of Rivers and Mountains, Others the Distinction of People and Inhabitants, Others again more frequently, the Politique Division of Princes.” There was, additionally, the “Itinerary Way,” which Ogilby followed, arranging his survey along the principal roads of England and Wales.2 Though topographers recognized the books produced through these diverse methods as kin to each other, part of the same family of inquiry, each book generated a different “Britain.”
Many topographers took the route of defining Britain by geographical contiguity. This included England, Wales, and Scotland but excluded Ireland. Additionally this definition tended to suggest that England, Wales, and Scotland were more unified, both politically and culturally, than they were. Works that followed this path, such as Joshua Childrey’s Britannia Baconica, displayed an ever-present tension between conceiving of individual regions, or kingdoms, as separate objects of study (as attested by numerous internal references to England, Wales, and Scotland) versus envisioning Britain as a whole. They were perhaps most successful at the latter when viewing Britain from an “oceanic” perspective, that is, as an island. This perspective suggests the deep continuities between the topographers’ project and the formation of the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which bore intimate discursive and ideological connections to this image of Britain as an island and seafaring nation.
Was it defined by shared language? This too was unwieldy: by the seventeenth century, English was the dominant language in England and Cornwall and among portions of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh elites, but Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic were still spoken by majorities in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the West Country a few even still spoke Cornish. Looked at through the prism of language, Britain might also include the French territory of Brittany, where the residents spoke Breton, a Celtic language. The diversity of English dialects and accents spoken even within England was a barrier to the formation of a broader English national identity, not to mention a British one, as naturalists recognized.
Shared descent, which topographers attempted to trace through their reconstructions of linguistic history, did not offer an easy solution either. The myth that Britain owed its founding to the wandering Trojan hero Brutus was increasingly being understood as just that, a myth.3 As Colin Kidd has observed, history (as seventeenth-century antiquaries understood it) increasingly suggested that the various peoples of Britain descended from different waves of invaders: Celtic peoples, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, to name a few of the groups who arrived over the millennia and left their mark on the cultural, linguistic, natural, and built landscape of Britain.4 Edward Lhuyd, mapping the descent of the peoples of Britain from the histories of their languages, eliminated England entirely and created a Britain defined wholly by relationships between the Celtic peoples.
Beyond these options, Britain might also be defined by commerce and trade ties: topographies of trade held in productive tension local particulars and national visions. Topographers both observed and promoted trade connections, participating in a long process by which local markets across Britain became more interconnected.5 Each region of Britain, each county and each nation, had its distinctive products, but these were traded around the islands as a whole and even internationally. In their work on trade, topographers constructed an image of the local as enmeshed in the national.
In addition there was Ogilby’s “politique division of princes,” which in practice often meant defining “Britain” by the extension of English political hegemony and the incorporation (willingly and unwillingly) of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland into the project of building a “British” Empire.6 Camden’s Britannia, which was published in six revised and enlarged editions within its author’s lifetime (1551–1623), led the way in this regard. Pitching his work directly at James I in the 1610 English translation, he wrote that “the glory of my country encouraged me to undertake” to “restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity.”7 A century later Edmund Gibson’s revised Britannia (1695) covered the same territory.8 In the dedicatory letter to John Somers, a counselor to William III, Gibson proclaimed that “Descriptions of Countries” were among the most pleasing of scholarly endeavors, as they allowed one to express “one’s Love for his Native Country.”9 In using the name Britannia, a word whose origins lay deep in the classical past, Camden and later authors attempted to proclaim the unity of the peoples and lands of the “Atlantic archipelago.”10 But from Camden’s perspective, Britain was not a fraternity of equals; Camden’s was an Anglo-centric unity. The 1695 revision, like the original, largely constructed Britain from an English perspective, devoting more attention to England than Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined.
Bookended by the first English translation of Britannia and its revision were a number of projected and completed natural historical, antiquarian, and topographical studies with “Britannia” or “Britain” featured prominently in their titles.11 Although the publication dates of these books spanned a century, they represented an interconnected corpus in that earlier works continued to be read and were often extensively quoted or paraphrased in later works. Most prominently Camden served later writers as both a source of information and a foundation upon which to build. Through the century, the replication (with variations) of Camden’s text across different “authors” helped to establish it as a somewhat stable version of the topographical Britain, one oriented toward an English readership.12 Regional writers with a narrower focus, such as Richard Carew, author of a 1602 study of Cornwall, continued to be cited as well. In his Britannia Baconica (1660) Joshua Childrey quoted both Camden and Carew for material beyond his own sphere of local knowledge. Indeed, Childrey quoted the thirteenth-century topographer Gerald of Wales, hinting at the deep historical continuities between early modern writings and medieval, as well as classical, precedents.
This chapter maps the lineaments of the topographical Britain. Natural historical and antiquarian writing offered a range of possibilities for conceptualizing Britain as an object of learned inquiry. It also drew on and intervened in contemporaneous debates about Britain as a political object, both explicitly and implicitly. The two, in fact, were not separate projects: because naturalists and antiquaries took into their remit languages, settlement patterns, trade, the distribution of natural resources, and local customs, in defining Britain as an object of topographical inquiry, they sketched its political and cultural outlines as well. Though topographers may have had dreams of a comprehensive, unified account of British nature and antiquities—a “whole body and book” that could serve as the foundation for a unified country—their works presented a more mixed picture, reflecting the political and social discourses of the day.
In particular, in their work topographers writing in the Britannia tradition attempted to hold in productive tension the competing forces that bound and drove apart England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Their ideal was a national vision composed of local particulars, rather than national visions that regularized or stamped out local particulars. Though regional diversity could function to stymie the formation of “Britain,” topographers attempted to understand it as a source of unity, whether that meant mapping local contributions to the national economy or looking for the hidden connections between the Celtic languages and peoples. This did not mean that topographers were univocal in their concept of Britain. Some chose loyalty to their individual region, or even county, over loyalty to “Britain,” never mind England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. In some cases English naturalists wrote about Wales, Scotland, and Ireland without knowing much about local particulars in those places. In some cases they were aware of this and apologetic about it—in the 1610 English translation of Britannia, dedicated to James I, Camden was reluctant to hold forth on Scottish antiquities—out of respect, he claimed, for those whose knowledge was deeper and more detailed. In other cases they were ignorant and hostile, often within the same book—Camden’s attitude toward Catholic Ireland reflected this combination.
Part of the work of this chapter is thus parsing out what “national” and “local” meant to topographical writers of diverse backgrounds following diverse lines of inquiry. In doing so, I hope this chapter complicates
