of husbandry required an accurate, detailed knowledge of nature, that is, in Hartlib’s words, of the providential distribution of God’s “benefits” across a nation. From that foundation of knowledge, industry could be applied to the improvement of husbandry and the production of goods from nature increased.30 Profitable increase in trade would follow.
Following the Restoration, many topographical writers and publishers maintained Hartlib’s link between natural history, husbandry, and trade, though they may have eschewed his millenarian Protestantism.31 John Aubrey, in the preface to his Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, bundled together “scrutinie into the waies of Nature” and “Improvement in Husbandry.” He saw interest in both of these as recent developments. Before the civil war, he wrote, both had been regarded as presumptuous and ill-mannered—even sinful, in the case of “scrutinie into Nature”—even when improvements increased profits, because the improver was setting himself up as “more knowing than his Neighbors and forefathers.”32 When John Ogilby published his Britannia, or, an illustration of the Kingdom of England and dominion of Wales (1675), he justified it in terms of how it reflected and enhanced British imperial power and (not unrelatedly) encouraged domestic trade in Britain. Ogilby dedicated his Britannia to Charles II, proudly proclaiming that it had been the practice of peoples of all great empires—the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Assyrians—to survey and document their principal thoroughfares. Britain likewise, to improve its “Commerce and Correspondency at Home,” required such a survey.33
Ogilby’s book was an exercise in nation-making: he linked trade, communication, and empire to each other and predicated their expansion on the diffusion of accurate knowledge of the roads.34 Just as Childrey did in Britannia Baconica, Ogilby yoked the oceanic and the national. Ogilby placed this survey squarely in the context of broader British imperial and commercial ventures, noting that his efforts to “Improve Our Commerce and Correspondency at Home” paralleled Charles’s efforts to ensure that Britons would have open to them “all those Maritin Itineraries, Whereby We Trade and Traffique to the several Parts and Ports of the World, through the Two and Thirty Points or Bearings of the Universe”35 (a mariner’s compass had thirtytwo bearings marked on it). His ambition was to provide tools that made roadways navigable and opened them to commerce and correspondence on a national scale, to match Britain’s trade beyond its shores.
Trade linked the local and the national: natural resources and the goods they were fashioned into may have had local origins, but they circulated in national and international economies. Childrey discussed numerous goods in these terms. Stroud, in Gloucestershire, was a center for scarlet-dyed cloth because the water there was peculiarly suited to the dying process. Walfleet in Essex sent oysters to London, while Suffolk “yields much Butter and Cheese,” though the Cheshire cheese made all other cheese seem inferior by comparison. Great numbers of herring were fished every year in September along the shores of Norfolk, and Leicestershire produced “the best Limestone in England.”36
Topographers took an active role in encouraging the integration of local and national economies. They sought to identify and promote local resources that could be mined, processed, or in some way improved upon and offered up for consumption across Britain. In a letter written while on his Welsh progress, Lhuyd noted the discovery in Merionethshire in northwestern Wales of a new kind of marble “which when polished represents a number of small Oranges cut across; the reason whereof is an infinite quantity of Porus or Alcynoium stuck through the stone.”37 The stone was strikingly attractive and “might serve very well for inlaying work, as tables, windows, cabinets, closets etc and would make curious salt cellars.”38 Lhuyd went on to close this letter with a request that if his correspondent knew any merchants who dealt in alum or copper ore, he would let them know that the counties of western Wales were rich in both.39 Lhuyd sought to bring these natural resources to the attention of those with the expertise and financial resources to exploit them.
Language: Uniting and Dividing
Naturalists and antiquaries were intensely interested in the linguistic topography of Britain. They cataloged place names, variations in local dialects and local slang, the vocabulary and grammar of Celtic languages, and the historical relationships between Celtic languages, which could be established by studying surviving Celtic-language manuscripts. Most basically they sought to map linguistic difference and similarity across Britain, both historically and in the seventeenth-century present. In this section I focus on linguistic differences in seventeenth-century Britain, and in the next I turn to the connections between linguistic topography, history, and descent.
Linguistic differences were observed as both causes and markers of social and cultural disunity. In The survey of Cornwall (1602), Richard Carew noted that by the late sixteenth century, knowledge of Cornish was in precipitous decline: “English speach doth still encroche vpon it, and hath driuen {Cornish} into the outermost skirts of the shire.”40 Most everyone, Carew wrote, knew some English, and fewer and fewer knew any Cornish. However, when approached by an outsider—an English person—the Cornish were likely to pretend total ignorance of English: “and yet some so affect their owne, as to a stranger they will not speake it: for if meeting them by chance, you inquire the way or any such matter your answere shalbe, Meea nanidua cowz asawzneck, I can speake no Saxonage.”41 In Carew’s telling, the Cornish pretended ignorance of English in order to maintain boundaries between themselves and perceived outsiders.
Naturalists were interested in linguistic difference in part because they recognized it as an impediment to national commerce and correspondence. Indeed in the preface to his comparative dictionary of Celtic languages, the first volume of his Archaeologia Britannica, Edward Lhuyd felt the need to begin with an apology for even attending to such a subject because “Diversity of Languages is Generally granted to be rather an Inconveniency than the Contrary.”42 Naturalists sought ways to bridge these gaps, or at least make the various local dialects and languages legible to travelers, particularly those who went from the orbit of London, Cambridge, and Oxford to more remote parts of Britain. In 1674 John Ray published A collection of English words, not generally used, a compendium of words peculiar to the north, south, and east of England. This collection offered definitions of local dialect words that Ray had collected in his travels around Britain in the 1660s with his fellow naturalists Francis Willughby, Nathaniel Bacon, and Phillip Skippon. It was published with catalogs of English fish and bird species and some notes on mining, ore processing, metal work, and alum- and salt-making that had been similarly gathered from conversations with miners and craftspeople during their travels.
In the letter to the reader that prefaced the volume, Ray focused on the northern dialects’ unintelligibility to southerners: “in many places, especially of the North, the Language of the common people, is to a stranger very difficult to be understood.”43 He believed that his collection therefore would be of some use to travelers in the north of England. Ray’s publication of this dictionary, and his justification for it, suggested that regional differences within England were sharply felt. It also implied that his ideal reader was someone from the center (for example, London, Cambridge, Oxford) traveling in the north. Yet Ray also included southern and eastern dialect words, indicating on some level that this was also a project designed to encourage mutual intelligibility and was not just about making the periphery intelligible to the center—or that even in the home counties the “language of the common people” contained dialect words unfamiliar to the educated.
Ultimately such aids would help naturalists see past the accidents of local linguistic variation (which might assign one species a diversity of names) to the underlying reality of nature, allowing them to classify species rationally and universally according to an agreed-upon set of characteristics.44 Naturalists across Europe were thus interested in documenting and understanding local vernaculars.45 One might see a similar motivation in Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue (1675), which listed words, broken down by category, in English, Greek, and Latin. The categories were not unlike those found in county natural histories—Ray began with words related to the heavens and worked his way through words related to plants and animals, human bodies and human health, and culture, society, and the built environment