Copiousness, conjecture and collaboration in WilliamCamden’s Britannia
Angus Vine
In the preface to the Britannia, his monumental antiquarian survey of Britainfirst published in 1586, and then in five increasingly large editions up to 1607,William Camden explained the work’s origins: ‘Abraham Ortelius the worthyrestorer of Ancient Geographie arriuing heere in England, aboue thirty foureyears past, dealt earnestly with me that I would illustrate this Ile of BRITAINE,or (as he said) that I would restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to hisantiquity.’1 Camden’s words have attracted extensive attention, with scholarsnoting their significance for the methodology of the Britannia, citing them asevidence for the international audience of the book, and pointing to themmore generally as testimony to the importance of his connection withOrtelius, the great Flemish geographer and cartographer.2 What scholars havenot fully appreciated, however, is the peculiarity of Camden’s statement. Yetthis statement warrants careful attention, not only because what Camdenunderstood by it is more complex than we might at first think, but alsobecause there is an intimate connection between his restoration of antiquityand Britain and the copiousness of his massive book. A restorative text, inCamden’s hands at least, is also a copious text. Uncovering that connection,and reflecting on what it means not only for his antiquarian project, but alsofor the broader political context of his work, is therefore the first aim of thisarticle. Uncovering what enabled him to compile such a copious book is thesecond aim.
1 William Camden, Britain, Or A Chorographicall Description Of The Most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland,and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning, out of the depth of Antiqvitie, trans. Philemon Holland (London: [Eliot’s CourtPress] for George Bishop and John Norton, 1610), π4r.
2 See, inter alia, Stuart Piggott, ‘William Camden and the Britannia’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 37(1951), 199–217; F. J. Levy, ‘The Making of Camden’s Britannia’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 26(1964), 70–97 at (87–90); idem, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; repr. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Universityof Toronto Press, 2004), 148–55; George C. Boon, ‘Camden and the Britannia’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 136(1987), 1–19 (at 2–3); Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007),136–8; John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008), 170; and Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early ModernEngland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 80–83.
The first thing to note about Camden’s chiastic expression is the way that itforegrounds the act of collaboration, informing readers from the outset thatthe Britannia is born out of a particular mode of scholarly exchange. Thesecond thing to observe, and something that is perhaps related to this, is theway in which the statement of origins echoes the earlier praise for Ortelius.In calling him ‘the worthy restorer of Ancient Geographie’, or, as he put it inthe original Latin, eximius veteris geographiae restaurator, Camden was almostcertainly thinking of Ortelius’ Synonymia geographica.3 This work, printed atAntwerp in 1578, eight years before the first edition of the Britannia, is adictionary of classical place names and their modern equivalents. In drawingthis parallel between his own book and Ortelius’ interest in the classical world,Camden reminds us that, initially at least, his project was a circumscribed one.Although it quickly expanded beyond these limits, beyond mapping the clas-sical world onto the modern one, as any reader, even of the first edition, soonrealizes, the preface makes it clear that Camden did conceive the Britannia inthe first instance as an account, both geographical and historical, of RomanBritain.4 In making the parallel, the preface also coincides with what we knowof Ortelius’ long-standing search for an antiquary able to identify Romanplace names in Britain. Before corresponding with Camden, he had turnedfirst to his kinsman, the neo-Latin poet Daniel Rogers, and then to the Welshscholar Humphrey Llwyd, but neither of them had managed to complete thetask.5 Furthermore, in light of the parallel, the preface also suggests thatrestoration is in some ways synonymous with the entire antiquarian enterprise,and that that enterprise is concerned primarily with identifying names andorigins.
This association between restoration and antiquarianism seems to havebeen widespread at the time. Camden himself, for example, elsewhere praisedHubert Goltzius, the Flemish antiquary and numismatist, as restaurator illeantiquitatis.6 In a similar vein, Cornelis Kiel, proofreader in the Plantin houseat Antwerp, praised Richard Verstegan in the title of his commendatory poem
3 William Camden, Britannia, sive florentissimorvm regnorvm Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et insularum adiacentium exintima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London: [Eliot’s Court Press] for George Bishop and John Norton,1607), π4r. We know from a letter of 24 October 1578 that Ortelius had given Camden a copy of the Synonymiaand that Camden admired it enormously. See Abrahami Ortelii (geographi Antwerpiensis) et virorum ervditorvum adevndem et ad Jacobvm Colivm Ortelianvm (Abrahami Ortelii sororis filium) epistvlæ, ed. Joannes Henricus Hessels(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887), 182: ‘Synonymiam tuam Geographicam (Optime mi Orteli)accepi, opus sane præclarum, multiplici eruditione refertissimum, et Ortelij nomine dignissimum.’
4 Most modern assessments of the Britannia have agreed on this. For a challenge, not entirely successful, tothis view, see William Rockett, ‘The Structural Plan of Camden’s Britannia’, The Sixteenth Century, 26 (1995),829–41.
5 For a recent account of Ortelius’ relationship with Llwyd, see Philip Schwyzer, ‘Introduction’, to HumphreyLlwyd, The Breviary of Britain, MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations Volume 6 (London: Modern HumanitiesResearch Association, 2011), 1–2.
6 William Camden to Abraham Ortelius, 4 August 1577, in Abrahami Ortelii . . . epistvlæ, 168. Goltzius’antiquarian interests are reflected in a series of folios published by the Officina Goltziana, the press that he setup at Bruges in the 1560s; see Herman de la Fontaine Verwey, ‘The First Private Press in the Low Countries:Marcus Laurinus and the Officina Goltziana’, Quaerendo, 2 (1972), 294–310.
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for the English antiquary’s A Restitvtion of Decayed Intelligence (1605) as ‘VIROCL. NATIONIS ET Linguæ veteris Anglicanæ restauratori’.7 Verstegan’s owntitle also invokes these antiquarian associations, albeit with the added correc-tive and reparative charge of restitution: a reflection of both the religious andthe historical polemic within the work. Verstegan wrote his book from theperspective of an English Catholic in exile, but also out of what he perceivedto be the shameful neglect of Saxon history by other English scholars.8 Oneof John Donne’s works, too, suggests this same set of associations. In hisexegesis of Exodus 1:1, posthumously published in the Essayes in Divinity(1651), Donne alludes to the names that ‘the Roman Emperors assumed inmany Coyns’. These include ‘Æternitas Cæsaris’, ‘Cæsar salus’, ‘Servator’, and‘Restaurator Orbis’.9 As it happens, Donne was misremembering the correctnumismatic term: his probable source for the names was the list of epithetsused by Roman emperors in Goltzius’ Thesavrus rei antiqvariæ hvberrimvs(1579), and here the fourth term is given instead variously as restitutor orbis andrestitutor urbis.10
If these instances suggest that the association between antiquarianism andrestoration was strong, what that restoration actually entailed was less straight-forward, as the rest of Camden’s preface indicates. Having explained theorigins of the work, he provides a gloss on his and Ortelius’ gnomic remark:‘which was as I vnderstood, that I would renew ancientrie, enlightenobscuritie, cleare doubts, and recall home Veritie by way of recovery, whichthe negligence of writers and credulitie of the common sort had in a mannerproscribed and vtterly banished from amongst us.’11 This gloss gives the clear-est sense of what he actually understood by Ortelius’ request. For Camden,restoration was evidently a process of both clarification and recovery; a processthat not only had the ability to expunge doubtful beliefs about the past, butalso had the power to bring back lost historical knowledge. Moreover, as hislisting here suggests, it was also a multifarious process: one that involveddifferent kinds of scholarly endeavour, one that brought about different formsof knowledge, and one that in a literary context might very well result incopiousness. The Britannia itself is, of course, a case in point: by the time ofthe definitive sixth edition, it was a truly massive book, richly illustrated withboth woodcuts and engravings, packed with maps, and made up of nearly 500leaves. Its contents were correspondingly diverse, ranging from heraldic andgenealogical disquisitions to epigraphy, etymology, and oral history.
7 Richard Verstegan, A Restitvtion of Decayed Intelligence In antiquities (Antwerp: Robert Bruney for John Nortonand John Bill, 1605), 2†4r.
8 For the best overview of Verstegan’s life and works, and in particular for his status as an exiled Catholic, seePaul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of the Catholic Reformation(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004).
9 John Donne, Essayes in Divinity (London: T. M. for Richard Marriot, 1651), F2r.10 Hubert Goltzius, Thesavrvs rei antiquariæ hvberrimvs (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1579), 88.11 Camden, Britain (1610), π4r.
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In the later editions of the book, in particular, there was a clear politicalcontext for this copiousness and inclusiveness. Throughout, the Britannia isunderlain by a unifying rhetoric, as Camden emphasizes again and again theshared heritage of the various peoples in Britain. Before 1603, that might havebeen understood simply as an act of disinterested antiquarian enquiry, butafter the accession of James I the political charge of that unifying rhetoricwould have been unmistakeable. Allan Macinnes has spoken of the 1607edition as ‘[t]he formulation of a territorially expansive Britain’, as the ration-alization of the Jacobean political agenda in textual form, and Camden’s bookclearly was aligned with the king’s political goals in the early years of his reign.Most obviously, Camden connects his project with James’s primary objective:the union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland.12 Camden himselfmakes this explicit in a new preface for the Scottish section of the book, wherehe speaks of the ‘divine and heauenly opportunity . . . now fallen into ourlaps’: that is, the fact that Britain, formerly ‘disioigned in it selfe and unsocia-ble’, should now ‘by a blessed Vnion bee conjoyned in one entire bodie’.13
Given this, the act of antiquarian restoration takes on a further meaning. Itbecomes not only a means to recover lost knowledge about the British past,but also more fundamentally a way of healing political divisions, of bringingdifferent peoples together, and of making Britain whole again.
As it happens, restoration seems to have had this meaning more generallyin the early modern period. While today we would most often understandrestoration in the context of the repairs to a building, writers in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries used the word and its cognates more widely.14
Donne, for example, in his sermon on Job 13:15, preached before the Coun-tess of Bedford at Harrington House on 7 January 1620, used the termrestaurator to describe God’s power to save man, rebuild him, and raise him toeternal life:
[W]hether God kill by sicknesse, by age, by the hand of the law, by the malice ofman, si ille, as long as we can see that it is he, he that is Shaddai, Vastator, &Restaurator, the destroyer, and the repairer, howsoever he kill, yet he gives life too,howsoever he wound, yet he heales too, howsoever he lock us into our graves now,yet he hath the keys of hell, and death, and shall in his time, extend that voyceto us all, Lazare veni foras, come forth of your putrefaction, to incorruptibleglory.15
12 Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9–11.13 Camden, Britain (1610), 4A2r.14 See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘restore’, v.1, 3(a) and 6(a): ‘To build up again; to re-erect or reconstruct.
Now spec. to repair and alter (a building) so as to bring it as nearly as possible to its original form’; ‘To bringback (a person or thing) to a previous, original, or normal condition.’
15 John Donne, Fifty Sermons Preached by That Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr in Divinity, Late Deaneof the Cathedral Church of S. Pauls London (London: Ja[mes] Flesher for M[iles] F[lesher], J. Marriot, and R.Royston, 1649), 2A4r.
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While Camden’s context is not a theological one and the Britannia clearly doesnot share the salvational rhetoric of Donne’s sermon, there are some sugges-tive parallels between the two. Donne’s sense of restoration here is specificallythe resurrection of the body. James, to whom Camden’s restorative project wasincreasingly directed, conceived the union in similarly corporeal terms. As heput it in his speech to Parliament of 19 March 1604, ‘I must craue yourpatiences for a little space, to giue me leaue to discourse more particularly ofthe benefits that doe arise of that Vnion which is made in my blood, being amatter that most properly belongeth to me to speake of, as the head whereinthat great Body is vnited.’16 Furthermore, for Camden, restoring antiquity toBritain and Britain to antiquity is also a matter of ‘glory’. However, whereDonne’s ‘glory’ is the splendour of heaven and the bliss of the life to come,Camden’s ‘glory’ is the exalted praise due to his country and nation. As heexplains later in the preface, revealing what made him complete the task, ‘howmuch the difficultie discouraged me from it, so much the glory of my countryencouraged me to vndertake it.’17 For the antiquary, therefore, restoration isa matter of both honour and duty. It is this twofold responsibility, as the restof this article will show, that, in Camden’s case, leads first to his urge toencompass national heritage in all its manifestations and then to the charac-teristic copiousness of his ever-expanding book.
I
Examples of this copiousness can be found throughout the Britannia. Earlyon, for instance, in the prefatory epistle, we find the following passage, inwhich Camden explains, at great length, the preparation and research that hehas undertaken for the work:
Thus much give mee leaue to say, that I haue in no wise neglected such thingsas are most materiall to search, and sift out the Truth. I haue attained to someskill of the most ancient, British and English-Saxon tongues: I haue trauailedover all England for the most part, I haue conferred with most skillfull observersin each country, I haue studiously read ouer our owne countrie writers, old andnew, all Greeke and Latine authors which haue once made mention of Britaine.I haue had conference with learned men in other parts of Christendome: I hauebeene diligent in the Records of this Realme. I haue looked into most Libraries,Registers, and memorials of Churches, Cities, and Corporations, I haue pooredvpon many an old Rowle and Evidence: and produced their testimonie (asbeyond all exception) when the cause required.18
16 King James VI and I, ‘Speech to Parliament of 19 March 1604’, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 135.
17 Camden, Britain (1610), π4r.18 Ibid., π4r–v.
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No reader of this passage could accuse Camden of shirking his duty or takinghis research lightly. The passage also, of course, prepares the reader perfectlyfor the quantity and range of testimony that the rest of the book contains. Butit equally reminds the reader that the copiousness of the Britannia relates notonly to its contents, but also to its style. Here, Camden piles up what he hasdone in the kind of list that is a demonstration of the sheer labour involved inrestoring Britain and a hallmark of the work as a whole. In Philemon Hol-land’s English translation, that labour is then emphasized through the per-suasive anaphora: a device that, in George Puttenham’s words, ‘doth muchalter and affect the eare and also the mynde of the hearer, and therefore iscounted a very brave figure’.19 The labour is also, of course, emphasizedthrough the pun on ‘trauailed’: one that is more obvious in the Englishtranslation than in the original Latin, but which nonetheless may also bepresent there (Angliam ferè omnem peragraui).20 This pun seems to have had acertain currency at the time: Richard Carew, for example, likened the intel-lectual labour involved in reading his Svrvey of Cornwall (1605) with the travailof travel, a pun that in his case also picks up on the underlying structuraldevice of his work.21 In Camden’s case, however, the pun draws attention tothe labour not of the reader, but of the author. Copiousness, it suggests, is notthe easy or lazy piling up of words and testimony, but the product of great andwide-ranging intellectual endeavour. Camden can achieve copiousness pre-cisely because he has done so much research and looked to so many differentsources.
As well as signalling his intellectual labour, this kind of copiousness alsodemonstrates the comprehensiveness that underlies Camden’s project. Thatquality may, in fact, be its defining feature: in both content and style, theBritannia is a work that seeks to comprise or include a huge volume ofmaterial. A later example, the equally copious opening sentence of the firstsection of the book, illustrates the point:
BRITAINE or BRITANNIE, which is also ALBION, named in GreekeBPETANIA, BPETANIKH, PPETANIΣ, AΛBIΩN, and AΛOYIΩN, the mostfamous Iland, without comparison, of the whole world; severed from the conti-nent of Europe, by the interflowing of the Ocean, lieth against Germanie andFrance trianglewise; by reason of three Promontories shooting out into diversparts: to wit, BELERIUM, .i. the Cape of S. Burien in Cornwall, Westward;
19 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), Z1r.20 Camden, Britannia (1607), π4r. Peragrare means ‘to wander or travel through’ or ‘to go through, traverse,
to spread through; to search through, penetrate’.21 Richard Carew, The Svrvey of Cornwall (London: S[imon] S[tafford] for John Jaggard, 1602), 2S3r–v: ‘With
the like comfort, in an vnlike resemblance, I will refresh you, who haue vouchsafed to trauaile in the rugged andwearysome path of mine ill-pleasing stile, that now your iourny endeth with the land.’ Shakespeare may bemaking the same pun when Othello, remembering the wanderings of his youth, speaks of his ‘travailoushistory’; see William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), I. iii.140.
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CANTIUM, .i. the Fore-land of Kent, into the East; and TARVISIUM or ORCAS,.i. the point of Catnesse in Scotland, Northward.22
This passage introduces Camden’s initial description of Britain, and in it hefirst ranges over the various names by which the island was known to theGreeks and the Romans and then plots its topography, both in modern termsand in relation to the classical world. As with the passage from the preface, theoverwhelming impression therefore is of an author keen to impress by quan-tity. In this example, however, the point is less a demonstration of his scholarlycredentials and more an illustration of the scope of his project. That scope, inturn, as his careful mapping of the western, eastern, and northern extremitiesof the island illustrates, is integral to the restoration of Britain that is hisfundamental purpose.
What is also striking about this passage is the way in which it demonstratesthe importance that Camden attached to variation. In this, he was followingclassical writers on rhetoric such as Quintilian, who championed varietas as away to avoid the fault of ο� μοειδεια [sameness].23 However, where Quintilianis concerned principally with the risk of tedium and the dulling effect ofο� μοειδεια on the listener, Camden’s point is to range as widely and inclu-sively as possible, in this case over the names for Britain used by classicalwriters. His primary motivation, in other words, is comprehensiveness. Nev-ertheless, this passage does suggest that Camden also recognized the impor-tance of a varied style. This is especially apparent if we turn to the originalLatin and the part of the sentence in which he describes the three promon-tories: ‘BELERIO, quod solem occidentem, CANTIO, quod orientem,TARVISIO, siue ORCADE, quod Septentriones prospectat.’24 While the threeplace names are the same part of speech, the sentence avoids the monotonyagainst which Quintilian warns through the subtle modulation in the defini-tions that Camden gives for each of them. There is also, of course, an addi-tional element of variation in the third element in the list, as here, contraryto his previous practice, Camden provides alternative place names ratherthan a single one. Furthermore, in the precision of his variation here, andthe careful distinction in each of his terms, Camden also manages to avoidthe μακρολογια that Quintilian goes on to warn against in the next sectionof his Institutes.25 There is no prolixity, tautology, or unnecessary repetition.
We should not be surprised that a one-time schoolmaster recognized theimportance of variation or indeed of rhetoric more generally. Camden was
22 Camden, Britain (1610), A1r.23 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols. (Cam-
bridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001),VIII. iii. 52: ‘Peior hac ο� μοειδεια; quae nulla varietatisgratia levat taedium atque est tota coloris unius, qua maxime deprehenditur carens arte oratio, eaque et insententiis et in figuris et in compositione longe non animis solum sed etiam auribus est ingratissima.’
24 Camden, Britannia (1607), A1r.25 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VIII. iii. 53. Μακρολογια was, of course, a danger for all copious texts.
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second master at Westminster School from 1575 to 1593, and headmaster forfour years after that, and he was also the author of a widely used and muchreprinted school textbook, Institvtio Graecae Grammatices Compendaria (1597).What is perhaps surprising is that we can find evidence for this in a work thatapparently disavows rhetorical elegance or polish. As Patrick Collinson haspointed out, what distinguishes the Britannia in Camden’s own mind from hiswork as a historian, primarily in the Annales, is its lack of the rhetorical artcharacteristic of civil and political history.26 Camden acknowledges this lack ofpolish in his preface, when he admits the ‘rough hewed forme’ of the bookand concedes that he has neither ‘waied every word in Goldsmithes scales, asVarro commanded’ nor ‘purposed to picke flowers out of the gardens ofEloquence’.27 As a statement of his style, this seems pretty clear, although hisfondness for metaphorical language at the very point where he denies elo-quence or ornament suggests that he perhaps protests a little too much. Hiswork is not necessarily as unpolished as it purports to be. The presence of thevarious names of Britain in the opening sentence of his description of theisland suggests the same thing, for even if the list does not correspond exactlywith Quintilian’s notion of varietas, it does approach certain early modernconcepts of variation. In Book 1 of the De copia, for instance, Erasmus notedthat ‘[t]he first and simplest form of variation depends on using differentwords which indicate the same thing’: what Camden, in effect, does in hislist.28 At the very least, therefore, his compilation of it suggests someoneworking within a similar humanist framework; with a similar concept of copia.
Furthermore, for Erasmus, copia had another quality as well: a quality that iscloser still to Camden’s practice. As well as the ‘[r]ichness of expression’,involving ‘synonyms, heterosis or enallage, metaphor, variation in word form,equivalence, and other similar methods of diversifying diction’, that we find inQuintilian, Erasmus argued that copia also encompassed ‘[r]ichness of subjectmatter’: that is, ‘the assembling, explaining, and amplifying of arguments bythe use of examples, comparisons, similarities, dissimilarities, opposites, andother like procedures’.29 This aspect of copia is unquestionably at play inCamden’s book. Indeed, one of Camden’s stated aims is to accumulate asmuch subject matter and as many examples as possible. In relation to placenames, for example, he asserts that ‘[t]ruly it was my proiect and purpose toseeke, rake out, and free from darknesse such places as Cæsar, Tacitus,Ptolomee, Antonine the Emperor, Notitia Provinciarum, & other antique
26 Patrick Collinson, ‘One of Us? William Camden and the Making of History’, Transactions of the RoyalHistorical Society, Sixth Series, 8 (1998), 139–63 (at 144–6).
27 Camden, Britain (1610), π4v; see also Camden, Britannia (1607), π4v: ‘Sunt alij qui mihi tenue dicendifilum, & horridulam, ac incomptam orationem obijcient. Agnosco sanè, nec enim aurificis statera (quod iubetVarro) verbum vnumquodque appendi, nec orationis omnes vndique flosculos carpere decreui.’
28 Desiderius Erasmus, De copia/De ratione studii, trans. Betty I. Knott, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R.Thompson (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1978), XXIV: 307.
29 Ibid., 301.
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writers have specified and TIME hath overcast with mist & darknesse byextinguishing, altering, and corrupting their old true names.’30
This approach means that the Britannia is laden with quotations, primarilyfrom classical authors, but also from more modern authorities. These quota-tions correspond with the first stage in Erasmus’ account of copious subjectmatter: the assembling of examples or the gathering of particulars prior todiscourse. Where Camden deviates from Erasmus is in the second and espe-cially the third stages: in part, of course, because of the very different rhetori-cal purpose of his work. Camden’s ‘proiect and purpose’ is not to make anappealing or persuasive oration, but to recover as many traces of the past as hecan.31 Amplification for him is, therefore, concerned squarely with res. In theBritannia amplification meant not augmentation of tone, register, or diction,as Quintilian and the author of the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herenniumdescribe, but increase in volume and quantity of material.32
What enabled Camden to marshal this material and assemble so manyquotations was his diligent use of notebooks. His manuscript remains are filledwith lists of quotations, evidently gathered in anticipation of their future usein either the Britannia or some other composition.33 One of the Harley manu-scripts, for example, contains a series of short notes on Britain in Camden’sautograph, copied from classical authors and also a couple of neo-Latin poets:material germane to the Britannia and some of which, at least, he does seemto have incorporated into the published text.34 In taking reading notes in thisway, and in his use of notebooks more generally, Camden was adaptinganother part of Erasmus’ argument. Later in the De copia Erasmus outlines themeans by which ‘we may acquire an ample supply of examples’ and ‘have themready in our pocket so to speak’.35 That means is a commonplace book underheads, guidelines for which he then exhaustively provides. Camden’s notes arenot as systematically organized as Erasmus’ method, but the principle isessentially the same. He, too, collects commonplaces in preparation for some-thing else.
A good example of Camden’s copiousness, and an illustration of how itrelates to, but also differs from, Erasmus’ concept of copia, is his discussion of
30 Camden, Britain (1610), π5v.31 In judicial and demonstrative rhetoric amplification was used to give weight to an argument or to praise
a person or act. For its relation with copia in both classical and Renaissance rhetoric, see Terence Cave, TheCornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 8.
32 For the connection between amplificatio and persuasive argument, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XII. x.58–62; for amplification of tone and voice, see Rhetorica ad Herennium, III. xiii. 23–III. xiv. 25.
33 For a list of Camden manuscripts, including drafts of the Britannia and collections preliminary to it, seePeter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume I: 1450–1625, Part I: Andrewes-Donne (London: Mansell,1980), 143–65.
34 British Library (hereafter BL), MS Harley 2202, fols. 11r–12r. One of the items that he copied here, forinstance, was a couplet by Joseph Justus Scaliger (‘Vicit Aremoricas animosa Britannia gentes,/ Et deditimposito nomina prisca iugo’), which also appears in his discussion of the ‘Britannici Armorici’; see Camden,Britannia (1607), G4v.
35 Erasmus, De copia, 636.
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the etymology of Britain. His examples here assemble his argument in the waythat Erasmus stipulates. He begins, as we might expect, with Geoffrey ofMonmouth, summarizing his well-known Trojan narrative, but he then out-lines a whole range of alternatives, some familiar, some less so:
[O]thers there be that fetch the name of Britain from some other causes. SirThomas Eliot, by degree a worshipfull knight, and a man of singular learning,draweth it from the Greeke fountaine, to wit Πρυτανεια. a terme that theAthenians gave to their publike Finances or Revenues. Humfrey Lhuyd, reputedby our countrymen, for knowledge of Antiquitie, to carie, after a sort, with himall the credit and authoritie, referreth it confidently to the British word PRID-CAIN, that is to say, a pure white Forme. Pomponius Lætus reporteth, that theBritons out of Armorica in France, gaue it that name. Goropius Becanus saith, thatthe Danes sought heere to plant themselues, and so named it BRIDANIA, that is,Free Dania. Others derive it from PRVTENIA, a region in Germanie. Bodinesupposeth, that it tooke the name of BRETTA the Spanish word, which signifiethEarth: and Forcatulus, of BRITHIN, which, as we reade in Athenæus, the Greekesused for drinke. Others bring it from the BRUTII in Italy, whom the Græcianscall Bρεττιοι.36
As it happens, this learned and comprehensive list turns out to be a catalogueof mistaken beliefs about the etymology of Britain, and therefore an argumentfor the difficulty of resolving the matter. ‘But herein, as we cannot but smileat the fictions of strangers,’ Camden reflects, ‘so the devices carried by ourowne countrymen passe not currant with general allowance.’ As he thenconcludes, ‘verily, in these & such like cases, an easier matter it is to impeachthe false, than to teach and mainteine a truth.’ He can, in other words,assemble a copious argument about the etymology of Britain, with examples,comparisons, and opposites, but that argument remains a matter of conjec-ture, not proof.
Conjecture was an important part of Camden’s historical method, and inthe preface to the Britannia he offers a robust defence of it. ‘Many happily willinsult over me for that I have adventured to hunt after the originals of namesby coniectures,’ he asserts there, ‘who if they proceed on to reiect allconiectures, I feare me a great part of liberall learning and humane knowl-edge will be utterly outcast into banishment.’ Pessimistically, he adds that ‘theedge of our understanding is so blunt that we are of necessity forced toprosecute many matters in all professions coniecturally.’ Shortly afterwards hedefines conjectures as ‘certain detections of things vnknowne’, and then addsan analogy to illustrate further their place in the pursuit of knowledge: ‘I havealwaies thought that they were to be accounted among the skuppers where-with TIME worketh and draweth VERITIE out of Democritus his deepe
36 Camden, Britain (1610), A3r. For Geoffrey’s account of the Trojan colonization of Britain, see The Historyof the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), i. 3–i. 15.
234 Angus Vine
dungeon.’37 Camden’s term here, ‘skuppers’, is a curious one, and accordingto the Oxford English Dictionary a nonce-use, but it is one with importantimplications for his defence of conjecture as a method. A scupper wouldnormally describe the opening in a ship’s side on a level with the deck to allowwater to run away, but it is clear from his original Latin term (antlias) thatCamden was getting at something else here. Antlia means a kind of hand-pump: Martial, for example, in his Epigrams, 9. 18, speaks of the toil involvedin pumping water up to his villa with this piece of machinery.38 Likening thepursuit of knowledge to an obscure piece of agricultural equipment may, onthe face of it, seem odd, but Camden’s point, as the echo of Martial’s epigramshows, is to capture the intellectual labour involved in conjecture and therebydefend it. That sense of labour is also present, perhaps even more strongly, inthe only other citation for the word given in the Oxford Latin Dictionary: in hisLives of the Caesars Suetonius speaks of Tiberius condemning a man of eques-trian rank in antliam.39 Here, therefore, antlia is a form of punishment,perhaps akin to the modern treadmill. While Camden clearly does not havethis penal sense in mind, the classical echoes do have a particular rhetoricalfunction: to persuade the reader that conjecture is not something easy, ashort-cut to historical knowledge, but the kind of intellectual effort appropri-ate to his grand antiquarian project.
The Britannia was not the only work in which Camden relied on conjecture.In the Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605), the miscellaneouscollection on which he worked at the same time, he turns frequently toconjecture as he speculates on the derivation of names.40 Nor was he the onlyhistorically minded writer or scholar to rely on it. Indeed, according to FrancisBacon, writers of certain kinds of history had no choice but to depend on it.‘[H]e that vndertaketh the story of a time, specially of any length’, Baconargues, ‘cannot but meet with many blankes, and spaces, which hee must beforced to fill vp, out of his own wit and coniecture.’41 Those who used conjec-ture in a similar way to Camden included Gabriel Harvey’s younger brotherRichard and the Catholic antiquary and historian Edmund Bolton. In hisPhiladelphvs, Or A Defence of Brutes, and the Brutans History (1593) Harvey arguesthat ‘it is as lawfull to coniecture for Brute as against him, seeing he is but denied
37 Camden, Britain (1610), π4v.38 Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA,
and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), IX. xviii. 3–4: ‘sed de valle brevi quas det sitientibus hortis/ curvalaboratas antlia tollit aquas.’
39 Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 143. See Suetonius, Lives of theCaesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 51. 2: ‘omnisqueamicitias et familiaritates, etiam quibus ea funeris sui curam moriens demandaverat, intra breve tempus afflixit,uno ex iis, equestris ordinis viro, et in antliam condemnato.’
40 See William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, the inhabitants thereof, their Languages,Names, Surnames, Empreses, Wise speeches, Poësies, and Epitaphes (London: G[eorge] E[ld] for Simon Waterson,1605), F3v, H3v–H4r, and Q1v.
41 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2000), 2C3v (66).
William Camden’s Britannia 235
onely by coniectures and probabilities’, thus defending the conjecturality of theGalfridian history on the grounds that refutations of it are themselves just asuncertain.42 Bolton, too, turns to conjecture when it comes to the early historyof Britain and, in his dialogue The Elements of Armories (1610), he exemplifiesexactly what Bacon had said:
In our BRITAIN the nation of the BRIGANTS (beside whatsoeuer theirEnsignements else) had shields painted blew, according to the knowne verse inSENECA his deification of CLAVDIVS NERO, as the GERMAN ARII (saithCORNELIVS TACITVS) had shields painted blacke. And by all antiquity it isapparent, that blew was not the colour of the BRIGANTS only, but of allBRITANS: perhaps for that (as Ilanders) they were inuironed with the likecolour’d OCEAN, so (when place shall be for such coniectures) it were not vaineto pretend that they also bare shields distinguished with markes of honor, as theTROIANS, and at TROY they did.43
The argument here is conjectural in that Bolton’s speaker does not have anyproof as to whether every Briton bore arms or not. His speaker thus fills thatgap ‘out of his own wit’: in this instance, extrapolating from what he knowsabout one tribe to propose an argument about the Britons as a whole. It isrevealing, though, that he does this with a certain coyness. Just as Camdenadmits that his reliance on conjecture will not be to every reader’s taste, soBolton’s speaker here shirks the question of whether this is actually the rightplace to entertain a conjectural argument about the past.
Copiousness was an inevitable consequence of Camden’s conjecturalmethod. Since a conjecture was not a truth, it admitted alternatives, and sinceit was not an authority, it required multiple testimonies to be persuasive. Thisis something that Camden himself recognized. In the Remaines he defends hispiling up of material, his dependence on quantity, on precisely these grounds:‘I had purposed heere, lest I might seeme heereafter to lay my foundations inthe sands of coniecture, and not on grounds of truth and authoritie, to havegiven you the signification of such words as offer themselves most frequent inthe compositions of our meere English names.’44 In the Britannia we see thatconsequence played out again and again. The discussion of the etymology ofthe Saxons is an exemplary case. First, Camden outlines the uncertainty of thematter and the unreliability of most authors on the subject: ‘The originall andEtymologie of the Saxons, like as of other nations, not onely Monkes ignorant,as they were, in learned antiquitie, but also latter Writers, being men of someexact and exquisite iudgment, have enwrapped with forged & fained fables.’Then he details many of these beliefs, drawing on both older sources and
42 Richard Harvey, Philadelphvs, Or A Defence of Brutes, and the Brutans History (London: John Wolfe, 1593), B2r.Harvey’s principal targets here are George Buchanan and the Italian historian Tito Livio Frulovisi, both ofwhom had rejected the Galfridian narrative.
43 Edmund Bolton, The Elements of Armories (London: George Eld, 1610), D4r.44 Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, F4r.
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more recent humanist historians such as Albert Krantz and JohannesReuchlin, before tentatively advancing his own view that ‘that conceit of thebest learned Germans may seeme worthy of acceptance, and to bee preferredbefore the rest, who suppose that the Saxons descended from the Sacæ, a mostnoble Nation, and of much worth in Asia, and so called, as one would say,Saco-sones, that is, the sonnes of the Sacæ.’45 The extended etymology thereforedemonstrates both the multiplicity of this kind of conjecture and how it resultsin copious subject matter and copious expression.
II
One of the striking things about the Britannia is the way in which Camdenpresents the material therein as testimonia, not exempla.46 This reminds us, ashis conjectures also do, that with the Britannia we are in the realm of argumentas much as illustration. Testimony, as Richard Serjeantson has shown, was‘probative’ rather than ‘illustrative’, and thus differed from examples whosepurpose was ‘to shed light on a point, not to attempt to prove it’.47 This meantthat testimony in the early modern period was understood ‘not as a form ofpre-argumentative evidence’, but as the end of the ratiocinative process: thatis, as ‘authoritative confirmation for what had already been argued’.48 In thecase of the Britannia, therefore, the question that we need to ask is not justwhat sources, or even what kind of sources, Camden brought to bear, but alsowhat he was trying to prove, what argument he was trying to make throughtheir copious use. The simple answer is that series of localized observationsabout origins, customs, and names that constitute the Britannia as a whole. Butthe more complex answer is the restoration of antiquity and Britain that is hisstated purpose in the work, and it is to that that we therefore need to return.
Camden’s restoration was at heart a unifying project. While the contents ofthe Britannia are diverse, there is throughout a concerted effort to demon-strate common origins, shared customs, and unified bloodlines. Early on, forexample, he emphasizes the union of the Romans and the Britons, somethingthat he explains by the Roman practice of setting up colonies in territoriesthat they conquered. As he concludes, in language that draws attention to thegenealogical importance of this argument, ‘meet it is we should beleeve, thatthe Britans and Romans in so many ages, by a blessed and joyfull mutuallingraffing, as it were, have growen into one stocke and nation.’49 In a similarvein, he suggests that ‘the Picts came from no other place at all, but were verienaturall Britans themselves, even the right progenie of the most ancient
45 Camden, Britain (1610), L3r.46 Camden, Britannia (1607), π4r.47 R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony: the Artless Proof’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin
Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181–94 (at 189).48 R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Britans,’ and strikingly, in a passage that appears for the first time in the 1607edition, that the Lowland Scots ‘are . . . nothing lesse than Scots, butdescended from the very same Germane originall, that we English men are’.50
The cumulative effect of these passages is to contribute to a corporate Britishidentity and to efface the genealogical differences between the variouspeoples who colonized the island and are the ancestors of its current inhab-itants. After the accession of James I, as we have already seen, such passagesalso become an antiquarian defence of the new king’s policies. Camdenhimself is open about this, as his concluding remarks on the common heritageof the English and the Lowland Scots make clear:
In which regard, so farre am I from working any discredit unto them, that I haverather respectively loved them alwaies, as of the same bloud and stocke, yea andhonoured them too, even when the Kingdomes were divided: but now muchmore, since it hath pleased our almightie, and most mercifull God, that weegrowe united in one bodie, under one most Sacred head of the Empire, to thejoy, happinesse, welfare, and safetie, of both Nations, which I heartily wish andpray for.51
Not everyone agreed with Camden here: one contemporary (probably Scot-tish) reader wrote in brown ink alongside the equivalent passage of the 1607edition ‘mendacium absurdissimum’.52
For Camden, union was itself a civilizing force, something that could bringpeace to previously divided realms and embodied the politics of moderationthat he shared with his monarch.53 As he puts it at the end of a discussion ofGildas’s De calamitate excidio et conquestu Britanniae, ‘since . . . we are all now bya certain engraffing or commixtion become one nation, mollified and civi-lized with Religion, and good Arts, let us meditate and consider, both whatthey were, and also what we ought to be.’54 This moderation and civility, inother words, are the values that his book seeks to inculcate.55 They are also
50 Ibid., K2r and K4r; and Camden, Britannia (1607), H1r.51 Camden, Britain (1610), K4r.52 See Glasgow University Library, shelf mark Bn1-b.1, H1r. The same reader was equally exercised by
Camden’s arguments about the Picts, dismissing them as ‘mendacium insigne’ (G5v) and ‘mendaciumegregium’ (G6r).
53 For an overview of James’s moderate politics, and the irenic and ecumenical ideas behind them, see W. B.Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
54 Camden, Britain (1610), I5v. Camden owned a copy of Polydore Vergil’s 1525 edition of Gildas’s history(now Westminster Abbey Library, CB 36 [1]), from which he quotes at various points, and often at great length,in the Britannia. For a description of Camden’s library and a list of its contents (although not its sum total), seeRichard L. DeMolen, ‘The Library of William Camden’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128(1984), 327–409.
55 I use civility here not to designate orderly behaviour, good governance, or the set of values associated witha good citizen, but to mean behaviour or speech appropriate to civil interaction, or politeness (see OED, s.v.‘civility’, n. iii. 12[a]): the sense in which George Pettie uses the word in his translation of Stefano Guazzo’s TheCivile Conuersation (London: Richard Watkins, 1581), E6r: ‘And therefore wee cannot oftentimes; nor ought notfaile in ciuilitie and curtesie, in respect only of our owne duetie. For wee are bound to resalute those whichsalute vs, bee they our inferiours or equals.’
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values that return us to copiousness. For these are the values that enabledCamden to compile his book, to assemble his copious subject matter anddevelop his copious style. We have already seen how the Britannia was born outof an exchange with Ortelius, and it was thanks to similar exchanges thatCamden was able to extend it. The comprehensiveness of his projectdepended on the generosity of others; on their readiness to supply him withmaterial pertinent to it. His restorative project was therefore a collaborativeone as well as a copious one.56
Camden himself actively elicited this kind of contribution from his readers.His preface ends with him inviting them to correct any errors in the book andsupply any material that he might have omitted, which he would then endeav-our to incorporate into subsequent editions:
Others may be more skilfull and more exactly obserue the particularities of theplaces where they are conversant, If they, or any other whosoever, will advertiseme wherein I am mistaken, I will amend it with manifold thankes, if I haveunwitting omitted ought, I will supply it, if I have not fully explicated any point,upon their better information I will more cleere it, if it proceed from goodmeaning, and not from a spirit of contradiction and quareling, which doe notbefit such as are well bred, and affect the truth.57
We know that readers, from Nicholas Roscarrock in Cornwall to ReginaldBainbrigg in Westmorland, did exactly what he asked. In the case ofRoscarrock, he wrote to Camden as the 1607 edition was in press, correctingthree errors that he had detected in the previous edition and sending him aseries of inscriptions, which Camden did manage to incorporate into his finaltext.58 Camden also seems to have elicited contributions by sending out ques-tions or enquiries to like-minded individuals around the country: manuscriptequivalents to the printed questionnaires used by later generations of anti-quaries to gather information.59 Among Camden’s papers there is a docu-ment, in his own hand, titled ‘Enquiries to be made of Mr Claxton, touchingthe Picts Wall’.60 This document, which probably dates from the early 1590s, isa memorandum to remind him to send a set of questions to William Claxton,an antiquary from Durham. The essence of these questions, as the beginningof the memorandum makes clear, was to discover ‘[w]hat rare matter heknoweth as concerning the Pictes wall’.
56 In this respect, Camden was not unusual. As Daniel Woolf has pointed out, the efforts of many of the mostcelebrated antiquaries and historians ‘were highly dependent upon voluntary contributions of epitaphs, coins,inscriptions, and muniments from interested individuals in all parts of England’; see The Social Circulation of thePast: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 154.
57 Camden, Britain (1610), π5v.58 See Vine, In Defiance of Time, 91–3.59 For these, see Adam Fox, ‘Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British
Isles, 1650–1800’, The Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 593–621.60 BL, MS Harley 374, fol. 20r.
William Camden’s Britannia 239
Camden’s invitation to his readers also reminds us of the emphasis that heput on civility and courteous scholarly exchange. Outside the Britannia, thatmode of exchange is most obvious in his correspondence, much of which, asit happens, concerns material that would later end up in his antiquarian book.In August 1604, for example, he wrote to Justus Lipsius about the birthplaceof Constantine the Great, correcting an assumption that Lipsius had made inhis Admiranda sive de magnitudine Romana libri quatuor (1598) in terms that arestrikingly reminiscent of the end of the preface to the Britannia.61 He makes itclear in the letter that he corrects Lipsius not out of intellectual one-upmanship, but in a spirit of collaboration and the desire for knowledge andtruth. Much of his correspondence with Ortelius is in the same vein. Hisearliest surviving letter to him, for example, contains a characteristically cour-teous request regarding the British section of the Antonine Itineraries (‘siquod manuscriptum Antonini A. Itinerarium habes, vt Britanniarum itineramihi describes, te humillimè rogo’), while a letter of January 1586 endswith him asking Ortelius whether the fifth-century rhetorician ChiriusFortunatianus said anything about Britain (‘Interim mi optime Orteli vale. Etsi quid sit in Chirio Fortunatiano, quod ad Britanniam faciat, doce’).62 In bothcases, the request is couched in terms that signal Camden’s civility, and inboth cases, too, the request concerns material relevant to the Britannia.
Such requests were, of course, integral to Camden’s project. Without them,it is doubtful that he would ever have been able to compile such a copiousbook. The importance that he placed on his exchanges with Ortelius alone isattested to by another of their letters. In this letter, evidently responding tosomething that Camden had written, Ortelius suggests that Camden consid-ered him the midwife of his project.63 The letter makes it clear that Orteliuswas uncomfortable with this, seemingly out of a sense of modesty that is inkeeping with the spirit of their correspondence as a whole. The repeatedobstetric language of the letter is, however, testimony to Camden’s belief thathis friend had been integral to the genesis of his book. It also revealsCamden’s readiness to acknowledge his debt, and this was the case moregenerally as well, as he makes little attempt to hide the collaborative nature ofthe Britannia. In the text itself he acknowledges over and over again the debtthat he owes to others and incorporates the material sent to him in a barelytransformed state. A striking illustration of this is his description of the
61 William Camden to Justus Lipsius, 18 August 1604, in V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni, et illustrium virorum ad G.Camdenum epistolæ, ed. Thomas Smith (London: Richard Chiswell, 1691), 64: ‘Ex quo Admiranda illa tua, tedignissima, in lucem prodierunt, V. Cl. Gestiit mihi animus tecum paucis de loco natali Constantini maximiagere; non altercandi vel calumniandi studio, . . . sed cupiditate quadam cognoscendi, & veritatem, si fieripossit, ab injuriâ vindicandi.’
62 William Camden to Abraham Ortelius, 4 August 1577, and William Camden to Abraham Ortelius, 31January 1586; see Abrahami Ortelii . . . epistvlæ, 168 and 335.
63 Abraham Ortelius to William Camden, 1 April 1584, in V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni . . . epistolæ, 27: ‘Magnoperème exhilararunt literæ tuæ, quod ex iis intelligam Britanniam tuam te parturire; sed me obstetricem appellarevideris, aut hallucinor. Imo Lucina certè non sum, mi Camdene: si opem tamen adferre viribus meis potero,habebis me paratissimum, & extra jocum.’
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Boduoc stone in Glamorgan, which repeats almost word-for-word the accountgiven to him by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff, in a letter of 14 July1603.64 He also usually mentions his correspondents by name. The result is acopious book, but also a book whose own compositional practice embodiesthose qualities of moderation and civility that it urges on its readers.
Copia and collaboration therefore come together in Camden’s book in away that is central to both its politics and its restoration of antiquity andBritain. They also together produce a text that, up until Holland’s 1610translation at least, revels in its own expansiveness. With its successive editions,and the growing number of contributions from others, the Britannia consti-tutes an ever-increasing repository of Britain’s past. While some of the othertexts discussed in this special issue reveal anxieties about copia, finding strat-egies to contain as well as generate narrative abundance, Camden’s book isalways looking for more material and anticipating new directions and furthercontributions. This openness enables it to escape one of the dangers inherentin encyclopaedic histories, especially printed ones: superannuation or beingperpetually out of date. For the antiquary, there is necessarily always morematerial to accumulate and more information to gather. Camden’s recogni-tion of this acknowledges that his work will never be finished, but also meansthat he avoids many of the tensions of early modern encyclopaedism that AnnBlair has recently described.65 For Camden, the many and distinct strands ofhis project are not a problem, but part of the point. Thus when later scholarssuch as Regnerius Vitellius tried to close down the work, reduce its strands,and restrict its copiousness, they did miss the point and also Camden’s under-lying historical purpose.66 For Camden, the restoration of antiquity andBritain was not a single task, but a multiple and continuous process. It is truethat when Ortelius ‘dealt earnestly’ with him in the 1570s, he had had some-thing much more specific, and also rather different, in mind. But Camden’sunderstanding of the task, as each and every edition of the Britannia makesclear, meant that his restoration could not be anything but copious andcollaborative.
University of Stirling
64 See Camden, Britain (1610), 644; and BL, MS Cotton Julius F. VI, fol. 298r–v.65 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2010), 168–72.66 Vitellius, a native of Zierikzee, produced the first epitome of the Britannia, which was printed by William
Jansson at Amsterdam in 1617: Gvilielmi Camdeni, Viri Clarissimi Britannia, Sive Florentissimorvm Regnorvm Angliæ,Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, & Insularum adjacentium ex intima antiquitate descriptio. In Epitomen Contracta à Regnerio VitellioZirizæo, & Tabulis Chorographicis illustrata. The first English epitome followed in 1626: John Bill’s The abridgmentof Camden’s Britan[n]ia. This work, which Bill openly describes as ‘compendious’ rather than copious, goesfurther still: it closes down Camden’s copiousness to such an extent that the book is shorn entirely of thequotations that make up so much of the original text. What is left is the geographical framework provided bythe county maps and the barest historical exposition.
