.71 Leading Scottish politicians looked to the relationship between England and Ireland not in solidarity but primarily as an example of unwelcome colonial dependency. The orientation toward England was also visible in the histories of Britain that emerged from both Wales and Scotland: to the extent that they argued for any sort of historical connections between the parts of Great Britain, it was either between Wales and England or between Scotland and England. Among the “vulgar,” those whose horizons were encompassed by parish and village society and who spoke English either not at all or as a second language, local identities and local relationships were even more paramount.72 In addition, while the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish gentry and clergy displayed enthusiastic interest in
