the one hand, Lhuyd’s line of inquiry, which traced the histories of the Celtic peoples through their languages and treated those people (and their histories) with dignity, was deeply important to many of his Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and Scottish correspondents (nitpicky criticisms as well as praise testified to this). Yet, on the other hand, the only shared language among readers scattered across the Celtic nations was English. Only in English could Lhuyd and his correspondents speak across regional and linguistic boundaries. Neither was the “national distinction” conferred by Lhuyd’s project clear: there were some who believed that his reform of Welsh orthography granted new dignity to the language, while others believed it misguided, if not silly. As we will see more closely in Chapter 5, which explores how Lhuyd built up the correspondence through which he gathered information and financing, and received these responses to his book, the project was conditioned from the very start by questions of “national distinctions” between the Celtic regions.
England’s Britain
In defining “Britain” through the histories and languages shared by the Celtic peoples, Lhuyd swam against the tide of studies working from an English perspective. Not surprisingly, these other natural histories and antiquarian studies were largely written by Englishmen. Unlike Lhuyd’s Britain, England’s Britain was defined not by shared ethnicity but by the exercise of power. Britain was those territories that the English government—either king, Parliament, or some combination of the two—controlled or sought to control. The Britain thus produced was shot through with conflict and compromise. It heavily emphasized a Protestant vision, which meant that Ireland’s status within the topographical Britain was particularly problematic. Yet by no means was England’s Britain constructed solely by the English: in various ways and under various terms, Welsh, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish scholars contributed to the construction of England’s Britain. When these works ventured onto Irish territory, though, the native Catholic Irish figured largely as objects of study and scorn, rather than as participants in the topographical project.93
Given his genre-defining power, Camden is a fit starting point for an exploration of the topographical Britain as it developed from an English perspective.94 The title page of Philemon Holland’s 1610 English translation of Britannia indicated that it was a “chorographicall description of the most flourishing Kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland.”95 However, “England” appeared in larger type than “Scotland” and “Ireland,” and Wales (not to mention Cornwall) was subsumed into England, appearing nowhere on the title page. This structure aligned with the era’s political reality, in which the English monarch was king of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland but Wales was a dominion, for political purposes, considered part of England. In certain respects Camden’s Britannia emphasized the geographical unity of Britain, particularly the three nations of the main island. In part because Camden treated Wales almost as a part of England, Wales received more extensive coverage than Scotland and Ireland. Wales was physically integrated as well: Camden organized his book as a trip around Britain, taking the reader through Wales on his way from western to northern England.
Camden’s approach to Scotland (repeated in both the 1610 translation and Gibson’s 1695 revised edition) suggested a view of the Scots as respected equals, rather than subordinate partners, in the project of Britain. As a relative stranger to Scotland, Camden began by apologizing for even attempting to discuss the topography of that nation. Yet “Scotland also ioieth in the name of Britaine,” and so he hoped that the Scots might give him leave to include their nation in his book. What was more, England and Scotland were now united under one “most sacred and happie Monarch,” James VI and I.96 Camden hoped that his Britannia could provide a foundation for their further political unity and help contribute to ending any discord that persisted between the two “otherwise invincible” nations.97 Camden’s statement came at a time when the Crown had only recently been unified, and James I had pushed for but failed to secure a more thoroughgoing political union from Parliament in 1606–1607. England and Scotland shared a head but not a body, and in promoting Anglo-Scottish union, Camden’s proclamation reflected a hope rather than a firm reality.
In bringing together the human and natural histories of the diverse peoples and landscapes of Britain into one book, English naturalists and antiquaries implicitly (and sometimes explicitly, as in Camden’s case) made the case for a unified British polity. In the revised 1695 edition, Edmund Gibson altogether dropped from the title page any divisions between the realms of Britain: his Britannia was a survey of Britain, full stop.98 Within the book Gibson’s English contributors represented British cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identities, especially as expressed at the borders between regions, as products of the historical mixing and mingling of different peoples. In the additions for Cumberland, in the north of England, Hugh Todd reproduced a letter from William Nicolson to the antiquary William Dugdale. In the letter Nicolson, who was born in Cumberland and went on to become the Anglican bishop in the northern Irish town of Derry, explicated an inscription on a baptismal font that had been written in “Danish” runes. He wrote, “Only the Language of the whole seems a mixture of the Danish and Saxon Tongues; but that can be no other than the natural effect of the two Nations being jumbled together in this part of the World. Our Borderers, to this day, speak a leash of Languages (British, Saxon, and Danish) in one; and ’tis hard to determine which of those three Nations has the greatest share in the Motly Breed.”99 Though evidence for it could be found across Britain, historical contact between peoples was especially visible in the border zones, where it produced “motley breeds” who clearly could not trace their ancestry back to a single group.
Yet divisions and tensions remained. The continued Anglo-centrism of the 1695 Britannia was visible in its coverage: each English shire received an extensive description, while the treatments of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were often brief, even cursory, by comparison. Remarks on these three regions were sourced from one individual each, while remarks on English counties were supplied by upward of twenty local gentlemen and clerics.100 On the other hand, Edward Lhuyd and Robert Sibbald, who provided most, if not all, of the remarks on Wales and Scotland, were welcome, respected contributors to the revised Britannia. Getting their contributions right was important to them, as evidenced by the pains they took in their labors. Their work illustrates the complexities faced by Welsh and Scottish naturalists who participated in Anglo-centric topographical projects.
In their work Lhuyd and Sibbald displayed a kind of dual national consciousness, giving voice to allegiances to both Wales and Scotland, respectively, as well as to Britain. Lhuyd invested himself deeply in the construction of a British identity that tended to exclude the English. Yet he also expended enormous effort in fulfilling his obligations to Gibson, undertaking a special summer tour through Wales to collect material for the project and providing additions more extensive than those given by any other individual contributor.101 He also undertook to retranslate the entire section on Wales from Camden’s 1607 Latin edition.102 This double labor of translation and supplementation was a heavier burden than that shouldered by most of Gibson’s contributors.103 Lhuyd’s efforts made a difference: it was not a given that Wales would be included on his terms. In July 1694, with printing under way, the English printer Awnsham Churchill, who worked with Gibson as a co-undertaker for the project, threatened to cut some of the material on Wales from the finished volume. (In seventeenth-century book parlance, undertakers managed the production of books by subscription, overseeing both financial and editorial aspects of the process.) Lhuyd sought the help of Martin Lister in persuading Churchill not to do so.104 Through his enthusiastic participation in the Britannia project, Lhuyd promoted Wales to a broader British readership, one that included the English, and worked to elevate its status as part of a broader Britain. Gibson, in his introduction to the revised Britannia, praised Lhuyd’s diligence, suggesting that given competent encouragement (that is, funds), he could do a fine job with any county in England.105 Perhaps this was the highest form of praise Gibson could offer.
Sibbald, similarly,
