INTRODUCTORY SYNOPSIS
The purpose of the following text is to offer a tentative, preliminary
introduction to the history of antiquarian and topographical writings
and books covering Britain during the period 1550-1835.
These dates are chosen as convenient, makeshift chronological markers,
indicating the (temporary/permanent?) historical bounds of this study
at the present point in my research (July 2001).
The dates
have been ‘rounded off’ provisionally, so to
speak. To elucidate: The text of John Leland’s Itinerary in its
bound manuscript form was presented to King Henry VIII in 1546 as a
New Year’s Gift to the monarch, upon whom he was dependent indirectly
for his financial support, as well as for the warrants allowing him
to travel freely across the domains of the King (i.e. England and Wales).
As a
New Year’s Gift (the courtly equivalent, at that time,
of what would now be termed a Christmas present) it constituted a testament
of fidelity to the King; gratitude for the issuing of his warrants
and for whatever financial assistance he received from the royal coffers.
An act of seasonal etiquette in a textual form. - However, having stated
the last remark, it is alas no longer possible to ascertain precisely
how the fascicules of the manuscript were stitched; nor how elaborate
was the original binding. Although many fine bindings of the medieval
and early Tudor period are still to be found intact and in a state
of good preservation (even accounting for subsequent repairs and refurbishments
to binding, stitching and gatherings), this has not been the case with
Leland’s text.
There are (I think at this stage of my research) two reasons for this,
briefly stated as follows:
1. Leland
did not present a systematic account of the King’s
domains. There were several models which he could have well adopted
and adapted for his own purposes. For instance, he could have divided
his text into an organizational structure of shires. Another alternative
would have been a division by dioceses. This would have been especially
appropriate, as the text was written and completed during and in the
aftermath of the break from Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries
- arguably the two most far-reaching occurrences of Henry VIII’s
reign, politically, religiously and culturally. Moreover, an added
dimension or overlay of aptness in this respect is evident time and
again in Leland’s text, in the form of his frequently reiterated
attacks against the malpractices, idolatry and superstitions and allegiance
to the Pope over and above the King, which liberally pepper Leland’s
text. So many diatribal, anti-Papal digressions!
2. Leland had no established pattern from classical learning on which
to base the structuration and organization of his method or the presentation
of his findings. He had to gropingly find a new albeit tentative way
of organizing his material. And to all intents and purposes it can
be said that he never adequately did so.
- And to the foregoing, there may be added a third consideration,
related to the above:
3. Neither
Lucy Toulmin Smith nor T.D. Kendrick, in their introductory essays
to the 1964 edition of the Itinerary (the second publication of this
work; the first being that of Thomas Hearne in the early 18th century;
and still the most recent transcription of Leland) decisively solve
the problem of the status of Leland’s ms ( and the subsequent
copies). Namely: Did Leland himself regard the text as being in a state
of completion? Or was it regarded by him as a work in progress? A preliminary
draft presented in the hope of securing further royal largesse and
finance so that the ms could be refined with a view - possibly - to
being printed?
A manuscript
(or in the case of Leland’s Itinarary a series
of incomplete mss, the collation and comparison and analysis of which
allow one to conjecture a relatively fluid yet still difficult, digressive,
broken text of tesserae) is fundamentally different in material status
from a printed text.
A different form of dissemination - and of reading - separates the
manuscript from the printed text.
This undoubtedly gives rise to a highly complex nexus of theoretical
issues regarding the relationship of the acts of writing to those of
reading. Of the fundamental differential specificities separating manuscript
from print.
This thorny domain will not be entered at the moment.
Rather, some of the issues arising therefrom will become apparent in
the course of the following text. For there are, I think, digressions
enough as it is below. Therefore, I intentionally leave this - and
other knotty issues - in a state of intentional suspension or deferral;
to be tackled, perhaps in a closing synopsis - or perhaps excluded
from the corpus of the study for reasons of compositional concision.
*
The above remarks are intended as a tentative caveat: primarily aimed
at myself; and apologetically addressed to the readers of this work
in progress.
In the following, you are reading over my shoulder, so to speak, as
I write, erase and rewrite. Above all, the pages following are fundamentally,
essentially PROVISIONAL. Intentionally INCONCLUSIVE.
Five key books representing original work of antiquaries.
1. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent, 1576.
1(b) ibid..............................................................1596.
- The first published county history. What would a close reading or
comparative deconstruction of the two texts (colllation, etc.) yield
about the nature of whether or not new material had been added? I have
no prior judgements as yet; so far having only read the 1576 edition.
I possess working copies of both.
2. Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, 1605. I have only a modern reprint.
Yet here divisions into hundreds present a different mode of organization.
Also the arrangement of maps is different from Lambarde. The former
has only one large folding map of the county (missing in both my copies,
as it is worth morethan the text.) The latter contains individual maps
of each hundred. - Comparison of the different social status of each
writer.
3. Philipot, Villare Cantianum. 1656.
A vexatious text inasmuch as it is arranged via lathe and parish following
the course - evidently - of Philipot’s seasonal peregrinations
into diferent parts of the county. Because of the general state of
the roads in England, antiquaries tended to travel only in spring and
summer. A comparison with Kent as described by Lambarde with this,
a century later.
4. Robert Plot, Oxfordshire, 1676. Here engravings are integral to
the author’s argument. Different, therefore, in format from the
preceding examples.
5. William Borlase, The Antiquities of Cornwall, 1756. Followed by
the Natural History of 1765. Borlase was not subject to the contemporary
ridicule of Plot (who was somewhat credulous). In fact, Borlase, although
living in seclusion and elative poverty/modesty as a vicar in a remote
west Cornish parish, was hailed by no less a figure than Dr Johnson
for the scholarship and literary style of his work.
6. Horsfield, The Antiquities [...] of Sussex, 1835. In many ways,
the last of the county histories undertaken in the antiquarian fashion.
- Did the advent of the railway and the alterations wrought on Victorian
society by the industrial and agrarian revolution make the antiquary’s
task somehow redundant? It is to be remembered that the members of
the Pickwick club, touring England in search of the curious, were essentially
lampooned by Dickens. And Pickwick and Horsfield are roughly contemporaneous.
7. England as a whole. William Camden, Britannia. First published in
Latin in 1586. Subsequently translated by Philemon Holland, appearing
1635.
Then completely redone by Edmund Gibson, 1695, and again updated in
1722. By which time it had been augmented by Gibson and a whole team
of correspondents and contributors to two hefty folios.
- N.B. these processes of increasing augmentation.
Commentaries on antiquarianism.
These are in the main scattered through a whole variety of journals
from the Victorian period onwards. Often each county zealously guarded
its own historiography.
The first general introduction is T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity,
1950.
Followed by a selection of essays by Stuart Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape,
1973.
The best of recent work by far is Graham Parry’s The Trophies
of Time, which is as the author himself admits, intentionally selective,
indicating how epistemology, theology and politics determined several
key antiquarian texts in the 17th century.
Biographies of particular antiquaries are thin on the ground; and,
produced in small print runs by university presses, inevitably expensive.
And, moreover, difficult to obtain as they go out of print so rapidly.
Yet they are being produced sporadically at the moment. Subscription
to mailing-lists or to on-line specialists seems to be the most efficient
way of being informed of such publications.
The historians of antiquarianism - like the original antiquaries and
county historians themselves - are today as close-knit and exclusive
as were their predecessors. Perhaps because they are not studied on
university courses?
However,
at long last this situation shows signs of changing; for now, in
a small number of university history departments throughout the country,
postgraduate units and courses are evidently focusing upon this aspect
of historiography, most often under the aegis of specific, scattered
scholars who have an active interest in this field; among whom one
may cite Kevin Sharpe, Stephen Bann and Graham Parry as being eminent
in their fields of Tudor and 17th century studies. Also, Professor
Charles Thomas continues on a part-time basis at the University of
Exeter and at the Institute of Cornish Studies to combine the domains
of the historiography of local history, archival research and archaeology
and the history thereof, in specific relation to the counties of Cornwall
and Devon. (In this respect, he has an illustrious predecessor in the
figure of Professor W.G. Hoskins who, with the publication of The Making
of the English Landscape and Local History in England, both originally
published in the 1950s indicated that social history per se could and
should be approached in a far more specific, well-documented manner
than had previously been laid out in the pages of G.M. Trevelyan’s
English Social History. (Trevelyan’s work, although later historians
such as Sir Keith Thomas, in the Preface to Man and the Natural World
in particular, have duly paid homage, now seems as outmoded as the
historiography of Gibbon.)
*
Today, 2001, the status of the history of antiquarian thought, bears
many resemblances to the status of Structuralism and Deconstruction
(or New Criticism) in the early 1970s. To elucidate:
It exists as a domain of historical and critical inquiry and is academically
recognized as such in a number of university departments. However,
as with Structuralism and Deconstruction (a term I use with severe
misgivings, inasmuch as the supposed ‘erstwhile founder’ of
Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, has for several decades insisted that
it was never his intention to impose a rigidity of methodology, nor
to establish a canon of texts in the manner of Frye and Bloom in the
U.S.A.. Moreover, he insists that the term was not coined by himself,
but has rather been an epithet he has been encumbered with since the
publication of De la Grammatologie and L’ecriture et la differance.
And if one considers the diffuse nature of the entire output of Derrida,
one can appreciate his own exasperation at being labelled so reductively.
For, the underlying thread of Derrida’s various works is decidedly
anti-reductionist. He prefers to situate himself upon the margins of
specific, established disciplines; and, indeed, regards his own writings,
however brief or long they may be as being essentially marginalia to
the topics under discussion.)
To apply the above observations concerning Derrida to the topic of
antiquarian thought.
Some of those researching in this domain find themselves in Departmens
of History; others in Departments of History; others in Departments
of Cultural Studies.
So far there has not been established in any British institution a
Chair - let alone a Department - of Antiquarian Studies or of Antiquarian
Historiography.
Perhaps that in itself is a good thing. A dynamic opportunity for interdisciplinary
work in progress (which dried up during the repression of Thatcherism’s
malign influence on higher education). As Paul Feyerabend cogently,
passionately (and at times humorously) argued in Against Method, to
compartmentalize knowledge along departmental lines (more often than
not imposed from without, be it Church, State or Department of Education...
in all cases by those with little or no undersanding of research methods)
can only lead to stagnation, or at best thematic variation and repetition.
The early antiquaries and county historians seldom worked within university
environments. The closest any of them had to what might be termed an
academic tenure was Sir William Dugdale, who as Norroy King of Arms
was the undisputed head of the Royal College of Arms. In this position
he was not only the supreme adjudicator in questions of heraldry. He
was also the principle legislator in questions of the utmost importance
in the economics of 17th century England: namely financial inheritance
and land-ownership, having privileged access to the Record Office,
at that time housed in the Tower of London.
As for a specific environment or establishment of antiquarian research,
this still remains a vexed, uncertain issue.
The crux of the argument involvs the question of whether or not there
was a constituted Society of Antiquaries in the late 16th and early
17th centuries.
Joan Evans, in her ‘official’ history of the Society of
Antiquaries, published in 1956 (and still evidently regarded by the
Society as its canonical history) presents a confusedly cautious argument
concerning this early society, whereas from the (re)formation of the
Society of Antiquaries in 1707, with Royal assent, documentation becomes
more reliable.
In 1720 there was published a curious collection of treatises and
tracts collected by Thomas Hearne entitled A Collection of curious
Discourses, written by eminent Antiquaries, upon several heads in our
English Antiquities, and now first published by Thomas Hearne, M.A..
This single octavo volume was followed by an augmented 2 volume collection,
again gathered by Hearne, in 1771.
From the notes and journals which he kept,Hearne emerges as a not
particularly likeable, friendly character. One might say that he was
suspicious and vindictive (even to a greater extent than Anthony Wood,
the author/editor/gatherer of material of Athenae Oxoniensis). Problems
of religious belief - his Roman Catholic sympathies - prevented his
development of an academic career in either Oxford or Cambridge, as
well as the other domain of intellectual exchange, the Inns of Court.
As his diaries show, his sympathies for the Jacobite cause surpassed
his allegiance to the Hanoverian. Thus, under the first three Georges
he could not expect any academic or court preferment at all. Indeed,
one gets the impression that he was treated cautiously by his fellow
antiquaries because of his potentially dangerous (even treasonable)
religious allegiance. Nor was his own ill temper particularly endearing.
The 2 volumes of the 1771 edition of Hearne’s Collection functions
as a digest, rather than as a complete record of the proceedings of
the Society of Antiquaries. Ironically, the early antiquaries of the
18th century society do not seem to have been models of custodianship
by any means. One factor was that of the dispersed membership, scattered
across England and Wales. Only a small group seem to have been in regular
attendance at the London meetings - those who lived in easy reach of
London, or who had town properties there. The second contributing actor
was the lack of any permanent base as such for the Society until well
into the 18th century. In the early days the Mitre Tavern seems to
have functioned as meeting place, committee room and library cum study
collection. It was not until the Society of Antiquaries was granted
apartments adjacent to the Royal Academy (where they are still housed
today) that anything akin to a sense of permanence/stability could
be tentatively established.
Moreover, from the outset of its establshment proper, it could be
said (and indeed it was felt by many leading figures of the time) that
the Society of Antiquaries was, in a way, representative of second-league
scholarship.
In intellectual matters (covering both the sciences and the arts) the
Royal Society undoubtedly was far more prestigious.
Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society had been published
as early as 1667 - only seven years after it received its Royal Patent
and patronage from King Charles II. Nor was this a slender tome, but
a quarto of 438pp, proudly emblazoned with a frontispiece of its Patron,
Charles II himself.
Sprat’s History is divided into two sections: the first covering
the historical, political, technological and epistemological issues
which led to the foundation of the Royal Society; the second including
a sample of papers which demonstrated the breadth of the Society’s
interests. Also, the Royal Society published annual volumes of Transactions,
illustrated with detailed engravings on copper; the illustrations themselves
thus forming a testament - in visual terms - to the advances in learning
and dissemination being made by the Royal Society. From Sprat’s
account, and from the pages of the Transactions, it becomes apparent
that the Royal Society’s inquiries were, on the one hand, following
principles laid down by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning,
the Essayes, and his Sylva Sylvarum, demonstrating that observation,
mensuration and experimentation were the keystones of scientific endeavour
and epistemology. Secondly, that conceived thus, science, instead of
being synonymous with idle speculation or specious argumentation, was
not an end in itself - but had technological, and thus economic applications,
both militaristic and mercantile. (Here a certain rivalry with similar
achievements in the Low Countries becomes apparent.)
*
It would, however, be completely wrong to consider a spirit of antagonism
creating a void separating the Fellow of the Royal Society from the
antiquary during the Stuart and early Georgian period. Quite often,
figures held dual membership.
As a case in point it is worthwhie briefly considering the case of
John Evelyn.He proudly proclaimed his membership of the Royal Society,
and applied its scientific principles to mainly botanical purposes
- both in his practical gardening and forestry, as well as in his book
devoted to forestry, Sylva, and to horticulture and dietics in Acetaria.
On the other hand, such interests did not preclude afervent interest
in Greek and Roman history and literature, quotations from which besprinkle
both the forementioned books.
He published one of the first detailed studies of Roman coins, their
sequence, datings, minting variants, etc. (thus establishing the format
of the modern coin catalogue), Numismata (1697). Preceding this was
his work on the history of engraving (closely related to nuismatics)
in 1662, entitled Sculptura, or the History and Art of Chalcography
and Engraving in Copper; this lastmentioned includes an engraving by
Charles II’s brother Prince Rupert, better known for his military
exploits rather than for his artistic endeavours.
However, it may justifiably be argued that the full range of interests
and erudition of John Evelyn are not truly evident even in the corpus
of his printed work, but are rather to be found in the pages of the
copious, detailed Diaries which he kept.
It is from the 17th century that one can date the commencement of extant
diaries and daybooks and journals in English. For the antiquary, the
diary and the account book were of interest in two ways. First of all,
the discovery of a diary, usually in the form of an manuscript account
of a journey or pilgrimage, or of a chronicle from a monastic house
(and in a sense it can be argued that the chronicle in this context
functions as a sort of collective diary, kept by a series of writers
on behalf of the house and the religious order of which they were members)
formed a textual link with the past. What, using the terminology of
Jacques Derrida, one may justifiably term a written trace of a past
encounter or perception, a witness, documentary evidence, constituting
the archival (see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever).
Why the diaristic mode came to the fore during the 17th century is
a problem which, albeit deserving detailed attention, lies beyond the
confines of the present text. Some have considered it as a vernacular,
Protestant form of confessional. Others as an extension of book-keeping/accountancy.
As quasi-legalistic memoranda. As catalogues of empirical observation
and experimentation (usually incorporating a financial element) as
in the account-books and recipe books kept by farmers and housewives
often assume a diaristic mode. And upon this last-mentioned point,
attention could again be drawn to Evelyn’s published works; for,
alongside his Sylva, one often finds bound his Kalendarium Hortensis
- the gardener’s almanack. ...And the 17th century marked the
high point of almanack publication (as Sir Keith Thomas has noted in
Religion and the Decline of Magic).
This may seem wildly tangential to the main theme of antiquarianism,
the focal topic of this study.
However, all can be subsumed as being enmeshed in the network of the
written, printed, drawn, engraved... TRACE.
*
This
notion of the trace (for which once more I am endebted to Jacques
Derrida) can in turn ‘by a commodious vicus of recirculation’ to
quote James Joyce return the reader to the medieval chronicles (some
of the most important monastic examples being published in the latter
17th century, as well as being incorporated into the original Latin
edition of Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum) which were first
critically perused by John Leland and incorporated into his Itinarary...
Whilst
the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII undeniably entailed
the loss of an inestimable amount of cultural heritage (as Sir Roy
Strong has noted; and before him, John Aubrey bewailed, as he remembered
seeing bakers’ pie-trays being lined with pages
of illuminated manuscripts, presumably from the large monastic houses,
notably Malmesbury, in his immediate vicinity, as well as other westcountry
religious centres such as Bath and Wimborne (see both Anthony Powell
and Michael Hunter respectively on Aubrey)) the dissolution also caused
many such manuscripts removed from the monastic scriptoria to be brought
into the commercial domain of the collector. Most notable in this field
was Sir Robert Cotton.
Sir Robert
Cotton has recently been the subject of critical-historical re-evaluation.
Previously, the major study of him was that by Hope Mirrlees - very
much an amateurish effort, frequently lapsing into a style which
makes the reader cringe - evidently, if one is to judge by the opening
dedicatory preface, owing much to the intervention of T.S. Eliot
at Faber & Faber to see it into print. Like Eliot’s
own forays into Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural criticism, Mirrlees’ text
tends towards the subjective, the nebulous, and the downright condescending
in its attitude towards the reader.
However, thanks to the painstaking work of Kevin Sharpe, the full importance
of Sir Robert Cotton’s contribution to the antiquarian milieu
as collector, writer and eminence grise supporting the work of others
(with the political and ideological ramifications of this) is now being
brought into sharper focus.
*
Such a reconsideration of a figure as Sir Robert Cotton is indispensible
in any consideration of the history of antiquarianism inasmuch as it
is via a scrutiny of figures such as he that a primary, tentative taxonomy
of the early exponents of antiquarianism -the early antiquaries -becomes
feasible.
There is, however, one fundamental proviso to be made. Namely that
it is more easy - and meaningful - to speak of various shifts within
the taxonomy or taxonomies of antiquarianism during the period c.1550-1830
rather than to posit any epistemological break(s) (in the sense in
which this term is used by Gaston Bachelard and, following him, Michel
Foucault and Louis Althusser.
.......The epistemological break, when it does take place, as I will
argue, after 1840, effectively brings to an end the antiquarianism
of the early county historians and topographers.
Sir Robert
Bruce Cotton (1571-1631) was educated at Westminster School and Jesus
College, Cambridge. (William Camden became head of St Paul’s
School in 1593; the first edition of his Britannia, a small 8vo, was
published in 1586. For further information on the genesis of Camden’s
Britanna, see Stuart Piggott’s essay in Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape).
Cotton’s library , although it was housed in his London residence,
rather than being a separate building or institution, became an intellectual
landmark in late Elizabethan and Stuart London. Among the most eminent
scholars to be allowed use of his collection of coins, books, mss and
curios were Bacon, Camden, Speed, Selden and Ussher.
An indication of the importance of his collection, and the generosity
in allowing access to privileged scholars can be assessed perhaps most
readily by consulting the marginal references to both the Holland and
the Gibson translations and enlargements of Camden’s Britannia.
In one respect, it could be argued that for Cotton, collecting, and
cataloguing his collection, was a means of pursuing antiquarian studies
without actually writing any major work.
In fact, his major work was his collection itself, in its time an unrivalled
database (so to speak) for anyone wishing to pursue antiquarian studies.
It is this which makes the figure of Sir Robert Cotton so elusive,
and in a way partially explains why the abovementioned study of him
can be unintentionally infuriating.
He was undoubtedly possessed of great antiquarian learning. From the
abovementioned list of just some of the leading intellectuals with
whom he mixed, and who availed themselves of his antiquarian and library
collections, one would have expected at least one magnum opus - one
well-composed, perhaps illustrated folio of some 300 pages or so...
the equivalent of a county history of this period. Instead of which
one is faced with a miscellany of relatively short tracts written for
specific purposes, forming part of an interchange of correspondence
within the group of antiquaries who managed to survive the vagaries
of the Civil War. These pieces were collected posthumously by the apparently
inexhaustible James Howell, and published under the title: Cottoni
Posthuma; divers choice Pieces of that Renowned Antiquary Sir Robert
Cotton, Knight and Baronet. By J. H., London 1679.
...Thus
one essentially fugitive writer’s works become collected
and arranged by another of a similar ilk. For Howell himself is equally
difficult to pin down.
- At which point a few words are necessary concerning J.H. (James Howell)
himself.
Howell, so it seems, had no antiquarian training by the standards of
his day. He was certainly no Bacon, Camden, Dugdale, Plot or Carew.
Nor was he particularly adept at epitomizing or paraphrasing the travails
of other antiquaries and chorographers, as were, for instance,Nathaniel
Crouch who, under the pseudonym of ‘R.B’ [an allusion,
or perhaps a misrepresentation or impersonation of Robert Burton, author
of The Anatomy of Melancholy...?] composed the derivative Admirable
Curiosities Rarities and Wonders in England, Scotland and Ireland,
1697 - largely gleaned from Camden.
As for Howell, it seems that his major publication was entitled
Epistolae Ho-Elianae, Familiar Letters, Domestic and Forren [...],
Third Edition 1655, apparently adding further letters with each edition.
It is difficult to disentangle and decode Howell’s highly readable
farrago of epistolary observations and researches.
At a first reading of the opening 100 pages or so, one is under the
impression that these are letters being written whilst on a tour of
Europe, back to friends, family and benefactors. However, during the
Civil War, it seems that Howell spent much time incarcerated in the
Tower, as his political allegiances were considered dubious by both
sides. Thus it remains debatable as to what extent his observations
are factual, eyewitness reports; or recollections of former travels;
or, indeed, fabrications based upon his own reading, conversation with
other political prisoners, embellished with his own fancies.
It seems strange, therefore, that the erstwhile literary executorship
of such a distinguished and wealthy person as Sir Robert Cotton should
be entrusted to such a person of - it would seem - questionable credentials,
and certainly lacking intellectual acumen and honesty.
The actual basis (if any) of the Cotton-Howell relationship certainly
needs more clarification.
However, having stated that much, perhaps this is not a single, isolated
instance of literary entanglement and intellectual property-rights.
*
To adequately
investigate the career of Sir William Camden, or even to carefully
evaluate the various elements and figures at work in the masive reshapings
which his magnum opus, the Britannia, went through from the first
small 8vo Latin edition to Gough’s late 18th century
text would demand a study in itself, incorporating detailed biographies
of all the various contributors to the different editions, and the
fundamental difference in prose style separating the first English
translation by Philemon Holland (erstwhile ‘translator-general
of his age’, so many Latin texts did he render into English)
It is
strange, not to say apparently unfair that several writers on the
historiography of English topography have sought to belittle Philemon
Holland’s translation. The most common critique is that he took
so many liberties with Camden’s Latin, whilst adding turns of
phrase and additional material of his own, that he produced a mangled
text. However, before proceeding further, some minimal information
concerning Philemon Holland himself.
Philemon Holland (1552-1637) was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge,
and, as a doctor of medicine, was master of the free school at Coventry
from 1628, receiving a pension from that city in 1632. In 1600 his
translation of Livy was published; a year later, 1601, followed the
mammoth folio of Pliny’s Natural History. Then followed Plutarch’s
Moralia in 1603; in 1606 his Suetonius; in 1609 Ammianus Marcellinus;
in 1610 his Camden’s Britannia, with maps by Kip; finally, 1632,
his version of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Sir Paul Harvey in the
Oxford Companion to English Literature (1950 ed.)
comments:
His knowledge of Greek and Latin was accurate and profound, and his
renderings are made in a vivid, familiar, and somewhat ornamented
English.
To the above comments it may be added that Shakespeare scholarship
has uncovered many borrowings of turns of phrase from his translations
of Pliny and Suetonius peppering the works of the bard himself.
Nonetheless,
by the end of the 17th century a new edition of Camden’s
Britannia was thought desirable. This desire fuelled in no small way
by the burgeoning of county histories and antiquarian research in England,
instead of a reissue of Holland’s translation, it was decided
that the whole enterprise should be started anew.
Underlying this drastic overhaul there seem to be two determinant factors.
First of all, to correct faults and oversights within Holland’s
text, incorporating research undertaken by the various corresponding
contributors since the appearance of the 1610 edition.
Secondly, to add appropriate references and marginalia where necessary.
...Which two primary factors contributed to the third, most drastic,
namely: acomplete overhaul of text and translation.
In the process, the text which Camden had originally conceived and
composed became little more than a scaffolding around which later accretions
by Edmund Gibson and his colleagues entirely restructured their text
and concept of the Britannia.
Although Stuart Piggott has magisterially traced the genesis of this
text, it is, I think, worthwhile drawing attention to a factor which
Piggott tends to pass over in silence in his own essay: namely, what
has been LOST in the process of this major revision undertaken under
the direction of Gibson, which culminated (in the first stage) in the
1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia.
Stuart Piggott indicates that by no means all of Gibson’s ‘improvements’ are
for the better. Take the following excerpt from Piggott’s essay,
for instance:
The
new translation has precision and a comfortable dignity, though one
regrets at times the enthusiastic, if wayward, style of Holland.
We lose, for instance, the charming phrase which describes Camden’s
visit to Hadrian’s Wall - ‘Verily I have seene the tract
of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully
rising and falling’, which is accurately, but how flatly, rendered ‘I
have observ’d the track of it running up the mountains and down
again, in a most surprising manner’.
[Piggott, Ruins..., p. 48]
As Piggott comments:
Here then was the Britannia adapted to the needs of the new school of antiquaries
of the early eighteenth century, the circle of William Stukeley and the Gales,
of Francis Wise, Ralph Thoresby and Sir John Clerk.
[ibid., p. 48]
Moreover.
Piggott raws attention to the fact that the subsequent edition of
1722 acknowledged John Aubrey’s conribution to scholarship
concerning Avebury in particular . On the other hand, however, Piggott
elides the underhand way in which everyone except Aubrey himself seemed
to benefit from his benevolence in circulating the various drafts of
the facsicules of his work in progress, The Monumenta Britannia. Nor
does Piggott indicate the unscrupulous way in which William Stukeley
was later to pillage Aubrey ms masterpiece, and pioneering work of
field archaeology. In fact, in his biography on Stukeley (which still
remains the standard work on this antiquary) the apparently partisan
Piggott heralds Stukeley as one of the most humane of eighteenth-century
archaeologists and scholars. Personally, I am more inclined to the
opinion regarding Stukeley propounded by Professor Michael Hunter in
his monograph on John Aubrey and in his co-authored (yet predominantly
his) Avebury Reconsidered as being a plagiarist, mentally unstable,
primarily wishing to somehow reconcile his fabulist druidism with his
own Christian beliefs.
*
[CONTINUED BELOW .../...]
ANTIQUARIANISM & COUNTY
HISTORIES
RANDOM NOTES ON SPECIFIC TEXTS, No. 1
WILLIAM LAMBARDE. A PERAMBULATION OF KENT, 1576.
*** The first published county history.
Having no textual precursor or template from which to work, or from
which to derive his own ideas of presentation, how does Lambarde construct
and present his finished text?
In the following draft, I take the two published editions into consideration
only.
This of course begs the most important question of exactly how, by
what means, Lambarde arrived at this finished - or at least published
- version?
There are important issues which should be tackled prior to opening
these books and attempting any analytical reading.
The most important of these are as follows:
1. The why of the text. That is, what function did it have for Lambarde
as a process of composition?
2. Who were his intended readership?
3. What did he consider as the primary function of the completed text?
What political, ideological and social (let alone personal investment)
purpose did he envisage the text as fulfilling?
4. How did he go about the preliminary research?
5. How did he arrive at the scheme of presentation as it is laid out
in printed form?
6. How did he consider the interaction between text and the large map
(which is lacking in both editions which I possess and have used in
the following... a large, fold-out map which evidently did not survive
as well as the texts (size of print run??). During the 19th century,
and evidently as late as the 1950s - and even after - quite often the
map was removed from the book, framed and glazed as a separate item.
Thus, a cartographical element which was bound into the book as part
of its essential contents, was removed, as the cartographical became
recognized as an artform independent of the book itself.
Thus, what was intended as a documentary element, changed function,
and became regarded as a purely decorative element, prized far more
than the book itself. The value of the book lay in the map above all
else.
A subsection of the gentle art o book breaking.
After all, there were dealers in antiquarian engraved items long before
the book (apart from the incunable) achieved the corresponding status.
Here again, the history of collecting interferes with, intrudes upon.
the history of textual production.
the following notes constitute a preliminary, tentative counting and
identification of the major pieces of the jigsaw, so to speak, prior
to the construction of any evaluative argument in tentatively cogent
form.
...
Lambarde commences his text by casting a critical eye implicitly and
explicitly over the ms chronicles of the medieval period. Especially
those of monastic origin.
The only text upon which he dwells which was available in printed form
at this date was that of Polydore Vergil, of whom he writes as if his
intended readership hould already be acquainted with his work.
[For the status of Polydore Vergil’s text during the Tudor period,
a good point of departure is provided by T.D. Kendrick in British Antiquity.
For future reference and further research].
The very notion of a critical prologue at this date (i.e. of publication)
suggests that Lambarde had a relatively good grasp of contemporary
Renaissance historiographical methods. And also of Italian humanist
thought as it percolated into England. He was certainly adept enough
to handle certain humanist literary conventions, as his experimentations
in Latin poetry demonstrate.
Following on from this, it would seem valid to surmise that Lambarde
aspired to place the topographical (or chorographical) description
upon a similar footing and ranking as history and poetry. In other
words, as an essential component of humanist scholarship. The output
of the Tudor court was thus in no way markedly inferior to that of
her continental counterparts, albeit they might have enjoyed a head
start.
It is worthwhile paying careful attention to the opening dedication
to Thomas Wotton. In this passage, Lambarde mentions
i. that he received assistance from others in the loction, transcription
and indication of materials and documents of importance. This suggests
a convivial sharing and exchange of information and knowledge, ideally
part and parcel of Renaissance scholarship; the brotherhood of humanism
extolled by Italian precursors such as Alberti and Vespasiano da Bisticci
among many others.
ii. Note also the significance of the extended metonymy which he uses
in this dedicatory text.
He takes his basic rhetorical figure or trope from IRON FOUNDING -
the industry which was at this time primarily linked with the Weald
of Kent and Sussex.
Lambarde develops this trope by comparing textual composition with
the casting of base metal (having removed the dross) into ‘certeine
rude, and unformed Sowze, not unmeete for a workeman’.
By extension, therefore,Lambarde positions his own literary or rather
textual endeavours upon a specific scale of humanistic cultural pursuits.
The undertaking of the topographer is, he implies, somewhat further
down the social scale than that of other humanist pursuits. His own
literary craftsmanship is of a fundamentally lowly nature when compared
with the productions of the cultural hierarchy.
iii. Thus, via metonymical implication, it seems that Lambarde cast
himself in the role of mining prospector and iron founder in regard
to his antiquarian and topographical reearches.
This rhetorically well-crafted foreword is followed by a commendatory
reply from the dedicatee, Thomas Wotton, following which ambarde once
again obliquely approaches the problem of the intended readership,
the mode of reading implicit in his text, and the utility of such writing.
From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is difficult
to fully appreciate the diffiulties faced by Lambarde in determining
precisely who constituted his readership; what they expected of his
text; and indeed whether the text would be lisible (in the Barthesian
sense) to his contemporaries. There seems to be a nagging worry that
the text would somehow meet with incomprehension; that there would
be a linguistic rift separating Lambarde from his readership. Put briefly:
would they comprehend his intentions, let alone appreciate the labour
invested in the production of such a tome?
And at this point there arises the thorny problem of how such a pioneering
topographical text as Lambarde’s was marketed.
There was, of course, the precedent of Camden’s Britannia, and
before that, the description of Britain presented as a prolonged avant-propos
to Holinshed’s Chronicles - and often, it seems, bound separately
from the Chronicles themselves.
Lambarde’s text (difficult to appreciate and to succinctly formulate
today, in the wake of the ongoing series of the volumes of the Victoria
County History and the far more easily accessible volumes of the highly
successful Penguin Buildings of England series) seemed to defy the
taxonomies of reading at the time. It did not readily fit into the
syllabuses of the schools and universities of his time, inasmuch as
it was not History as such. Perhaps the nearest classical precursor
was to be located in Pausanias’ guide to Greece. But then again,
to the Tudor classicist, to compare the legendary achievements of Greek
civilization with the traces of human settlement and cultivation contained
in Lambarde’s survey of Kent would have seemed rather absurd.
Moreover, fine and undoubtedly important book that it is, there is
one serious drawback to both the 16th century editions of his text.
Both lack any illustrations. And, to the general scholar, perhaps based
in the environs of London, there might feasibly be a reason for visiting
the major ecclesiastic sites, namely Canterbury, Rochester and Maidstone,
if only on the offchance of visiting the monastic libraries; and, after
the Reformation, in a more piratical fashion, paying a visit to ascertain
what could be purchased or plundered from such sites. For, indeed,
the backbone of many private libraries - and there were few, books
being such expensive commodities - of the time was in fact the result9s
of pillaging the monastic libraries.
It has
to be borne in mind that ‘sightseeing’ as a category
of pleasure per se was not widely developed in Tudor and early Stuart
England. Travel, for most, consisted in the trudge to nearby work.
For the wealthy, too, it was something of an ordeal rather than a pastime:
the necessity of balancing one’s time between court and countryside.
And when in the countryside, within an agrarian-based economy, it was
the careful overseeing and maintainance of one’s own property
which was of paramount importance. Necessity rather than pleasure remained
the fundamental dynamic for travel within England until the Restoration.
I set upon this date, for it saw the publication of the first of the
genre of ‘road books’, namely that of John Ogilby who in
strip-format showed the accepted routes interlinking the major English
centres of commerce. However, in another way, Ogilby’s undertaking,
however laudable, was both impractical and unnecessary. The format
and expense of the book made it impractical for even carriage travel.
Moreover, most journeys, because of the foulness of the ways in bleaker
parts of the countryside, and the mercantile commerce betwixt nearby
towns, were relatively short. Or, if a longer progress was intended
from town house to country house (so that the London house could be
adequately cleansed, and to avoid the dangers of pestilence in summer,
then guides and outriders were quite often hired at stages along the
route: hence the growth of the coaching inns from the late medieval
to the late Georgian period.
*
However,
following the above digression, to return to the text which it was
intended to contextualize - namely Lambarde’s Kent.
Upon close reading, one consideration which is pparently absent, or
elided in the opening pages is the UTILITY of the text, as well as
its DEFINITION
(i.e. the manner in which Lambarde intends it to be read). Is this
an instance of what might be termed the anxiety of incomprehension,
of the ILLISIBLE - pace Roland Barthes - on Lambarde’s behalf?
In place of which, one finds a preface of elisions preceding the corpus
of the text proper.
In this manner Lambarde defers or elides any precise definition of
his text or its purpose. Instead, by adopting a policy of omission,
he so constructs the text that the way of reading it and its purpose
becomes apparent the more the reader explores, or travels into the
text.
Once familiarized with Lambarde’s compositional style, structure
and function, then the reader may with more confidence dip into or
consult the book for specific information concerning a particular locality
(whether familiar or unknown) within the county.
It is essential to indicate - and few if any of the writers on antiquarian
topography have done so - that for the earliest readers of volumes
such as Lambarde’s Kent (and to a lesser extent, Carew’s
Cornwall of 1602, where the division by hundreds, each prefaced by
its respective map results in a greater clarity of exposition and organization)
the very novelty and innovation of the genre produced its own pleasures
and difficulties.
Unfortunately, few readers, whether ‘famous’ or otherwise
have bequeathed written accounts of what and how they read. The two
major diarists of the 17th century - Pepys and Evelyn - are the exception.
Especially with regard to the history of antiquarian and topographical
research, th only means of tracing modes of reading is via the footnotes
and references one finds in their texts to the texts of others. Only
very, very rarely does one find an annotated copy of a county history
- and even less frequently a bound interleaved copy, so that the reader
may make comments without intruding upon the text itself.
And such copies, it seems, are in general to be found on the shelves
of the country houses which have remained in the same family for generations,
and whose libraries are still intact - yet inaccessible to all intents
and purposes to the general researcher. Seldom do such copies come
onto the open market at the present time.
A few tentatively inconclusive remarks on Lambarde now follow.
There
is little to be found in the way of descriptive, detailed topography
in his book. Does this indicate a lack of the command of what might
be called the EKPHRASIS OF PLACE in Lambarde’s
writing?
To elucidate what is intended by the above (unintentionally gnomic)
question. take a representative passage from Leland for reading - and
re-reading.
As an entirely random choice of venue, cetermined by the page at which
the 1576 edition of Lambarde fell open, take Faversham as an example.
(A spur of the moment, aleatoric choice).
First of all, to quote from Leland’s Itinerary the longest discussion
of Faversham contained therein:
Faversham
is a market town franchised with a sanctuary, and hath a great abbey
of blake monkes of the fundation of King Stephane. The towne is encluded
yn one paroche, but that ys very large. Ther cummeth a creke to the
towne that bereth vesels of xx. tunnes, and a myle fro thens north
est is a great key cawled Thorn to disscharge bygge vessels. The
creke is fedde with a bakke water that cummeth fro Ospring and a
thorowgh fare amyle and more of, wherwas sumtyme a Meason de Dieu,
that now longeth to S. John’s yn Cambrige.
Herteye joyning to Shepeye liyth agaynt Faversham and the Thorn.
[Leland’s
Itinerary, L.T. Smith ed., vol. 4, p. 68f.]
(Leland’s Itinerary was undertaken and written c. 1535-1543)
And now, Faversham as recorded by Lambarde in the 1576 edition:
As it
is very likely, that the Towne of Feversham received the chiefe nourishment
of her increase from the Religious house; So there is no doubt, that
the place was somewhat of price long time before the building of
that Abbay there. For it is to be seene, that King Ethelstane helde
a Parleament, and enacted certeine lawes at Feversham, about sixe
hundreth and fortie yeares agoe: at which time (I thinke) it was
some Manor house belonging to the Prince, the rather, for afterwarde
King William the Conquerour (to whose handes at length it came) amongst
other thinges, gave the advowson of the Church, to the Abbay of S.
Augustines, and the Manor itself to a Normane in recompence of service.
But what time king Stephan had in purpose to build the Abbay, he
recovered the Manor againe, by exchange made with one William de
Ipre (the founder of Boxley) for Lillychurch and raysing there a
stately Monasterie (the temporalities whereof did amount to a hundred
and fiftie & five poundes) he stored
it with Cluniake Monkes.
This house, was first honoured with the buriall of Adelicia the Queene
his wife: Then with the sepulture of Eustachius his only sonne: and
shortly after himself also was there interred by them. I reade none
other thing worthy remembrance touching this place, Save that in the
reigne of King John, there brake out a great controversie betweene
him and the Monkes of S. Augustines, touching the right of Patronage
of the Churche at Feversham. For, notwithstanding that King William
the Conquerour, had given it to the Abbay (as appeareth before) yet,
there wanted not some (of which Hubert the Archebishop was one) that
whispered King John in the eare, that the right of the Advowson was
devoluted unto him: which thing he beleeving, presented a Clarke to
the Churche, and besides commaunded by his writ, that his presentee
should be admitted. The Abbat on the other side withstoode him, & for
the more sure enjoying of his possession, not onely ejected the Kings
Clarke, but also sent thither divers of his Monkes to keepe the Church
by strong hand. When the King understoode of that, he commaunded the
Sheriffe of the Shyre, to levie the power of his countie, and to restore
his presentee: Which commaundement the officer endeavoured to put in execution
accordingly: But such was the courage of these holy hoorsons, that before the
Sheriffe could bring it to passe, he was driven to winne the Churche by assault,
in the which he hurt and wounded divers of them, and drewe and haled the rest
out of doores, by the haire and heeles.
[...]
[Lambarde, 1576, p. 202f.]
Tempting though it is to quote more from Lambarde, for reasons of
brevity and focus of argument, the aboe must suffice.
From a comparison of the two excerpts quoted above, the crucial difference
of approach separating not only the style and presentation, but also
the fundamental purpose of Leland and Lambarde respectively comes to
light.
For Leland, the essential task is the presentation of a prose-picture,
a topographical ekphrasis of the situation of aversham as it presents
itself to the traveller. For him, it is the present impression of the
specific situation (wherever it may be) which is the essential point.
Lambarde, on the other hand, enjoys to add touches of human embellishment
- so much the better if they are scandalous, scurrilous and highlight
religious (most often Romish) malpractice. After all, for the writers
of the post-Reformation and Dissolution period it was de rigeur to
emphasize the potential perils, scandals and corruptions from which
England had been saved by severing links with Rome. Today, his reference
to the recalcitrant monks as ‘hoorsons’ (i.e. ‘whoresons’)
may provoke a titter - that within such a sober work of scholarship
such low-life epithets may be found. However, at the time, such humour
or rough parlance served a polemical purpose, indicating the necessity
of maintaining constant vigilance against the threat posed by Papal
influence. For indeed, the view of English history presented by John
Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, as that of a constant striggle against
the corruptions of the Church of Rome after the period of the disciples
and apostles, was one which percolated the whole of English society
(except, of course, those pockets of recusancy in which the Catholic
faith was clandestinely maintained).
Neither Leland nor Lambarde shows the least regret for the cultural
potential which had been swept away in the more impassioned outbursts
of iconoclasm of the Reformation. Indeed, it would have been politically
dangerous - if not potentially treasonable - to express any regrets
in writing, especially in print.
...Which left the antiquary of this period is somewhat of a quandry.
On the one hand, the relics and traces of the past deserved a secular
recognition. Yet on the other hand, preservation could lead slowly
into a backsliding into Romish idolatry, and, of more importance, of
the supreme allegiance which the English subject owed to the reigning
monarch, rather than to the Papacy (or the Bishop of Rome as he is
most often termed in the pages of Foxe).
*
RELIGION AND THE IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF THE ANTIQUARY.
The preceding paragraph raises an incredibly knotty problem, difficult
to formulate without falling foul of anachronistic misreadings.
For the sixteenth-century antiquary it was permissible to trace the
ancestry of armigrous families. To collect Roman artefacts, to identify
their camps and the remains of their urban fortifications were praiseworthy
pursuits - even when the conclusions arrived at by the antiquaries
were, in retrospect (even from the vantage point of the late 17th century
with regard to their Tudor predecessors) manifestly wrong-headed.
However, to bemoan the fate of the monasteries and other religious
houses, their libraries, their stained glass, their furnishings and
objects of devotion, was a matter of an entirely different order. One
had to distinctly differentiate between acts of collecting and acts
of veneration. It is evident from reading the mss of John Aubrey that
this was something which he found difficult to do. His various biographers
are all in agreement that whatever views one has of his intellectual
acumen and particular fixations, he was of what might best be termed
a generous yet highly unsettled temperament. He was hopeless at handling
finances and property of any kind. Opportunities and offers of help
were squandered and frittered away; fundamentally wrong decisions were
made throughout his life - as Aubrey was the first to admitand emphasize,
as if proffering a warning tothose who followed after him.
The oft-quoted outburst from his writings, that he wished that it was
still posible to enter a monastery, and thus avoid all the social predators
surrounding him on all sides is symptomatic of his dilemma. He sought
the sanctuary, but not the religious complications of a monastic life
- were such a thing possible.
Aubrey was an outstanding, exemplary figure in one respect. Yet in
another, he was the perfect specimen of the antiquary in his most impractical
guise.
He was in his own lifetime already a prime representative of a particular
social type: one of ridicule, unfortunately.
Turn the pages of John Earle’s satirical Micro-cosmographie,
the sixth edition, 1633, and there one will find the mature and elderly
Aubrey drawn to the life, in its way as sharply present as was Roy
Dotrice in Patrick Garland’s play based upon his life.
The character - or type - of which Aubrey is a particular instance,
is to be found in Earle’s small 8vo volume under the heading,
appropriately of ‘The Antiquary’, which is here quoted
in full, to demonstrate that Aubrey was by no means a lone figure,
but rather one who, against the odds, actually managed to salvage something
worthwhile, assuring his literary-historical immortality.
Earle mercilessly writes:
An Antiquary
Hee
is a man strangely thrifty of Time past, and anememy indeed to his
Maw, whence he fetches out many things when they are now all rotten
and stinking. Hee is one that hath that unnaturall disease to bee
enamour’d
of old age and wrinckles, and loves all things (as Dutchmen doe Cheese)
the better for being mouldy and worme-eaten. He is of our Religion,
because wee say it is most ancient; and yet a broken Statue would almost
make him an Idolator. A great adrirer hee is of the rust of old Monuments,
and reades only those Characters, where time hath eaten out the letters.
Hee will goe you forty miles to see a Saints Well, or a ruin’d
Abbey, and if there be but a Crosse or stone footstoole in the way
hee’l be considering it so long, till he forgets his journey.
His estate consists much in shekels, and Roman Coynes, and he hath
more pictures of Caesar, than of James , or Elizabeth: beggars coozen
him with the musty things which they have rak’t from dunghills,
and he preserves their rags for precious Reliques. He loves no Library,
but where thereare more Spiders volums then Authors, and lookes with
great admiration on the Antique worke of Cob-webs. Printed bookes he
contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age, but a Manu-script hee pores
on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all Moth-eaten, and the
dust make a Parenthesis betweene every Syllable. He would give all
the Bookes in his study (which are rarities all) for one of the old
Romane binding, or sixe lines of Tully, in his owne hand. His chamber
is hung commonly with strange Beasts skins, and is a kinde of Charnel-house
of bones extraordinary, and his discourse upon them, if you will heare
him, shall last longer. His very attyre is that which is the eldest
out of fshion, and you may picke a Criticisme out of his Breeches.
He never lookes up on himself til he is gray-hair’d, and then
he is pleased with his own Antiquity. His Grave do’s not fright
him, for he ha’s bene us’d to Sepulchers, and he likes
Death the better, because it gathers him to his Fathers.
John
Earle, Micro-cosmographie [...] The sixth Edition; augmented. London
1633. Reprinted by Methuen & Co., London, 1904.,
n.p..
- This
is by no means the earliest description of a collector/transactor
in antiquities and curiosities in the English language. In Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet one is presented with a marvellous evocation of a
treasure-house of clutter... demonstrating that it was often difficult
to discriminate between an apothecary and a dealer in antiquities;
for quite often they would be one and the same person; or items from
one classification system would migrate into another, according to
the whims of fashion and the vagaries of trade.
(That the interests, lubies, and collections amassed by antiquaries,
botanists, and naturalists overlapped in a most confusing and arbitrary
manner - at least by the standards of modern taxonomical classification
is exemplified by the accounts of the famous Tradescant’s Ark,
one of the landmarks of 17th century London, which deserves further
study, if only cursorily undertaken within this present text . However,
for reasons of research schedule, this discussion will be deferred
to an Appendix.)
...Meanwhile,
to quote Shakespeare’s marvellously
evocative description of such an assortment - evidently part collection,
part stock in trade of the apothecary, from Romeo and Juliet. I quote
from the 1685 edition of Shakespeare:
I do remember an Apothecary,
And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted
In tatter’d Weeds, with overwhelming Brows,
Culling of Simples, Meager were his Looks,
Sharp Misery had worn him to the Bones
And in his needy Shop a Tortoise hung,
An Alligator stuft, and other Skins
Of ill shap’d Fishes, and about his Shelves
A beggarly account of empty Boxes,
Green earthen Pots, Bladders, and musty Seeds,
Remnants of Packthred, and old cakes of Roses
Were thinly scattered, to make a shew.
Noting this Penury, to my Self I said,
And if a Man did need a Poyson now,
Whose sale is present Death in Mantua,
Here lives a Caitiff Wretch would sell it him [...]
This
is, of course, one of the most famous and evocative descriptions
of the contents and ambience (somewhat ambiguous to say the least)
of the late Tudor and Stuart apothecary and his ‘shop’ -
a word which is inserted in inverted commas inasmuch as at the lower
end of the market (i.e. that which was not part of an aristocrat’s
collection or within a college environment or the library cum study
of one of the better-off antiquaries whwerein objects held in duplicate
were usually exchanged or bartered rather than sold for instant monetary
gain) .
Shakespeare implies that there was very little difference twixt the
the quack apothecary and antiquary at this, the lower end of the social
scale. Both sold unusual, bizarre items for profit.
This
is a key issue (as far as I know not fully investigated) of how information
was obtained, collected and eventually collated prior to being composed
into a text during this period. Earle in his satire, implies that
antiquaries of his age were notoriously unsystematic. A study lined
with a jumble of diverse objects through which the antiquary gingerly
moved, entrapped within a labyrinth of his own devising, composed
of disparate elements. One thing it was definitely not - and that
was a collegiate library. Nor was it the study or inner room of a
person working for or on behalf of the state. One may think of Pepys’ Library,
with its specially bound volumes arranged in bookcases which he had
specially constructed, according to his own specifications.
Or again, one may think of the libraries of the stately homes of the
gentry of the eighteenth century.
Although the antiquary was dependent upon the patronage of such wealthy
figures, his own situation was muchfurther down the social ladder.
The cramped conditions in which the antiquary worked, the insecurity
of his financial ability to be able to continue his studies are duly
reflected in Lambarde’s text. The divisions of the territory
of Kent may have assisted him in the layout of his survey. These at
least presented with a readymade scheme of organization, even though
it presupposes a familiarity with the divisions of Kent, which would
have been unfamiliar to any other than those living in the ciunty,
interested in similar pursuits. Thus, his prefatory insistance that
his text is primarily intended for the inhabitants - indeed the gentry
in particular - of his chosen county.
From
reading and rereading the opening historical sections, the insecurities
in Lambarde’s composition become all too apparent. There are
no specific headings, devoted to topics such as topography; varieties
of scenery; varieties of agriculture; in brief, the ‘making’ of
the landscape as W.G. Hoskins termed it in The Making of the English
Landscape. This is mainly because the division of history and geography
and the way in which they inter-relate were quite unknown to Lambarde.
(Richard Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall of 1602, less than 30 years
after Lambarde, shows a much greater degree of confidence in the ordering
of his material, as well as in the perambulation (or sequential arrangement)
of the history and topography of his specific county. Carew was a member
of the lower aristocracy, wealthy and well-educated, versed in the
Humanism of European learning and more so in its courtly Elizabethan
variant. He possessed money, estates, and courtly connections which
Lambarde lacked.)
To continue
with the reading of Lambarde’s text,
in the hope of dialectically deconstructing/reconstructing his method
(?) or procedure (progression) in his writing.
Having relatively early alluded to the specifics of Kent in brief form,
mineral composition (in a confused form) , he turns to agriculture.
Here at least one feels that there is a greater degree of self-confidence
in his writing. In particular, he draws attention to the way in which
the agriculture of Kent is ultimately dependent upon the system of
land-tenure known as gavelkind (which topic was to exercise the brains
of many 17th century antiquaries). Carew relates land use not only
to climate and soil, but also to the legal ramifications of landholding
peculiar to Kent. In other words, in modern parlance, the ways in which
class structure have determined the apportioning of the land and the
uses to which it is put.
The people of this countrie, consisteth chiefly (as in other countries
also
of the Gentrie, and the yeomanrie, of which the first be for the most parte
governours, and the other altogether governed: whose possessions
were at the first distinguished, by the name of knight fee, and
Gavelkinde: that former being propre to the warriour, and this latter
to the husbandman. But as nothing is more inconstant , then
the estate of that which wee have in lands and living (if at the least
I may call that an estate whiche never standeth. Even so, long
since these tenures have ben so indifferently mixed and confounded,
in the hands of eche sorte, yt there is not now any note of difference
to be gathered by them.
(p.9f)
Immediately following, there is Lambarde’s distinction of the gentlemen
and the yeomen classes:
The gentlemen be not heere (throughout) of so auncient stockes as
else where, especially in the partes neerer to London, from whiche
citie (as it were from a certeine riche and wealthy seedplot)
Courtiers, Lawyers, & Marchants be continually translated, &
do become new plants amongst them. Yet be their revenues
greater then any where else: whiche thing groweth not so muche
by the quantitie of their possession, or by the fertilitie of their soyle,
as
by the situation of the countrie.
Lambarde
continues by indicating the following factors: i. the sea; ii. the
rivers; iii. an established highway connecting it to - iv. London.
All of which are determinants specific to the flourishing gentry.
Via their entrepreneurial status, they are able to free themselves
from direct contact with the land which they own, thus enabling them
to enter into ‘the publique service’,
and thus have time and money to utilize the countryside for pastimes.
Next
in Lambarde’s text there follows the second
class:
This form of land tenure, peculiar to Kent implies, so Lambarde insinuates,
lesser friction between landowner and tenant; the latter in Kent being
quite content economically, and not wanting the responsibilities of
county and court attendance imposed upon the gentry.
Next
come the group termed by Lambarde the ‘artificers’,
a loosely-knit category, roughly to be understood as craftsmen, skilled
and semi-skilled: providers of raw materials ‘handmaidens to
husbandry’, providing building materials (it is implied for the
first phase of noble and lower gentry rebuilding within the period
still known by many historians of vernacular architecture as the phase
of the first great rebuild; and also those invloved with the provision
of coloured woollen cloth, both for home use and foreign export. Here
again, it is worth emphasizing that there is an emphasis upon local
pride insamuch as the woollen produce is of a high quality, good enough,
in fact, to vie with the established woollen trade of the Low Countries.
However, at a point such as this, where Lambarde seems to be coming
to grips with the rural economy of the county, in the next paragraph,
without warning, there follows a digression wherein again the historical
content is brought back into the foreground.
The first issue to be raied here is the vexed issue of the human inhabitation
of Britain. Here is must be remembered that the most inflential passages
regarding the population of Europe were gleaned from the Bible. A problem
which was to vex many of the early topographers and British historians.
At which point Lambarde becomes somewhat guarded as to his own beliefs.
Whilst referring to the Biblical account of population of the known
world having initially derived from the Mosaic division of the world
under Shem, Ham and Japhet, he also brings in the figure of Samothes
with his tribe.
The next major invasion (or incursion) took up the myth which, as
T.D. Kendrick in British Antiquity, was to tax the ingenuity of the
antiquaries down to the eighteenth century (mulled over in detail by
William Borlase in the opening section of his Antiquities of Cornwall,
1754, 200 years after Lambarde.
This is commonly referred to as the Trojan ancestry. Briefly stated,
with the fall of Troy, the remaining Trojans forsook the ruined city,
sailing in search of a suitable place to resettle. In the year 1242
B.C.with a fleet of 324 ships
[...] laden with the remaines of Troye, and he likewise, both subdued all
the former peoples that he found here to his owne obedience, and also
altered their name after his own calling. [...] Kent which we have in hand,
was the first inhabited part of all this our Iland. [p.13]
Their leader Brutus Iulus, thus gave his name to all the isle, whilst
subdueing or vanquishing Samothes and earlier invaders.
In no way could such scholarship be said to be placed upon archaeological
principles. The discipline was unknown at the time. The early antiquaries
had, of course, no true conception of the great timsepans separating
the various settlements and histories of Eurasia. Not wishing to fall
foul of ecclesiastical authority in such matters, they nevertheless
thought it imperative to present a chronicles - however tentative -
to fill in the space separating history since the Norman invasion from
all which had preceded it.
It was well known by the early antiquaries that the isle had been
largely incorporated into the Roman Empire. One had the Commentaries
of Caesar and other Roman fragments to substantiate this. Moreover,
there were the vestiges of Roman buildings besprinkled across the landscape.
Leland, in his Itinerary, had tentatively indicated the remains of
Roman settlement. However, as to the mores and the heritage of the
natives who had been subjected to the Roman yoke, nothing seemed to
remain.
There
were of course those inexplicable monuments - most notably Stonehenge
before Aubrey’s researches at Avebury
- which posed problems. However, it was no easy task to differentiate
between specific building types and stages of historical development.
In effect, as Kendrick emphatically argued , the stubborn adherence
to the Trojan myth of the first settlement of these isles by Brut and
his Trojans simply bogged down and confused the conjectures and observations
of the early antiquaries who had, after all, no precise or even coherent
time-scale by which to work. For instance, Archbishop Ussher was considered
as making a bold and canonical statement when he stated that the formation
of the Earth itself took place in the year 4004 B.C..
However, in asserting this, he intentionally opened up a box of worms
which voraciosly ate into the hypotheses of his own chronology.
One of the central critiques of Ussher’s dating was that, allowing
for the longevity of Adam and Eve once they had been cast out of the
Garden (presumably on the same day, or at the latest, so it seemed,
the following day, from that on which they were created) there were
still other problems of a reproductive nature which remained beyond
the pale of ecclesiastical argument. For instance. Of the immediate
offspring of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel are the only ones mentioned.
Abel having been killed, there was already one less. Cain became an
outcast. But,then the problems arose. If Eve was the only woman, and
was already enforced to give birth after prolonged pain and misery,
how was the world populated?
How did all these various tribes come into being? Where did the other
women come from? The reference to the Giants in the Book of Genesis
implied that there appeared (from where?) a group of beings, large
in number as well as in size, who were not the progeny of Adam and
Eve.
Did Cain interbreed with the Giants?
Prolongation of life and of male and female fertility was one ersatz
answer proposed. And yet, by the end of the sixteenth, and augmented
in the seventeenth centuries, mathematical common sense was often being
applied to Biblical texts. And such mathematical common sense called
into question the literal truth of these early passages in Genesis
in particular - as well as raising the question of the historical period
at which they had been committed to writing.
A further antiquarian vexation was posed by the account of Noah and
the Flood. This implied that man had multiplied on the face of the
earth to such an extent that it was more practical for God to destroy
them in a cataclysmic fashion, rather than indulge in discriminate
annihilation. So once again it seemed that a second Creation was necessary
to account for the dispersion of homo sapiens.
One cunning way around this was to propose - as many 17th century writers
did, that in fact the Flood which covered the face of the world covered,
in fact, only that part of the globe known to the early Biblical writers.
In other words, it was alocalized, Mediterranean and near eastern affair
which left the major part of the globe relatively untouched.
[Mathias
Prideaux, writing in the mid 17th century, shows how far antiquarian
research had become a discipline of more systematized investigation
and probing questioning when, at the end of each section, he raises
issues such as the age of the Earth, the way in which Biblical accounts
of creation and flood are to be interpreted, etc.. By which time
such questions were no longer the provice, exclusively, of a small
coteries of antiquaries and theologians, but, according to Prideaux
were a necessary part of the study of history for all those interested
in it. - And, from an early age; for Prideaux’s
historical synopsis was, as title page and preface informs us, initially
composed for the instruction of his students at Abingdon Grammar
School.
By the 1640s, historiography had certainly come a long way from its
roots in monastic chronicles of the type written by Matthew of Paris,
Roger Hovedon, etc., finding points of dissemination in many a grammar
shool of the 17th century, for Prideaux’s book was a scholarly
best-selling textbook of the period, going through close on 20 editions
during the 17th century - despite the publishing problems of the Civil
War and Interregnum period, it is to be recalled. ]
It was for reasons such as this that the antiquary and the chorographer
tended to become more of a feasible duality undertakings, thus pushing
the problem of ultimate global origins and the history of mankind into
the background.
Perhaps
also to be borne in mind was an awareness of the damage done by religious
antagonism following Henry VIII’s
breach from Rome, and the social upheaval formed by the dissolution
of the monasteries which, after all, had been the major repositories
of culture and heritage for some 1000 years.
Moreover, as if this was not enough, there were the persecutions initiated
by Henry, continued by Edward VI, then the reversal of the process
under Queen Mary, wherein it was the Protestants who bore the brunt
of persecution. And, so it is being increasingly recognized, an augmentation
of persecution, sequestration and execution under Elizabeth I. directed
against the Papacy.
In such
an atmosphere it is not to be wondered that te antiquaries and chrographers
increasingly focused their concentration on their fields of descriptions
of the remains of bygone times, the growth of cities and towns, and
the ‘look’ of England:
one which covered descriptions of the shipyards of Chatham, as well
as the large flocks of sheep of the Cotswolds and the limestone and
chalk uplands, upon which the prosperity of many midland and northern
towns was based prior to the industrial revolution.
- Again, this reinforces and complements A.L. Rowse’s argument
concerning the Elizabethan Discovery of England.
*
In the
consideration of Lambarde’s opening essay entitled ‘The
Estate of Kent’ from which all the preceding quotations have
been taken it has hopefully become apparent how, on close reading,
this particular portion of his text is by no means ‘straightforward’.
Instead of acting as an induction into the text which follows (which
may be termed the chrographical description), in many ways, despite
the charming prose of Lambarde, the chain of argument which he attempts
to present seems to fragment, betraying perhaps his own indecision
concerning the broader issues raised, along with the knowledge presupposed.
The first edition, in Latin, of Camden’s Britannia, did not appear
until 1586. Thus he had no convenient template upon which to base the
organization of his own text. He was, singlehandedly, attempting to
found a new literary and objective genre, that of the survey of a county,
attempting to make it as comprehensive as possible. Hence the text’s
resemblance to a pot pourri of ideas and gleanings from other authors.
One often gets the impression that to all intents nd purposes, in this
section, Lambarde is presenting a series of reading notes, perhaps
even transcribing and adding observations as he discovered texts, or
relocated references in tomes he had already read.
However, with this important proviso: that the references from Latin(and
Greek) texts are not simply quoted verbatim with no critical commentary.
Evidently the readership at which he aimed his book from its inception
was one well-versed in English, yet who might have found long extracts
in Latin and Greek hard going if not impenetrable.
Perhaps this accounts for a particular, quirky discursiveness of style
already indicated above. Was he actually attempting to compose a text?
Or rather, does this opening section constitute rather something quite
different. Namely a discursive flow, sometimes meandering, of notions,
tentative historical constructs, as a stream of consciousness almost.
Or at any rate, something perhaps akin to a transcription of a conversation
with an interested listener.
Lambarde seems to be fully aware that at some instances in this introduction
he regresses rather than progresses; in other words, a notion or observation
previously noted is again re-cited (and re-sited) as if to show the
manifold importance of a particularly intricate or innovatory observation.
A sort of consolidation before proceeding further. This is, I think
a pattern of exposition determined by adding to his text as he read
in a sort of magpie-fashion.
Having pursued briefly a passage from Bale, in the following paragraph,
Lambarde recapitulates, and reverts to a synopsis of Caesar’saccount
of Britain:
Howsoever that bee therefore, Caesar himselfe witnesseth, that at
the
time of his arrivall in this Iland, the people were by one common name
called Britaines: And that Kent was then divided into foure petite
Kingdomes, which were governed by Carvillus, Taximagul,
Cingetorix, and Segonax: who, having severally subject to their
Dominions certain Cities with the territories adioyning unto them
(after the manner of the Dukedomes, or Estates of Italie, at this day)
extended their boundes (as it may be gathered) over the whole
countriesof Kent, Sussex and Surrey, at the least.
This kind of Regalitie, Kent retained not many yeares after, bicause
the Britain kings, succeeding Caesars conquest, & yeelding
to ye Romanes, rduced not only these partes, but in manner the whole
Realme also, into oneentier Monarchie. So that in course of time,
and under the reigne of King Vortiger, Kent was ruled by a Lieutenant, or
Viceroy, called Guorongus, as William of Malmesbury witnesseth. [...]
[p. 15]
- Note
here the sudden leap in the use and citation of documents, from ‘Caesar himselfe’ to
William of Malmesbury whose Chronicles were composed between 1120
and 1140.
(It was not until the latter half of the 17th century that antiquaries
such as Roger Dodsworth and Sir William Dugdale in The Monasticon Anglicanum
commenced a rigorous study of the medieval monastic chronicles. They
came to the conclusion that, whereas the chronicles of particular religious
houses gave a relatively reliable account of incidents directly relating
to the establishments themselves - such as enlargements, endowments,
the impact of Papal edicts effecting the maintainance of their houses,
details of acqusitions of land and so on... the reliability of recors
of events outside their immediate proximity left much to be desired,
and were of little value outside the history of the respective orders
themselves. For instance, the method of investigation and exposition
employed by Dugdale in other works such as The History of Embanking;
Origines Juridicales, and the history of Warwickshire is quite different
in organization and purpose from the presentation of the Monasticon.
More on Dugdale follows in a separate section below.)
Lambarde concludes this opening section by giving a list of the respectives
divisions or Lathes, and the towns contained therein with the levies
which they are obliged to pay the Crown. This is followed by a list
of sundry information relating to fairs, castles, religious houses,
etc., presented in the fashion of an inventory; this being followed
by a list of the nobility of the county.
There then follows a caveat concerning the reliabiity of the ‘Bryttishe
hystorie’ as handled by writers such as Polydore Vergil and Geoffrey
of Monmouth who, Lambarde insinuates, are guilty of perpetrating many
erroneous fables and legends in the fabrication of their work. Then,
following a list of the Archbishops of Canterbury, some 78 pages into
his work, Lambarde begins with the actual antiquarian and topographical
work of his survey. Now the reader is at long last presented with particular
observations, backed up, wherever possible or appropriate, by reference
to actual documentation.
One could
say that it has taken Lambarde a long time to get started. Perhaps
it was the composition of this preamble which gave him the courage
to shift from generalities to particularities. However, it did not
take John Leland so long to get started with the essential part of
his much more ambitious work, namely his Itinerary..., composed sometime
between 1520 and 1540 - at any rate, in sufficiently finished form
to be presented to Henry VIII as a New Year’s Gift. And
it was Leland’s ambitious task to cover the whole of England,
noting anything of antiquarian, topographical or innovatory interest
i n the course of his travels. Far more ambitious than the perambulation
of a single county - whatever key importance Lambarde attached to that
county in the preface to his work.
Lambarde and the Ekphrasis of Place.
Ekphrasis, briefly put, is the technique - or varieties of techniques
- used for evoking particular scenes, places and objects. They might
not necessarily be real, when the ekphrasis forms art of a literary
exercise. The places and actions may be imaginary, as indeed, may be
the objects, which can include buildings and smaller works of art,
notably paintings and sculptures (as well as gardens). The visual impression
must be encoded into words by the writer, in such a manner that it
may be decoded, brought to life, by the reader. Of course, the insurmountable
barrier is that of the absence of the object seen by the writer-spectator
as the reader peruses the text.
It was a mode of writing brought to perfection in the classical world
by writers such as Pausanias, in his guide to Greece.
Later, in the Renaissance, this rhetorical mode was adapted and applied
by Vasari to descriptions of works of art contained in his Lives of
the Artists. As such, it became one of the essential accomplshments
of the humanist writer, whatever genre he was composing.
In an age when travel books - both practical guides, and the accounts
of travellers both living and dead - are among the most pupular genres
of publication, it is quite easy to at first cursory glance belittle
the experiments and achievements of the earliest British topographers.
In early book production, illustration of any kind was an expensive
process. Woodblocks were frequently used and re-used in a variety of
volumes - and quite often within the confines of the same volume: witness
many of the duplicated woodcuts supposedly showing different townscapes,
etc., in the Nuremberg Chronicle. Only gradually, as printing and book
production techniques became more refined did the reader expect a higher
degree of precision and verisimilitude.
It was not until the seventeenth century that in England, the topographical
view attained the ranks of high art in its own right. (Even then, the
initial stimulus was not home-grown, but imported, so to speak, along
with the Hugenot refugees who fled to England to avoid the vicisitudes
of the 30 Yeas War on mainland Europe, hich will be considered in a
later section.)
In the earliest antiquarian and topographical treatises, those texts
which set the pattern for county histories which was to continue until
c.1835, there are few topographical views. Engraving - even in comparison
to printing - was an expensive craft. Moreover, in sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it was an artform more closely aligned to the work of the
jeweller, the goldsmith and the silversmith. Both groups worked with
highly-finished metals, using precision instruments for marking the
surface of the metal - copper - sheet in a variety of ways in order
to produce a subtlety of texture once the finished surface was carefully
inked and then ran through the printing press. Often a superior form
of paper was de rigeur to achieve blemishes such as traces of knotted
linen or small slivers of wood which, when subjected to the press,
would often tear the surface of the handmade paper sheet, thus wasting
valuable labour time as well as finely combined ink.
In this respect, the work of the cartographer (at least, until purchasers
demanded more precise and decoratively embellished maps as the 17th
century progressed) was initially less fraught with the impending fear
of failure than was the work of the illustrator, whether he worked
in wood or metal. For, after all, it was more easy to detect a manifest
blunder or flaw in the depiction of nature (except where the specimen
was exotic... or indeed imaginary or confusedly observed - as in the
famous instance of Durer’s armour-plated rhino) than was a cartographical
error.
After all, few if any of the antiquaries and county historians discussed
in this study had anything approaching a thorough grounding in the
principles of surveying and cartography. Such skills seemed to have
been ‘learned’or ‘picked up’ if not intuited
on an ad hoc basis (cf the work of Aubrey and Stukeley when working
on the pans and elevations of prehistoric remains; see below).
To consider
in detail the history of the development of the cartographer’s
art and procedures would be to shift this study into a totally different
domain - one which I am unqualified to comment upon. What tentative
remarks I am willing to make on the development of the cartographer’s
art overall during this period will be found in one of the appendices
to this study.
For the moment, I hope that the following cursory remarks will be of
some validity and utility when assessing the development of the production
of the county history.
One of the fundamental differences between the map and the engraving
of a view was the way in which its production was subsidized. The map
far less frequently carries a dediation of patronage and subscription
than does the engraved plate (most often of a country seat, castle,
or of antiquarian objects from the library or cabinet of a wealthy
landowner).
The reasons for this are not, I think, difficult to comprehend. The
subscriber or one of the patrons would - understandably - prefer to
subsidise an embellishment which illustrated part of his wealth, rather
than to subsidize an accurate survey of the cartographical layout of
the county in which he resided. Similarly, it proved difficult to persuade
the country gentry to contribute towards the unifom upkeep of roads,
even when they lay in the immediate proximity to their grounds. Often,
on the nether side of the gatehouse was a potholed thoroughfare which
it was deemed the responsibility of the whole parish to maintain. Yet,
once across the threshold, in the parkland, there were finely maintained
carriageways of carefully laid and compacted gravel. Similarly with
the county maps. Often the coastline was a poorly surveyed matter of
conjecture, relying more on a system of schemata rather than accuracy.
Schemata indicating only in the most general terms rugged, high cliffs,
estuaries, low-lying flats, marshes, havens and coves.
Such schemata tended towards inaccurate exaggeration rather than anything
resembling precision. Some counties fared better than others (although
one must make allowances for the abilities of the cartographers and
the date when the map was printed). To ilustrate this point, compare
maps of Cornwall and Sussex, with especial attention to the coastline.
Of the earliest cartographers of the British Isles specifically, the
most famous are Christopher Saxton, whose work was published in 1579-80;
and John Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain of
1611/12.
Speed undoubtedly adapted or plagiarized Saxton’s earlier maps,
along with those of Abraham Ortelius. Where a coastline was rugged
and ragged, difficult and dangerous to survey with accuracy, Speed
often exaggerated to such a degree that if a segment of a current O.S.
map is compared with the corresponding segment of Speed, the latter
will seem like a wilfully dramatized, distorted travesty. On the other
hand, the map of Sussex, with regard to the coastline does not show
the same degree of exaggeration.
*
Michael
Baxandall in Painting and Experience ... coined a rather useful phrase
- ‘the period eye’ to indicate
that the act of perception was by no means a universal, but was subject
to socio-historical determinants.
And, consequently, Baxandall continues by indicating that ways of recording
what one sees are also subject to corresponding determinants and schemata.
These shemata in turn having the status (conscious or unconscious)
of rhetorical tropes which one encounters in the writings of authors
from the same historical milieu, yet without plagiarizing or emulating
the style of one another.
Can one
adapt this notion of the period eye to antiquarian and topographical
writing during the period under consideration? To such a question
I think I would answer with qualified assent. Qualified, because
one must, of course acknowledge the specific historico-social circumstances
separating quattrocento Italy from England of 1550-1830. Baxandall’s
turn of phrase indicates a ‘period’ of a century, whereas
the historical period covered in this study spans almost 300 years.
Therefore, in relation to the particular topic here tentatively discussed,
I would suggest a sequence of period eyes: a socio-intellectual history
of ways of seeing and textually recording the pattern of the English
landscape. Put bluntly, Lambarde’s Kent is utterly diferent from
Hasted’s Kent, not only because a little over 250 years separated
the completion of Lambarde’s Perambulation from the commencement
of Hasted’s antiquarian and topographical survey - but because
the intellectual tools at their disposal have undergone changes; and
the purpose of perception and of text has radically changed.
What is at stake in the above statement, and the necessity of the preceding
digression will hopefully become more easily perceptible when one returns
once more to Lambarde’s Kent - now scrutinizing the text of the
Perambulation proper, rather than concentrating upon the preliminary,
uncertain prefatory notes which precede Lambarde’s text proper.
*
To continue
now to the opening pages of the actual survey section of Lambarde’s
text.
Thus, on p.78 (following a long preamble to a Perambulation one might
say) one finds the following commencement to the text proper:
Tanet, called in Brytish, Inis Rhuochym, of the Shore Rutupi:
it is named of some wrriters, in Latine (or rather Greeke)
Thanatos, or in Saxon ,Tenet [...]
Iulius Solinus (in his description of England) saith thus of Tanet:
Thanatos nullo serpitur angue & aspertata inde terra angues necat. There
be no snakes in Tanet (saith he) & the earth that is brought from thence
will kill them. But whether he wrote this of any sure understanding
that he had of the quality of the soyle, or only by coniecture of the
woord which in Greeke signifieth death, or killing, I wote not & much
lesse dare I determine, bycause hitherto neither I my selfe have heard
of any Region hereabout (onely Ireland excepted) which beareth not
both snakes and other venemous wormes, neither am I yet persuaded,
that this place borowed the name out of the Greeke, but rather tooke it of
the propre language, of this oure native countrie. For Tenet, in the Saxon,
or olde Englishe tongue, sounded as much as, moysted, or watered,
whiche derivation, howe well it standeth with the situation of Tanet,
being Peninsula, and watered (in manner) round about, I had rather
without reasoning, referre to every mans iudgement, then by debate of
many woordes, eyther to trouble the reader, or to interrupt mine owne
order. Leaving the name therefore, I will resorte to the thing, and shew
you out of Beda, and others, the content and stoarie of this Ile. [...]
[Lambarde, Kent, p.78.]
The above quotation contains many of the most salient, frequently
recurring problems of antiquarianism and county topographies.
Note that, contrary to what the modern reader might expect, instead
of beginning with an ekphrastic description of Thanet - its situation,
scenery and places of beauty and historic interest, Lambarde begins
elsewhere.
Instead of beginning with the place itself, Lambarde begins with collating
and comparing, cross-referencing textual references to the place. In
brief, he begins with the name rather than th place. Thus one could
justifiably argue that it is etymology rather than geography or topography
which is Lambarde’s initial point of departure.
To continue without break from where the above quotation left off:
Leaving the name therefore, I will resorte to the thing, and shew
you out of
Beda, and others, the content and stoarie of this Ile.
[ibid., p.78]
Thus,
instead of direct observation, from the very beginning Lambarde looks
at, considers the location via the filter or barrier of words of
an intervening text. One may cynically ask whether (on the strength
of this single, but opening section) Lambarde’s ‘perambulation’ was
indeed around a county, but rather, to all intents and purposes, first
and foremost, around a series of texts... exploring libraries, collections
and studies rather than the actual ground and topography of Kent itself,
travelling in gown and slippers rather than on horseback, in carriage
or on foot, trudging the roads and lanes themselves.
Thus, contrary to the practice of local history today, the place somehow
supplements textual references, rather than documents acting as the
marginalia and addenda to the visit to the place itself. One has the
first suspicions, intimations that Lambarde (And how many others? In
the course of this study, hopefully more light will be thrown on this
question. At the moment, let it remain in a state of deferral.) travelled
through texts rather than landscapes. Briefly, Lambarde here presents
himself as a paleographer rather than geographer.
However it is to be reiterated that in the Tudor period, travel was
most often undertaken out of pressing necessity. For the majority of
the populace, even the aristocracy, travel was a perilous undertaking
of getting from A (home) to B (as near as possible, the place of business;
payment or receipt of rents; estate management etc.).
Henry VIII seems to have limited the extent of his travels from Whitehall
to Richmond and Hampton Court, using the Thames as a highway, leaving
the roads around the capital for the waggons carrying all the fixtures
and fittings necessary to the maintainance of the decor and provision
of court splendour.
Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, proved to be a far more adventurous
traveller, taking her court much further afield. It was she who first
established the notion of the Royal Progress per se.
However, despite the amount of research into the cult of Gloriana,
begun in earnest by Dame Frances Yates, and continued in equivalent
detail by Sir Roy Strong in the essays spanning some 3 decades in the
3 volumes of his Tudor and Jacobean Studies, little research has been
devoted to the early royal progresses - even those of Elizabeth I,
where extant documentation is the most coherent, research into the
Royal Progresses still remains in its early stages.
This is emphasized by Zillah Dovey in An Elizabethan Progress, complemented
by a Foreword by David Loades, published in 1996.
An Elizabethan Progress is a highly readable, meticulously-researched
account of just one Progress: that by Elizabeth into East Anglia in
1578.
Dovey,
in her Introduction, argues that these summer progresses fulfilled
aseveral functions simultaneously. Interestingly, first and foremost,
she argues that these progresses were a source of pleasure for the
Queen. (An interesting area of inquiry and speculation would be to
account for the psychological basis of such pleasure. For instance,
it is worthwhile remembering that for much of her adolescence and
early womanhood, during the reign of Queen Mary, Elizabeth was to
all intents and purposes kept as a privileged politico-religious
prisoner in a variety of gentry houses, away from the City and Court.
There was little privacy available in the major Royal residences
in and around London. The entourage of court, governmental secretaries,
and the Queen’s
immediate entourage of guards, ladies in waiting and servants meant
that she lived a life of constant surveillance. Today, the ‘surveillance’ comes
from journalists and paperazzi photographers. An infringement of privacy.
However, social historians have in recent decades being trying to ascertain
whether privacy was indeed possible as understood today; and concomitantly
what the bourgeoisie and nobility understood by privacy in early modern
Europe (work undertaken mainly in France, under the aegis of Philippe
Aries).
Zillah Dovey begins her study of this, the best-documented of the Progresses,
by placing them in their contemporary context:
The Queen enjoyed her summer expeditions. She and her Court were
used to moving up and down the Thames - they shifted regularly
between the palaces of Greenwich, Whitehall, Richmond, Oatlands
and Windsor - and the mechanics of removal were matters of
routine. Furnishings, hangings and so on were regularly taken down,
brushed and aired and put up somewhere else; then the rooms vacated
could be cleaned. But in the summer the Queen liked to get away from
London and show herself to the people. [...]
[Zillah Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1996,
p.1.]
Thus, at the start, Dovey indicates two of the factors determining
the (necessity of) the progresses. First of all, so that the respective
royal residences could be cleaned in rotation. Secondly, they formed
an essential element within the cult of Astrea or Gloriana - myths
which had rapidly accumulated and been elaborated around the Virgin
Queen. As several historians, such as Sir Roy Strong, have indicated,
this mythologization of Elizabeth functioned on the religious-ideological
level as an act of symbolic substitution: a successful attempt to oust
the popularity of Mariolatry, the cult of the Virgin Mary, which remained
probably the most ingrained of all remaining Roman Catholic vestiges;
one which Elizabeth and her ministers sought to extirpate as quickly
and completely as possible - especially given the backdrop of continued
claims on the English throne made by Spanish Catholics, basing their
aims of legitimacy on the marriage of Philip and Mary.
Therefore, following a prolonged series of house-arrests, these progresses
were (most probably) also a way for the Queen to assert her royal freedom
of movement. Never again would she be hemmed in by palace or castle
walls against her will.
To resume Dovey’s text:
Progresses were primarily an exercise in image-making. To establ
|
