Early Modern Chorographies

The delineation of an “Elizabethan discovery of England,” made by A. L. Rowse in 1950, has in some respects stood the test of time.¹ Rowse drew attention to the wave of cartographic and written descriptions of the nation and its constituent counties that began in the reign of Elizabeth and continued through the early decades of the seventeenth century. The evidence for his case, simply in terms of the volume of material—whether published at the time or brought into the public domain subsequently—is compelling. One might even speak of a genre specific to this period: chorography had classical roots, was established across continental Europe in the sixteenth century, and flourished through the late-Tudor and early-Stuart eras in England. But in other respects Rowse’s thesis, underpinned as it was by a desire to celebrate the reign of Elizabeth, prompts some questions. In particular, once we accept the complexity of describing place, and once we acknowledge also the need for any author to make decisions about what is worth describing, and as a result what might be seen to constitute the land, we might ask about the politics of this “discovery.” What was being discovered? In whose interests were the discoveries being made? And how was the nation being shaped as a result?

In recent decades, a range of scholarship has trained fresh eyes upon this material, helping us to address these questions. Studies of history writing have demonstrated the ways in which preexisting narratives of British history came under intense pressure at this time, especially due to the analysis of documents, places, and objects that was promoted by antiquarianism. William Camden’s Britannia, which combines history and topography in a manner that would help to define the genre of chorography, stands as a key text in this regard.² Other scholars have examined advances in the study of geography, a discipline within which chorography assumed a position as one of three recognized branches.³ Efforts to examine chorographies as texts, situated within the period’s rich literary culture, also demand attention. For Richard Helgerson, chorographies developed new ways of describing place, and, as a result, they assume a key position within the fraught politics of the early seventeenth century, a period in which English men and women were weighing up competing loyalties to their monarch and their land.⁴ Others have followed Helgerson’s methods of analysis, if not his arguments, considering chorography in relation to arguments about representations of political cultures, social and economic change, and a culture of localism.⁵ Still others have embraced the analysis of maps, which stand as the period’s most striking development in the conceptualization of space.⁶ While attention to chorography has informed studies of a range of authors, from Spenser to Shakespeare, many studies have focused in particular on the achievement of Michael Drayton’s epic poetic version of the genre, Poly-Olbion.⁷

This article will consider the position of those who wrote chorographies as they set out to forge new models for the description of place. Before the reign of Elizabeth, little writing that resembled chorography was done in England; before the 1570s, no one had attempted to describe a county. Yet, within the space of a few generations, chorography emerged as a recognizable and influential genre, shaped by clear, even rigid conventions. While it did not last, it was a genre that mattered at the time, performing important cultural functions for its writers and readers. It promised to make sense of their environment; it helped people to determine what mattered in their nation and its counties. The article will begin by considering the reasons why people were attending more closely to place and its influence upon identity. Second, the men (for chorography, in its most obvious and public forms, was an exclusively male-authored genre) who wrote chorographies and their methods of research are examined. Third, the texts themselves are analyzed, outlining their principal structures and styles and considering their ultimate achievements. And finally the functions of poetry in chorography are considered, concluding with some remarks on Poly-Olbion.

William Cunningham, writing at the very beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, explained that while cosmography “describeth the worlde” and “Geography th’earthe”:

Chorographie sheweth the partes of th’earth divided in themselves. And severally describeth, the portes, Rivers, Havens, Fluddes, Hilles, Mountaynes, Cities, Villages, Buildings, Fortresses, Walles, yea and every particuler thing, in that parte conteined.

Chorography consisted, he concluded, in showing “the qualitie … and quantitie of any thinge.”⁸ While this definition may seem in retrospect to be hopelessly capacious, it gives a valuable sense of chorography as an emergent genre, which required explanation for an English audience, and of the scholarly effort being devoted to situating it in relation to cognate textual forms. It also serves as a reminder of a need, when considering the contexts within which chorography emerged, to spread one’s net widely. For, despite its classical origins, the development of early modern chorography was intertwined with advances in fields such as geography, history, and mathematics. It was also shaped, I want to argue, by the social and political context of Elizabethan England. Like so many other disciplines, the field of geography was revitalized in Renaissance Europe by the study of classical works. For the more technical aspects of the discipline, such as surveying and map-making, advances in mathematics, informed above all by the study of Euclid, were critical.⁹ For the discipline as a whole, the key text was Ptolemy’s Geographia, which received fresh attention in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century. According to Ptolemy, geography deals with the whole world, its purpose being “to fix positions, and show the relationships of places by means of parallels.”¹⁰ Chorography, as one branch of geography, focused on smaller regions, its purpose being to describe places as closely as possible. By the time it reached England it had been established across much of Europe for about one hundred years: Flavio Biondo’s Italia Illustrata, for instance, was published in 1474, while Germany produced its own tradition of chorography through the sixteenth century.¹¹ By the Elizabethan period, the study of geography was expanding at the English universities. Although this was impelled largely by interest in foreign discovery and conquest, the genre of chorography also took hold.¹² Moreover, given the widespread acceptance of the tenet that environmental factors shaped individual characters, the knowledge of place always promised to open the way to a more fundamental understanding of people.

As contemporaries recognized, however, the description of places was never easily separated from an interest in their histories. Hence chorography was almost always intertwined with local history, and by the Elizabethan period this had become an accepted characteristic of the English genre. Furthermore, the underlying impetus to consider the past was given fresh direction and credibility by the rise of antiquarianism, a method of historical study rooted in the analysis of places and artifacts. The antiquarian looked for evidence of the past in the land rather than in medieval historical narratives. The seductive myths of “the British history,” most notably, had held that Britain had been founded by Brute (or Brutus), a Trojan warrior and descendant of Aeneas, who landed at Totnes, Devon, conquered a race of giants, and then went forward to establish London (“Troynovant”). Antiquarianism relentlessly chipped away at these narratives, replacing them with a commitment to reveal England’s Roman heritage. Camden, as he worked toward the first publication of his Britannia in 1586, positioned himself firmly within this context. He was influenced most directly by the Flemish cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius, who was keen that someone should write a chorography of Britain.¹³ Camden’s use of Latin signalled his intention to engage with a European readership of intellectuals, situating the nation within a pan-European narrative of civilization.

But Camden also found a native audience within a country that was ready for the Britannia’s model of a national identity rooted at once in history and geography. People were curious about the idea of the nation in a way that they had not been before. One major reason for this was the Reformation, an event that effectively cut England’s most tangible link with continental Europe. The taunts of the Catholics that this novel experiment could never last—“Where was your Church before Luther?”—prompted scrutiny not only of the past, but equally of the present and the future. The dissolution of the monasteries, moreover, released much manuscript evidence about the nation’s history, albeit in an often chaotic manner, for the first time. But other factors were at work as well. The growth in the production of printed materials, after the technology had been introduced to the country late in the fifteenth century, proved an important force for cultural definition. The translation of the Bible into English was a key moment in the Reformation, while that of classical works furthered the spread of intellectual debate. In due course the press circulated the maps and written works that sought to define England. When we consider the achievement of Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales (1579), it is perhaps too easy to concentrate on the advances in cartography that made it possible rather than the technology of print that made it so widely available.

The Tudor and early Stuart periods also prompted intense questioning about the parameters of the nation. Throughout this article I write mainly about England as a nation because that was the unit that meant most to its average inhabitant; however, the definition of nationhood has never been a straightforward matter in the British Isles. “What ish my nation?” asks the Irishman Macmorris, fighting alongside a Welshman and a Scot in the army of an Englishman, in Shakespeare’s Henry V.¹⁴ His question, explored so searchingly in Shakespeare’s history plays, resonated through this era. The Tudors embraced their Welsh heritage, and in the reign of Elizabeth several writers attended to the history and geography of Wales. David Powel’s Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales, was published in 1584, while the Welshman Humphrey Lhwyd was responsible for the first attempt at a chorographical description of all of Britain, in his Breviary of Britain (1573). The popular author Thomas Churchyard, meanwhile, published The Worthines of Wales (1587), a poem that was in part a personal travelogue and in part a more earnest exercise in chorographical description. Despite these assertions of cultural difference, however, the political history of the time was a story of increasingly greater integration of Wales into England. Scotland was a different matter, sharing a version of Protestantism with its southern neighbor but neither its Roman heritage nor its political and legal structures. The accession of the Scottish James VI to the English throne, as James I in 1603, changed this situation, but not as much as he had hoped. The union he pursued early in his English reign would not eventuate until the eighteenth century. And Ireland, finally, remained a troublesome colonial outpost in this period, separated not only geographically, but crucially also by the natives’ adherence to Catholicism. English chorographers manifestly vacillate on the question of whether Scotland is part of their nation, but nobody seriously claims that Ireland belongs. Edmund Spenser’s brutal colonial blueprint, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), stands as a more instructive document of English attitudes.

Within England, political and administrative structures provided further impetus toward reflection upon the nation. By comparison with most other European countries at this time, England had a highly efficient bureaucracy. Yet in a period in which the Wars of the Roses were by no means a distant memory, and in which the Crown did not maintain a standing army, the management of government depended heavily on interaction between the center and members of the nobility and gentry residing across the land. Country gentlemen typically assumed roles as justices of the peace and members of parliament, as well as innumerable more specialized duties. In all these roles they performed vital mediating functions: “sensitive to local needs and peculiarities,” yet essentially loyal to the Crown all the while.¹⁵ Although these roles were in the main longstanding, historians agree that Tudor administrations substantially increased their demands upon them.¹⁶ Other scholars have identified, at a cultural level, “a new awareness” among the Elizabethan gentry “of their place and importance in society.”¹⁷ Such roles also brought these men together physically: the Quarter Sessions gathered the JPs of a county four times a year, while MPs were drawn to London for the period’s frequent, though irregular, parliaments. These occasions provided ample time to reflect upon regional and national identities; indeed, it was within this context, among these kind of men, that the Society of Antiquaries was established in the 1580s. The London-based Camden was a member, but so too was the Cornishman Richard Carew, author of The Survey of Cornwall (1602).

The Society of Antiquaries also documents the interests of these men when they were not directly involved with legal and administrative matters. While it retained the commitment to a historical method, as evident in Camden’s work, it tended increasingly toward a study of “the practical past.” This was a history

that was immediately important in their own lives and thoughts, and discoverable through the subjects of portentous antiquarian solemnity, such as ancient law, the origins of institutions, offices, customs, privileges, and the like, and in the history of land-tenure and of the measurement of land.¹⁸

The fact that many of these interests center upon the nation’s land as property is hardly surprising, given the unquestioned alignment at the time between landownership and authority and given also the considerable dynamism in the Tudor land market. The dissolution of the monasteries had led to widespread transfers of estates, while in subsequent decades the market was stimulated by social and economic forces, such as population growth and inflation. The county gentleman, who was often highly educated, typically wanted instead to be able to identify order and stability.¹⁹ These desires drove him not only to antiquarianism, but also to studies in genealogy and heraldry, concerned with the relation between families and the land. This was the context, then, within which so many county gentlemen looked to chorography.

The desire to investigate the land was not entirely new in sixteenth-century England. Antiquarian studies had roots stretching back into the fifteenth century, while descriptions based on journeys, such as those taken by Giraldus Cambrensis late in the twelfth century, had a long heritage.²⁰ Indeed many Tudor writers looked, for models as well as for evidence, back to the description of Britain left by Julius Caesar or to the “Antonine Itinerary,” which recorded routes and distances between settlements in the Roman Empire. But the tradition that produced such a wave of texts from the middle decades of Elizabeth’s reign may reasonably be said to have begun with the work of John Leland in the reign of Henry VIII. In this section, I want to look briefly at Leland himself, before considering the methods and goals of those who followed him, more often than not consulting his notes in the process.

Leland began traveling the country in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries, determined to catalogue the contents of monastic libraries at a moment when their future appeared uncertain. But along the way his agenda shifted, and he began instead to describe the land through which he traveled.²¹ Through a series of long journeys across England and Wales, he recorded comments about settlements and land use, information about properties and their owners, and details of distances between one place and another.²² What Leland planned to do with these notes has been shrouded in mystery ever since he lapsed into insanity. In 1546–1547 Leland presented “A Newe Yeares Gyfte” to Henry VIII, in which he related his efforts to describe the “opulent and ample realme” of the king. He had traveled, he writes, “in your domynions both by the see coastes and the myddle partes, sparynge neyther labour nor costes by the space of these.vi. yeares past”; and from this survey he promises to fashion “such a descripcion … that it shall be no mastery after, for the graver or painter to make the lyke by a perfect example.”²³ Most likely he had in mind something visual and cartographic, although it is unlikely that he would simply have discarded his notes, close as they were to being publishable as they stood.²⁴ For subsequent generations, however, the lack of finished form was part of Leland’s appeal, since his accumulation of information could be deployed to serve the interests of various different kinds of endeavor.

In particular, we might identify two distinct Elizabethan approaches to the description of England, each of which was informed by Leland. The first, characterized by a critical or analytical use of information gleaned from sources including Leland himself, is typified by William Harrison’s contribution to Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. Harrison readily admits his lack of fieldwork, stating that he has rarely “travelled 40. miles foorthright at one journey in all my life.”²⁵ But this approach frees him to look critically at the sources that he has to hand. A large part of his “Description of Britain” is topographical, concerned particularly to catalogue river systems, but another part stands as one of the Elizabethan period’s greatest efforts in social observation. The “Description of England” (which was originally part of “The Description of Britain,” though it has since been published as an independent work), is divided into thematic chapters.²⁶ Harrison has, for instance, chapters on “the foode and dyet of thenglish,” “their apparrell and attire,” “degrees of people,” “venimous beastes,” “English Saffron,” and “sundry Mineralls.” He also writes sensitively, from personal experience, of social and economic changes. The second approach to Leland, which was ultimately more influential to the development of chorography, was to adopt him as a model for a research method. For men such as Camden, Leland directed the way forward simply by having traveled the land; the goal for his own generation was to combine the labors of travel with the critical insight of antiquarianism. Looking beyond Camden himself, the sheer demands of such research often justified a focus on one county rather than the nation as a whole. William Lambarde, for instance, author of the first county chorography, The Perambulation of Kent, described amassing antiquarian information relevant to all of England but deciding “to make estimation and trial” of his method in a description of his native county.²⁷ In recognition, perhaps, of the size of the task, he never attempted descriptions of any more counties.

The accretion of local detail in Lambarde’s Perambulation signaled the future of chorography. Indeed the expansion of Camden’s own book, over its six Latin editions between 1586 and 1607, traces a similar trajectory. Camden, who was not born into the gentry himself, not only became a member of the Society of Antiquaries, but also served from 1597 until his death in 1623 as Clarenceux King of Arms in the influential College of Arms. These activities made him acutely aware of the ways in which members of the nobility and gentry perceived the nation. For them the matter was intensely personal; just as voting rights were largely dependent at this time upon landownership, so a longstanding proprietorial interest in the land was felt to confer a more profound sense of enfranchisement. Chorography, with its concentration on the relation between place and the past, promised to underwrite these perceptions. And the Britannia increasingly fell into line with these expectations, greatly expanding its engagement with the nation’s people and places and intertwining genealogy with antiquarianism.²⁸ It shows the land as it was understood by his readers, “streamlin[ing] its topographical and antiquarian information into the celebration of a landscape shaped by successive generations of the leading families of the gentry.”²⁹

Even as Camden was revising and expanding his masterwork, others were seeking to redefine chorography for the next generation. John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, published as a companion volume to The History of Great Britain (1612), boldly speaks to King James’s vision of a united Britain, including maps of Scotland and Ireland as well as England and Wales. This lavish folio volume prioritizes maps over written description, improving upon Saxton in terms of overall detail, and also including insets of town plans into county maps. The accompanying pages of county descriptions follow a formulaic model: a full-page gazetteer of place names listed on the map, and another page of information presented in a standard format. While this volume was not advancing chorography as a project of research, it demonstrates the genre’s currency among the elite audience who would have been able to afford to buy it. John Norden, meanwhile, had greater ambitions. He aimed to produce a full series of county descriptions, in written and cartographic form, under the title Speculum Britanniae. Norden was a professional surveyor at a time when surveying was not merely concerned with the relatively new art of estate mapping but more fundamentally with the question of the uses and value of land.³⁰ His years as surveyor for the Duchy of Cornwall, in particular, gave him an acute appreciation of how the management of land—the rents charged or the ways in which natural resources were exploited—could significantly influence the income an owner might derive from it. While he produced only a handful of county descriptions, these volumes are distinctive for their greater attention to such practical and immediate concerns.

While Norden approached counties with the professional eye of a surveyor, the chorography at a county level fell more consistently into the hands of resident gentlemen. In the wake of Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, this project gathered momentum over the succeeding decades, driven by a spirit of emulation. William Burton, for instance, describes how he was “drawn” to his description of Leicestershire by the example of Camden, Speed, Norden, Lambarde, and others; on a regional level, John Hooker notes the influence of Carew’s Survey of Cornwall upon his efforts to produce a similar volume for the neighboring Devon.³¹ Moreover, much work was generated through networks of men rather than individuals, and this perhaps helps to explain the fact that so many of the resultant texts were not published at the time they were written. That is, if a text was circulating in manuscript form among a coterie of the people who were perceived to matter, an author might reasonably feel that he had achieved his purpose. Some, such as Burton, perceived potential benefit to be gained from going to press with a fulsome dedication to a regional nobleman (he chose George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the foremost statesman of the age and a man from a Leicestershire family), but for others widespread dissemination was simply not necessary. The sense of a group enterprise was particularly strong in southwestern England, where the endeavors of Carew and Hooker were succeeded by a clutch of further works on Devon, Dorset, and Somerset.³² The degree of overlap between these texts indicates a high degree of manuscript circulation.

Decisions about publication were complex at this time, revealing much about conceptions of authorship. In the case of chorography, as suggested throughout this section, these decisions say much about the men who were involved with this genre, and the ambitions they had for their works. Camden, though always committed to publication, increasingly looked to a native audience, as evident ultimately in the lavish 1610 English-language version of Britannia. Speed shared this vision, keen to deploy chorography in support of James I’s agenda of unification. In the provinces, some saw print as a way of promoting the achievements and values of their regions; Carew, if nobody else, evidently also perceived the genre as a form of literature. But the imperial agenda of Camden and Speed slid from view after 1612, while in the provinces few authors shared Carew’s passion for promoting his county. Chorography, as a result, became somewhat insular in character. As Helgerson has argued, this trend was surely symptomatic of a nation that was in the process of reassessing its primary affiliations, turning away from “dynastic loyalty” and looking instead to the land as an index of identity.³³ With its meticulous cataloguing of places, chorography might well work toward an image of a cohesive and unified nation, yet it might equally suggest a fracturing of the nation into its constituent parts.

Perhaps the single defining feature of chorography, as a genre, is its capaciousness. For John Dee, writing in 1570, chorography’s efforts of topographical description “leaveth out … no notable or odde thing, above ground visible.”³⁴ Once the antiquarian agenda of the late Elizabethan decades is added to the generic expectations, and then the genealogical and heraldic interests of the provincial gentry, the demands upon authors may well be imagined. When constructing their volumes, such authors were faced with certain fundamental questions. Perhaps the most pressing of these was how to structure their mass of information into a coherent and readable form. More fundamentally, chorographers struggled, in the face of their research and observations, to reconcile myths of order with undeniable evidence to the contrary.

Structurally, chorographies tend to adhere to a distinction between “general” and “particular” forms of description. The latter was the more stable category and, over time, became the greater focus of a chorographer’s attention; in Tristram Risdon’s words, it was a matter of registering “particular places, with their ancient and most eminent families; or any other memorable matter, that hath come within the compass of my knowledge, worthy the leaving to posterity.”³⁵ Essentially, given that early modern English society was still overwhelmingly rural, the particular description was an account of manorial estates. According to the dominant theory of the time, the estate was a coherent and stable social unit, governed by the resident lord; in the words of Norden, it was like “a little commonwealth.”³⁶ The general description, by comparison, could contract in some texts to barely more than a brief topographical and historical overview, but one that always held the potential for longer and more analytical engagements with society and culture. Harrison is exceptional in having no particular description: as stated above, he stands in many respects askance to the central chorographic tradition. But others managed to incorporate Harrison’s spirit of investigation into their works. Carew, for example, whose section of general description is slightly longer than his particular description, includes historically valuable accounts of the Cornish fishing industry, the county’s wild and domestic animals, and regional sports and pastimes, among other matters.

Some of Carew’s topics of discussion are striking for the way that they stretch chorography’s generic bounds. For the most profound tension underlying chorography was that between a powerful myth of stability and order, on the one hand, and engagements with more complex and mutable sets of circumstances, on the other hand. The details, quite simply, did not always accord with the ideal. In descriptions of the land and landscape, for example, chorographers typically labor to suggest a prevailing model of social and economic order, typically characterized by the long stewardship of estates in the hands of successive generations of individual families. But this myth was under strain, on account not only of the stimulus to the land market provided by the dissolution of the monasteries, but equally by omnipresent pressures of social and economic change. Leland’s notes are in this respect uncharacteristic of chorography since they are unusually alert to processes of change; as Jennifer Summit argues, they describe “a remarkably fluid landscape, always in a state of passing, like the traveller who records it, from one point in time to another.”³⁷ But his unrealized vision for a completed work of national description was altogether more static, as though Leland adhered, at this formative moment in the English chorographical tradition, to a belief in its powers to suppress evidence of instability.

For subsequent generations of chorographers, the commitment to order may be identified in various emergent generic characteristics. To take one example, most chorographies include, in their early pages, descriptions of the social order. Indeed these efforts to define lines of social stratification, in the face of increasing mobility, became something of an Elizabethan preoccupation. While the modern industrial concept of class was not available to social commentators, the language of “degrees” promised deceptively neat distinctions and became particularly attractive at a time of social flux.³⁸ But the categories themselves were rarely agreed: Harrison, for instance, has gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and laborers; Carew has gentlemen, townsmen, yeomen, and the poor; Thomas Westcote has gentlemen, yeomen and husbandmen, merchants, and day-laborers.³⁹ These categories struggle to equate status in the growing towns with that in the countryside, blur boundaries between categories that many people held to be important, and more often than not fail to comprehend the phenomenon of extreme poverty. A second example of the commitment to order, evident at the local level, is the use of genealogy to demonstrate longstanding relations between families and the land. Westcote, for instance, notes that the Cary family “hath taken deep root and multiplied” in the “soil” of Cockington, and he proceeds to enumerate family members and their connections.⁴⁰ Yet the seductive clarity of a list stretching back through centuries regularly gives way to more complex narratives. The role of women in these narratives—linking families in marriage, occasionally controlling estates as widows, and frequently disrupting theoretically neat lines of patrilinear inheritance—would bear further scrutiny as a topic in its own right.

Closer attention to one example of an activity that challenged the chorographer may be helpful at this point. While an account of a region’s minerals was conventional enough in chorography, the practices of those involved in mining were altogether more problematic, since they departed so radically from the model of the nation as essentially agrarian in character. Mining was a force of change across the country.⁴¹ But on the southwestern peninsula its importance was particularly notable, given the region’s great reserves of tin, and this prompted chorographers to reflect upon its impact on the character of the region and the nature of social relations. Carew, whose account is exceptionally detailed, begins by considering the mythology of the industry: for example, how the county’s tin was believed to have been left behind by the receding waters of Noah’s flood and how people had found rich seams of the mineral after dreams.⁴² He then considers, in some detail, the economic structure of the industry:

Their workes, both Streame and Load, lie either in severall, or in wastrel, that is, in enclosed grounds, or in commons. In Severall, no man can search for Tynne, without leave first obtained from the Lord of the soile, who, when any Myne is found, may work it wholly himselfe, or associate partners, or set it out at a farm certaine, or leave it unwrought at his pleasure. In Wastrell, it is lawful for any man to make triall of his fortune that way, provided, that hee acknowledge the Lord’s right, by sharing out unto him a certaine part, which they call toll: a custom savouring more of indifferencie, then the Tynners constitutions in Devon, which enable them to dig for Tynne in any man’s ground, inclosed or unclosed, without licence, tribute, or satisfaction: wherethrough it appeareth, that the Law-makers rather respected their own benefit, then equitie, the true touch of all laws.⁴³

Here the mining laws are acknowledged to shape social relations and, in turn, the attitudes and characters of those involved in the industry. Chorography’s defining question, “whose land is this?” is reduced to a strikingly material level and with consequences that challenge the model of orderly gentry control. Cornwall, he insists, differs even from its neighbor on account of the different customs governing the rights of landlords over minerals.

The representation of the miners’ demanding physical labor was a further challenge and produced quite distinct responses from different chorographers. Norden, whose professional role in the region required him to maximize returns on the Duchy of Cornwall estate, concludes that the prevailing poverty of the mining regions must be the result either of “ill successe” or “Idlenes.”⁴⁴ Carew, by contrast, betrays a surprising degree of empathy for the tinners; “In most places,” he writes, “their toyle is so extreame, as they cannot endure it above foure houres in a day, but are succeeded by spels: the residue of the time, they weare out at Coytes, Kayles [i.e. skittles], or like idle exercises.”⁴⁵ While he acknowledges the poverty of tin-mining regions, he attributes this rather to the “hard dealing” of London merchants and moneylenders or the lack of by-employments for members of the men’s families.⁴⁶ In Devon, chorographers were less sympathetic, resorting to more familiar models of the laboring poor. For Hooker,

There is no labour to be compared unto him for his apparell is course his dyet slender his lodgynge harde, his feedinge commonly course breade and hard cheese, and his drinke is water and for lacke of a cuppe he drinketh it out of his spade or shovell.⁴⁷

There is in fact virtually no evidence to suggest that miners of tin could not afford cups; the description bespeaks instead a patrician disregard for those perceived as almost beneath contempt. Westcote leans rather toward the more benign yet equally dismissive model of the contented laborer, derived from a tradition of pastoral literature:

Miserable men! may some men say in regard of their labour and poverty; yet having a kind of content therein, for that they aim at no better, they think not so; for having sufficient to supply nature’s demand, they are satisfied; sleep soundly without careful thoughts, which most rich men want not.⁴⁸

My point in dwelling on the representation of tinners is to consider how chorography enabled—or constrained—people in representing the social realities of their counties. Chorography was a genre geared toward documenting the things that mattered to gentlemen; the chorographer was less comfortable with the lives of those of more lowly social degree and with manifestations of change. Carew’s engagement with such a wide range of social and economic matters was exceptional; Hooker and Westcote, addressing tin mining at an uneasy distance, are more indicative of the dominant conventions of chorography. This instance thus indicates the limitations of chorography and signals in retrospect its tendency toward ossification. Books that consist of little more than pedigrees of landowning families make for tedious reading: unless of course one happens to belong to one of those families. While the genre provided a framework for work such as Carew’s, driven as it is by an almost inexhaustible fascination with what it meant to live in Cornwall, this was never its core purpose.

Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, published in two parts in 1612 and 1622, is one of the most idiosyncratic landmarks of English literature. Its 15,000 hexameter lines, accompanied by prose annotations written for the first part by John Selden, and decorative maps engraved by William Hole, is positioned firmly in the chorographical tradition. As the title page declares, the poem offers

A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, With intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same.

In some respects Poly-Olbion may be seen as a simple rehearsal of its major source, Camden’s Britannia; however, Drayton was always alert to the resources and opportunities afforded by poetry, and he engaged also with preexisting traditions of topographical verse. In this final section, it is worth considering the position of this extraordinary poem within literary and cultural traditions, as well as its unique achievement.

Topographical poetry was part of the English chorographical tradition from the outset. John Leland may never have finished the grand work he proposed, but he published two Latin poems that are at least partly topographical in nature: Genethliacon illustrissimi Eaduerdi principis Cambriae, occasioned by the birth of Prince Edward in 1537 but not completed until 1543; and Cygnea Cantio (1545), dedicated to Henry VIII, that narrates the journey of a swan down the Thames from Oxford to Greenwich. Each poem uses extensive prose annotations to underpin the poetry with Leland’s learning, and focuses on indexes of royal authority, such as the castles and royal residences along the Thames. Camden also sprinkles snippets of verse throughout his Britannia, including extracts that can be pieced together to form a poem on the birth and progress of the nation’s greatest river, “The Marriage of Tame and Isis.” Though he is coy about the poem’s authorship, it is now assumed that Camden wrote it himself.⁴⁹ And in the counties, writers such as Carew and Westcote recorded some remarkable poems on subjects ranging from the Carew family through the pleasures of fishing to multiple pieces on rivers.⁵⁰ Indeed river poetry, a minor genre with classical lineage that was revived in the sixteenth century most notably by Edmund Spenser, flourished unobtrusively in the pages of chorography.⁵¹ It has rightly been argued that poetry provided for chorographers, loosened from the constraints of factual description, a vehicle for mythologizing; it formed, for someone like Camden, a “subtext” to his historical narrative.⁵² Yet it also enabled a degree of innovation and experimentation as writers forged new ways of articulating their experiences of the natural world.

Drayton’s grand ambition was to represent Britain as a unified whole, made up of the sum of myriad geographical and historical parts. Through its thirty “songs” the figure of the author’s muse moves methodically around England and Wales, county by county, praised repeatedly for her labor and industry. (Although he certainly intended to progress to Scotland, these plans were eventually shelved, perhaps out of disaffection for the Stuart regime, perhaps equally out of exhaustion.) Inspired in part by the methods of antiquarianism, the poem deftly blends geographical and historical description. As the muse traverses the countryside, she lends voice to the various rivers, hills, and other natural features that she describes. They in turn give the poem dynamism and tension as they describe their various rivalries and loves. One superb passage, for example, presents a singing context between the rivers entering the sea on either side of the Bristol Channel, each claiming ownership, respectively for Wales and England, of the isle of Lundy. The poem also recurrently digresses onto historical matters. Indeed it is commonly the natural features of the land that carry the burden of history, their voices breaking into the poem to sing about the past. Particular songs thus present the achievements of the different eras of the national past, while various historical and geographical catalogues are also interjected: of the saints of Britain, the civil wars, famous voyages, birds, plants, and so forth.

Despite Poly-Olbion’s basic accord with the methods of chorography, the character of the poet and medium of poetry pull the text in new directions. Most notoriously, in its historical vision Drayton turns his back on the advances of Camden, invoking afresh the founding myths of British history. As much even as the notes provided by Selden interjected a sober and skeptical perspective, for Drayton the Trojan Brute’s landing at Totnes and founding of Troynovant presented too good a story to ignore. Equally significant is its lack of interest—extraordinary given the trajectory that prose chorography had assumed—in the land as property. No genealogies are found in Poly-Olbion and very little attention to indexes of contemporary civilization, such as the great houses and castles of the gentry and nobility. Indeed, with the exception of a nod to one of his patrons, Sir Walter Aston, remarkably few references are made to living Britons.⁵³ The attention to the land itself as a source of interest and authority is indebted variously to a Spenserian tradition of allegorical landscape description, a determination to situate strains of classical pastoral literature in a native context, and an evident distaste for much that Drayton observed in contemporary Britain. (The second part of the poem, tellingly, was prefaced by a grumpy note “To any that will read it.”) Yet it also gestures tellingly toward a proto-ecological vision in which the land may be valued by standards that never even occurred to prose chorographers. Most notably, the recurrent laments of the poem on the destruction of woodland slide from an economic concern for “posterity” into a deeply felt concern for a natural order under threat from human hands.⁵⁴

In some respects Poly-Olbion was belated, hankering as it does for the politics of Queen Elizabeth and the poetics of Spenser. But in other respects it was very much a product of its time, creaking under the weight of expectations for various different kinds of knowledge. After Drayton, indeed, the vision of chorography on a comprehensive and national scale dissipated. In the following generations, the heirs of Tudor and Stuart chorographers tended to formulate more specialized projects. John Weever, for example, concentrated on the nation’s funeral monuments, while William Dugdale directed fresh scholarly rigor to a study of the “antiquities” of his native county.⁵⁵ Of equal importance, in the longer term history of chorography’s transformations, a new attention was given to natural history and the uses of the land. Dugdale, interestingly, also researched the drainage of the fens, while Robert Plot found inspiration in the new science movement for his Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677).⁵⁶ Such efforts, drawing the unconventional chorographic interests of Harrison and Drayton into the context of an age committed to more rigorous scientific inquiry, indicate continuities as well as changes in descriptive traditions.

Despite its inevitable decline, though, the tradition of chorography performed for a number of decades a vital role in the cultural life of Britain. Across the reigns of Elizabeth and James the description of the nation was appreciated as a heroic endeavor that produced texts of both cultural and literary significance. These writers and cartographers were not only exploring their nation, but they were also making sense of it for a contemporary audience. They were helping that audience to appreciate what their nation was, what made it distinct, and what stake they had in its present and future. Though not overtly political, their works contributed in subtle yet important ways to unfolding debates about nationhood and the rights of citizens. They also opened the way to fresh perceptions of the natural environment and the place of humanity within it.