and religion). When collecting words in the Celtic regions of Britain, Edward Lhuyd used the lists in the Dictionariolum trilingue as his standard vocabulary.46
Ray’s focus on regional English dialects suggests two insights about the nature of the project of fashioning Britain as a scientific object. First, naturalists were not universally (or always) interested in Britain as a whole. In their work they frequently privileged one region over another. Because many of these naturalists were English first, England was of course the privileged region. There was more at work here, however. In Ray’s presentation of England as a linguistically diverse space, we see that it is not necessarily appropriate to read seventeenth-century England as unified—politically, linguistically, scientifically, or otherwise.
Furthermore, insofar as one reads the formation of Britain as a colonial process—one in which the English extended their hegemony over Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—it is in some cases more appropriate to identify the northern counties (and the West Country, which included Cornwall, though Ray did not discuss their dialects) with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Cultural and political hegemony was extended from London and its environs to the rest of England: although Ray included in A collection of English words dialect words from southern and eastern England, in the letter to the reader he framed his project as an aid to southerners attempting to understand northern dialects, and not the other way around.47
Language, History, and Descent: Britain Without England
Tracing human descent through history was another way of mapping the boundaries of the British “nation.” Naturalists-antiquaries started from the proposition that relics of human relations lay strewn across the languages of Britain, and therefore linguistic topography offered a key to the history of human descent and settlement in Britain. For example, ancient Celtic place names suggested a history of Celtic peoples in a location, whereas Scandinavian place names—or regional dialect words with Scandinavian origins—suggested a history of Viking settlements. Getting more deeply into the structure of the languages could show historical and contemporary similarities between the grammars of Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, and Cornish that could be used to define the historical connections between present-day speakers of those languages. In his Villare Anglicanum, a dictionary of English place names, John Aubrey proposed that if it were possible to trace the etymology of some Welsh words to Greek, this would be “good Evidence (without being beholding to Historie) that there was a time, when the Greeks had Colonies here.”48 Such an effort was doomed, but it does indicate what the naturalists hoped to gain from the study of language: evidence for the movement and settlement of peoples that was somehow independent of conventional historical evidence. The topography of languages promised to escape history, to provide an independent check on the chronicles and myths that Britons had been living with since the Middle Ages. In this section I trace topographers’ efforts to map the history of the people they referred to as the ancient “British,” often understood (at the time) as the ancestors of the modern Welsh, largely through the study of the Celtic languages.
The relationship between historic inhabitants of Britain and the then modern-day composition of its population was a subject of active debate among naturalists, antiquaries, political writers, and historians. This question had crucial implications for relations between the various kingdoms and regions and each group’s understanding of itself (this continues to be true into the present).49 Political writers, in particular, sought to shore up the foundations of the English constitution—and the liberties enshrined therein—by locating its origins in the histories of the peoples of Britain. Common descent could be used to unite the various peoples of Britain: where established, it provided the basis of a common cultural and national identity. However, awareness of differences in origins tended to divide the peoples of Britain—each individual group made strides, perhaps, toward “a more or less coherent” sense of a history that defined them as a nation, but it was difficult, if not impossible (and may or may not have been desirable, depending on one’s perspective), to spin a unified historical narrative about the peoples of the British Isles and Ireland.50
Topographical writers’ understandings of the ancient British and estimations of their contributions to the formation of Britain and the British landscape ranged from utterly dismissive to proudly appreciative. In The most notable antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stone-Heng (1655), the first printed treatise on Stonehenge, the architect Inigo Jones argued that the ancient British peoples were entirely too rude and barbarous to have constructed a monument as complex as Stonehenge. Jones’s book offered a particularly striking example of the link between English estimations of the ancient Britons and English prejudices against the “Celtic” peoples of early modern Britain.51 According to Jones, the ancient Britons were utterly devoid of the understanding of art, science, or mathematics that would have equipped them to build Stonehenge.52 Instead, Jones contended (totally wrongheadedly) that the Romans constructed Stonehenge according to classical architectural principles. John Aubrey, on the other hand, writing at roughly the same time, identified Stonehenge as a Druid temple, defining his Druids as “the most eminent Priests [or Order of Priests] among the Britaines.”53 Aubrey, who claimed Welsh ancestry, saw affiliations between similar ruins scattered across Britain. He sought out and where possible incorporated accounts of ancient British monuments in North Wales and Scotland into Monumenta Britannica, his study of British antiquities.54 Aubrey’s interpretation of stone circles as Druid temples became immensely popular through the eighteenth century when it was promoted by the antiquaries William Stukeley and William Borlase.55
In political history as well, opinions of the ancient British were neither wholly negative nor wholly positive, though over time this field turned more decisively away from them as progenitors of the English constitution. Earlier writers had made the argument that Britain’s foundations could be located among the ancient Britons, shrouded in time immemorial. However, by the late seventeenth century, historians, especially those of the proparliamentary and Whiggish type, came to believe that the Saxons were the true progenitors of English liberties. This argument, which was founded in a century of increasingly sophisticated antiquarian scholarship on Saxon England, had been popularly made in Nathaniel Bacon’s oft-reprinted An historicall discourse of the uniformity of the government of England, which was first published in 1647.56 Those on the Royalist side of things, on the other hand, tended to emphasize more the inheritance from the Normans. Even those who still sought to locate the foundations of English liberties in ancient Britain argued that little could be known about their governance, given the lack of surviving written documents. Regardless of which side one took, the shift to seeing the transfer of power from Saxons to Normans as a key moment in the history of the English constitutions led English writers to minimize the contribution that the Welsh made to the national polity, both as a people in the then present day and in their past incarnation as the ancient British.57 Not coincidentally, these arguments had a topographical basis: the boundaries of the medieval Saxon and Norman territories mostly mapped onto present-day England, which meant that the English claimed a direct line of descent from these peoples, but not the ancient Britons, whose descendants lived in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.58
Working amid this complex backdrop, Edward Lhuyd took the option of defining Britain from its geographical edges. In 1695 he issued proposals for a “British Dictionary, historical and geographical.”59 Partly inspired by his work on the 1695 revised edition of Camden’s Britannia, he proposed a study of the natural history, antiquities, languages, and customs of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany. This project consumed the last fifteen years of Lhuyd’s life and was built around extensive travel—he was on the road for four years—and a questionnaire that he issued to the clergy and gentry in an edition of four thousand copies. He planned a multivolume treatise but in the end finished only the first volume, a comparative study of “British” languages, before death cut his labors short in 1709. Based on the strength of this treatise, Lhuyd has come to be regarded as one of the originators of the modern study of these languages, now more commonly identified as “Celtic” languages.60
Lhuyd’s definition of “Britain” was complex and shifting. In his 1695 prospectus, he focused primarily on Wales.61 In these proposals Lhuyd defined