Sociable Knowledge. Elizabeth YaleЧитать онлайн книгу.
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, held allegiances to both Scotland and Britain. In 1682 Charles II appointed Sibbald geographer royal for Scotland (he also served Charles and his brother James as a royal physician). Sibbald was charged with producing maps, a natural history, and a study of the antiquities of Scotland. The warrant for his appointment emphasized the contribution that accurate, detailed geographical knowledge would make to husbandry and trade.106 The warrant’s emphasis, however, was very much on His Majesty’s kingdom of Scotland, not on Scotland within a broader British context. Yet Sibbald, like Lhuyd, was enmeshed in a pan-British correspondence: at various periods in his life he lived in London, and he corresponded with virtuosi in England and Scotland who shared his interests.107 As an Episcopalian for most of his life (with the exception of a brief period during which he identified as Catholic), Sibbald, unlike many Scots, was generally aligned with rather than opposed to the Anglican Church.108 Sibbald also collaborated with Gibson on the 1695 Britannia, providing new material for the sections on Scotland and the outer British Isles. In his additions Sibbald documented the crossborder links between England and Scotland, noting, for example, that in the shire of Teviotdale, people supported themselves by trading cattle, sheep, and wool with the English across the border.109
Sibbald’s engagement in the project of constructing the topographical Britain can be seen in his promotion of a newer etymology for “Britain,” one in keeping with the fundamental precept of natural history, that knowledge of nature was the foundation of trade, economic improvement, and British political and cultural identity. The medieval Brutus myth, which suggested that the British were descended from a hero of the Trojan War, had been dying even in Camden’s day. Camden had promoted an etymology that traced Britain to the ancient British word for “blue” because some of the ancient inhabitants of Britain—the Picts—had painted their bodies blue with plant-based dyes.110 This derivation was reprinted in the 1695 Britannia (much of the 1695 copy was taken from Holland’s 1610 translation, rather than being retranslated).111 Later in the book, however, Sibbald discussed an alternative etymology of Britain in his essay on the “Thule of the Ancients.” This was included near the end of the 1695 Britannia in the section that dealt with Britain’s outer northwestern islands. In this essay Sibbald attempted to pin down the physical island that corresponded to “Thule,” an island that, for classical Greek and Roman writers, marked the northwestern edge of the known world. Toward the end Sibbald repeated a claim, which he credited to the seventeenth-century French biblical scholar Samuel Bochart, that Britain was derived (via Greek) from the ancient Phoenician word for “Land of Tinn,” on the theory that tin was the most important product that Mediterranean civilizations would have obtained from Britain through trade.112
One might see Sibbald’s etymology as a descendant of the Brutus myth, in the sense that it retained a whiff of the prestige of the classical origins story while updating it to make it plausible for a late seventeenth-century audience. Sibbald was not the only one to link the ancient British to the ancient Phoenicians, who were, like the early modern British, seagoing traders: the disreputable antiquary Aylett Sammes went him one better in his Britannia antiqua illustrata (1676), claiming that the customs and language of the early