The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English 1843843188, 9781843843184

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books: Print, Manuscript, and the Circulation of Scholarship
Part I. Anglo-Saxon Texts and Sixteenth-Century English
2 The Abcedarium Glossary: Sources and Methods of Nowell’s Old English Lexicography
3 Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries: Standardized English and the Dawn of Anglo-Saxon Studies
Part II. Choreographies and the Past of England
4 Somewhere in Time: The Abcedarium Place-Name Index
5 Putting the Past in Place: Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description and Perambulation of Kent
6 Images and Imaginings of England
Part III. Old English and the Common Law
7 ‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’: Ancient Law and Old English Laws
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The

Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English

Rebecca Brackmann

Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 30

THE ELIZABETHAN INVENTION OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND LAURENCE NOWELL, WILLIAM LAMBARDE AND THE STUDY OF OLD ENGLISH

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465-6310 General Editors David Colclough Raphael Lyne Sean Keilen

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr David Colclough, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Dr Raphael Lyne, New Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0DF Dr Sean Keilen, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23188, USA Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

THE ELIZABETHAN INVENTION OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND LAURENCE NOWELL, WILLIAM LAMBARDE AND THE STUDY OF OLD ENGLISH

Rebecca Brackmann

D. S. BREWER

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

© Rebecca Brackmann 2012 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Rebecca Brackmann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

First published 2012 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-318-4

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Typeset by Tina Ranft, Woodbridge Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

vi ix

Chapter 1 The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books: Print, Manuscript, and the Circulation of Scholarship 1 PART I: ANGLO-SAXON TEXTS AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH

Chapter 2 The Abcedarium Glossary: Sources and Methods of Nowell’s Old English Lexicography

29

Chapter 3 Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries: Standardized English and the Dawn of Anglo-Saxon Studies 55 PART II: CHOROGRAPHIES AND THE PAST OF ENGLAND

Chapter 4 Somewhere in Time: The Abcedarium Place-Name Index 87 Chapter 5 Putting the Past in Place: Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description and Perambulation of Kent

120

Chapter 6 Images and Imaginings of England

148

PART III: OLD ENGLISH AND THE COMMON LAW

Chapter 7 ‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’: Ancient Law and Old English Laws

189

Conclusion: The Invention of Anglo-Saxon England

224

Bibliography Index

228 239

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Nowell’s lexical glosses in the Abcedarium. Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

28

2. Nowell’s place-name index in the Abcedarium. Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

86

3. Nowell’s ‘General description.’ © The British Library Board. Additional 62540.

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151

FOR MY PARENTS

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While writing this book, I have had the support of librarians, colleagues, mentors, and family at every step of the way. Particular thanks go to the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, and especially Bruce Swan, for making my work there so pleasant and productive. Closer to home, the tireless effort of Kay Davis at Lincoln Memorial University’s Carnegie-Vincent Library secured for me all the books and articles that I needed, and her cheerful labors are appreciated more than I can say. My debt to the work of Carl Berhout is obvious on every page of this book, and I would also like to thank him for his encouragement and advice. Invaluable feedback from Charlie Wright, Tim Graham, Achsah Guibbory, and Rob Barrett strengthened the final product immeasurably. I also benefitted from the opportunity to present at the Marco Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ Manuscript Studies Workshop at the University of Tennessee and the questions and comments from that workshop further honed my thinking. I am additionally grateful to the Marco Institute for awarding me a Lindsey Young Visiting Faculty Fellowship which allowed me the use of their libraries to complete the book. I cannot possibly mention all the colleagues and friends, past and present, who have offered encouragement and advice at all stages. Most recently, Dan DeBord, Jacques Debrot, Elissa Graff, Wayne Harden, Earl Hess, Liz Lamont, Joanna Neilson, Deb Salata, and David Worley have made their advice and support constantly available. I deeply appreciate LMU’s support for this project, especially that of Sherilyn Emberton, Clayton Hess, and Amiel Jarstfer. I thank the University of Illinois Library and the British Library for their permissions to reproduce manuscript images. Portions of Chapter Two appeared in a volume published by Medieval Institution Publications, and I thank them for their permission to include that material. Additional thanks go to Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer, and to the manuscript’s reader, for excellent suggestions. My brother, Dan Brackmann, lent me his insight into English legal history and has also been a valuable reader and sounding-board for me. My husband, Craig Steffen, continually humbles me with his unselfish support of my career

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Acknowledgements in general and of this book in particular. He also allowed me to make use of his skills in photography and technology, and I admire his talents more than I can ever say. This book would not be without him. My parents, John and Judy Brackmann, have never questioned why I wanted to go into this field or suggested even once that I ought to go to law school instead, and I am more grateful to them than I can express. My mother, particularly, put her programming skills at my disposal and wrote several databases to help me analyze my evidence. She has always been my model of an intelligent, articulate, and capable woman. My father’s surpassing love of language and books, and the boundless curiosity that they both share, have also inspired me for longer than I can remember. This book is dedicated to them.

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Chapter 1 THE ANGLO-SAXONISTS AND THEIR BOOKS: PRINT, MANUSCRIPT, AND THE CIRCULATION OF SCHOLARSHIP We wish to argue that the early modern must be defined not in distinction from the medieval but through it, that the urge to periodise and the development of the concept of nationhood are wholly interpenetrated, and that the reading of the medieval in early modern England has in several ways bequeathed to us our understanding of both the medieval and the early modern.1

So David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, in the introduction to their Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, set forth what has become a key issue in discussions of early modern historical writing and antiquarianism in England—the degree to which medieval studies exists as a product of early modern ideological and, particularly, nationalistic goals. The very act of separating ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ (or, especially, ‘Renaissance’) is agreeing to the terms of use laid down by sixteenthcentury scholars, as James Simpson argues in the same volume: ‘when we draw lines sharply between periods whole unto themselves, wherever we draw the line, we are already falling victim to the logic of the revolutionary moment’ of Reformation historiography.2 Because we have allowed this divide to shape our work, and even our institutional structures, ‘the study of the seventh to the fifteenth centuries is every bit as much a study of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.’3 However, despite Simpson’s inclu1

2 3

David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, ‘Introduction,’ Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. James Simpson, ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,’ in Matthews and McMullan, Reading the Medieval, 26 (emphasis original). Ibid., 19.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England sion of the centuries before the Norman Conquest, little work has been done on how Anglo-Saxon studies contributed to this process of periodization and national identity formation, except in discussion of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Anglican polemic.4 The essays in Matthews’ and McMullan’s important collection focus chiefly on early modern interactions with post-Conquest figures such as Chaucer or Langland, or broad institutions such as penance or the Order of the Garter. Such a focus might seem reasonable enough, given the linguistic divide between pre-Conquest and post-Reformation versions of English. Sixteenth-century writers could read Chaucer or Langland with some difficulty and occasional misunderstanding, but without extensive practice or exploration of vocabulary. Most of them, beneficiaries of humanist educations, could also easily read medieval Latin texts. The language of the Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, had to be learned with difficulty and labor—an undertaking which, at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, could not be supported by widely available grammars or glossaries. It could easily appear that here, at least, we have a clear and defensible break between ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ and ‘early modern England,’ on linguistic grounds if nothing else. One of this book’s main arguments is that this is not the case. The understanding of the period after the Germanic invasions and before the Norman Conquest as ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ is, by and large, a concept developed in the sixteenth century by Tudor researchers. After all, ‘England’ as it is now defined did not exist as a unified political entity for most of the period between the Germanic migration into southern Britain and the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Germanic invaders divided the portion of the island that they had conquered into separate, often warring, kingdoms. Even after Æþelstan, King of Wessex and grandson of King Alfred the Great, achieved in the tenth century some hegemony over most of an area continuous with modern England, the northern portion still retained cultural and linguistic ties to Denmark as much as to its neighbors in southern Britain.5 Yet, in 1596, William Lambarde (1536–1601) could

4

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For instance in Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 101–135; and Allen Franzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 27–47. Influential discussions of Anglo-Saxon history are Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., (1943; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (1956; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); and The Anglo-Saxons, edited by James Campbell (1982; repr., New York: Penguin 1991); Susan Reynolds describes the disunity during the period in ‘What Do We

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books call a short legal text in Old English an ‘English (or Saxon) antiquitie,’ affiliating the ‘Saxon’ (or as we would now say, ‘Anglo-Saxon’) text with a complex identity of ‘Englishness’ for his readers.6 This book will trace some of the ways that the process of regarding the portion of history between the Germanic invasions and the Norman Conquest as somehow essentially ‘English’ in nature took shape in the sixteenth century. Understanding Lambarde’s belief that ‘Saxon’ could be equated with ‘English’ requires us to examine not only Lambarde but his friend and mentor Laurence Nowell (1530–c.1570), probably the premier AngloSaxonist of his time. Nowell’s work in the 1560s, much of which was done in collaboration with Lambarde and all of which passed into Lambarde’s keeping, laid out avenues of investigation that guided future generations of scholars. Their studies also had the opportunity to be read by several of the leading writers and thinkers of the day—men such as William Cecil, Arthur Golding, Roger Ascham, Edward Coke, and Francis Bacon. Nowell’s and Lambarde’s work pioneered not only the focuses of AngloSaxon scholarship, but, I argue, its implications for defining what was quintessentially ‘English’ both in the sixteenth century and in the four centuries preceding the Norman Conquest. Nowell and Lambarde’s milieu indicates that a full understanding of the ways early modern scholars created themselves through the lens of the medieval should take into account the work of Anglo-Saxonists. So far, however, most recent studies of Tudor ‘antiquaries’ such as those by Andrew Escobedo and Philip Schwyzer have limited themselves to the study of Romano-Celtic Britain, or have (as Matthews’ and McMullan’s collection) primarily discussed printed texts and plays that engaged with post-Conquest writers and cultural elements.7 Escobedo does not mention Tudor Anglo-Saxonists, and implies that concern with the Old English

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Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’ Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 395–414. Rolf Bremmer observes that some late Anglo-Saxon texts try to suggest a unified identity in opposition to that of the Viking invaders, but this was not consistently maintained. Bremmer, ‘The Gesta Herewardi: Transforming an Anglo-Saxon into an Englishman,’ in People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature, Studies presented to Erik Kooper, ed. Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 29–42. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1826; repr., Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970), 450. Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004).

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England period began in 1605 with Richard Verstegan.8 Schwyzer comments that the Anglo-Saxons ‘were held in remarkably low esteem’ and concludes: Later English nationalism, as it developed from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, would celebrate a trio of specifically English virtues: the English language, racial descent from the Anglo-Saxons, and parliamentary and legal traditions and privileges. By contrast, in the Tudor era all of these were objects of significant anxiety, if not of outright contempt.9

However, all three of these were studied in the sixteenth century, and related to the Anglo-Saxons, without anxiety or apology by Nowell and Lambarde. When common lawyers under the Stuarts read early laws, they drew on the previous research of Lambarde, who had an edition of Old English laws printed in 1568 and conveys neither contempt nor unease about his subject matter. Nor does Nowell’s manuscript English translation of the Laws of Alfred betray anxiety about either the ancient laws or the modern language. Certainly several sixteenth-century authors express unease about the modern English language or the Anglo-Saxons.10 It has been too readily assumed that such attitudes were universal, and that Tudor Anglo-Saxon studies had no cultural importance, despite F.J. Levy’s discussion of Nowell and Lambarde in his 1967 Tudor Historical Thought.11 I have not cited Schwytzer’s and Escobedo’s studies because I think their books are unconvincing; quite the contrary, I have focused on them because their arguments are cogent and provocative. Indeed, their analyses of the Celticizing bent of many early modern historical narratives can only gain in emphasis when one realizes that other, competing discourses were available in Elizabethan England, which on the whole was less polarized between ‘Briton’ and ‘Saxon’ than the subsequent centuries.12 So far, though, ‘Saxonist’ discourses have not been visible in recent investigations of Tudor historiography. 8 9 10

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Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 144. Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory, 5 and 6. This anxiety probably stemmed from the fact that Catholics, in turn, periodically used Anglo-Saxon authors to argue that Protestantism was a dangerous innovation. Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80–117. F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), especially 124–166. Colin Kidd has described how the seventeenth century, particularly, divided itself between these categories. Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books This critical blind spot stems, I think, from another conceptual division of the sixteenth century that still guides much of our own work: the split between printed works and manuscripts. The assumption, mostly unconscious, that what is printed is more culturally relevant, more widely read and therefore more significant than a text that remains ‘locked up’ in manuscript echoes the Protestant emphasis on the importance of printed, vernacular versions of religious texts and the Protestant figuring of Catholic practice as secretive, obscure, and hidden, and this, perhaps, has guided the majority of studies of Elizabethan antiquarianism to concentrate on printed works.13 Such a division was central to the work of the early sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland, who, setting forth his plans for producing several massive printed chorographic works, states that he wishes to bring the ‘monuments of auncyent wryters’ ‘out of deadly darkenesse to lyuelye lyght,’ that is, to have them printed.14 Cathy Shrank, in her discussion of John Bale, observes his similar ‘emphasis on printing as a tool of enlightenment,’ an emphasis shared by many modern students of sixteenth-century historicism.15 Certainly, if the importance of Tudor Anglo-Saxon studies versus those of either Romano-Celtic or post-Conquest Britain were determined by weight of the published materials alone, we could justify ignoring them. And yet, it is just such distinctions as the one between manuscript and print that now need to be called into question. As Shrank goes on, ‘we should remember (as [Bale] does) that publication occurred before and without printing’—even in the sixteenth century, after the presses had been firmly established.16 Printed works had the potential to circulate widely, and were certainly favored for propaganda of the sort Bale wrote. Yet

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See, for instance, the discussion in Richard Ross, ‘The Commoning of the Common Law: The Renaissance Debate over Printing English Law, 1520–1640,’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review 146 (1998): 342–352. This distinction was less regarded in the seventeenth century when, as Harold Love argues, ‘texts of great political and intellectual importance were deliberately reserved for the scribal medium.’ The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), vii. The New Year’s Gift, 1546, facsimile printed in John Leland’s Itinerary: Travels in Tudor England, ed. John Chandler (1993; repr., Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998), 1–2. James Carley also interprets Leland’s statement as declaring his resolve to see manuscripts printed. James P. Carley and Pierre Petitmengin, ‘PreConquest manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey and John Leland’s letter to Beatus Rhenanus concerning a lost copy of Tertullian’s works,’ Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004): 195–223, especially 198 and 221. Cathy Shrank, ‘John Bale and Reconfiguring the “Medieval” in Reformation England,’ in Matthews and McMullan, Reading the Medieval, 191. Ibid., 191–192.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England manuscripts could still reach a select audience and could, within that circle, still become influential in cultural discourses. The manuscript–print binary itself has come under question, at least in certain contexts. William Sherman’s study of readers and their marks in early modern books cites instances where readers carried their reactions to texts, their ‘marginalia,’ into notebooks—making these notebooks, I would argue, into an extension of the (printed) texts they studied and blurring the division between the two categories.17 Sherman’s study of book use in early modern England argues that ‘readers regularly transformed one printed book into another, and indeed, they occasionally turned one back into a medieval manuscript,’ suggesting that the two categories were not always discrete.18 His conclusion that ‘looked at from the user’s rather than the producer’s perspective, there are significant continuities across the “Medieval–Renaissance” divide’ should be extended to the ‘manuscript– print’ divide in our own categorizations.19 Certainly, some studies of early modern medievalism have examined manuscripts produced in the Tudor period. Jennifer Summit, for instance, in addition to describing the forces that guided early modern collectors’ selections of medieval manuscripts for their libraries, considers some of the notebooks that Robert Cotton compiled, as well as his pre-Reformation holdings, in her discussion of his library.20 Summit’s analysis proceeds to discuss how Cotton’s collection, including his own autograph codices, affected printed texts such as William Camden’s Britannia, however, and one could infer (although Summit certainly does not claim this) that the chief importance of Cotton’s manuscripts, pre- and post-Reformation, lay in their ability to influence writers who then printed their work.21 Similarly, her discussion of Matthew Parker’s library coincides with an examination of Book II of the Faerie Queene, placing Anglo-Saxon studies in the context of polemic and again tying it to a printed work.22 In the aggregate, discussions of Renaissance historiography reveal a marked bias towards works that appeared in print or that may have directly influenced printed texts. Technological and institutional factors have probably also played a part in the emphasis on printed works, and the consequent overlooking of 17 18 19 20 21 22

William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Ibid., 7. Ibid. Summit, Memory’s Library, 136–196. Ibid. Ibid., 101–135.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books Anglo-Saxon studies in the sixteenth century outside of Parker’s immediate circle. Our idea of the cultural influence of printed works against those that existed in manuscript in the Renaissance may have been skewed by the instant availability of nearly every book printed in England through Early English Books Online (EEBO), which can elide the limited circulation of some of the volumes it includes. The advent of Google books has also made an ever-greater number of early printed books available to scholars, even those without the institutional resources to subscribe to EEBO. However, as EEBO and Google books make possible studies of early printed texts even by those who cannot travel to archives, they also, perhaps, increase the marginalization of manuscripts (figured in historical contexts as quintessentially medieval) compared to early printed works, which signal the Renaissance. The much greater availability to us of these printed artifacts must not be allowed to obscure the existence and influence of even nonliterary manuscripts produced in the sixteenth century.23 The notion that manuscripts are ‘medieval’ leads to another aspect of Nowell’s reception that has helped hide him in particular from students of early modern antiquarians—nearly all studies of him have been written by medievalists and published primarily in journals of medieval studies. The most recent book on the topic, The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, was printed by a press that focuses entirely on medieval studies, and, as far as I have been able to determine, was not reviewed in any major journal of early modern studies.24 In contrast to early modernists’ concern with printed works, medievalists studying Tudor antiquaries have turned microscopic attention to the manuscript evidence from the period—especially that which was left in the margins of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as they passed through early collectors’ hands. In addition, medievalists have also burrowed their way through some of the antiquaries’ transcriptions, editions, and notes, looking for clues about lost medieval manuscripts that the earlier scholars saw. Nowell, for instance, is probably most famous to Anglo-Saxonists as the first known owner of the Beowulf manuscript (sometimes even called the Nowell Codex), but his second-best claim to fame among AngloSaxonists is his full transcription of London, British Library Cotton Otho

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Also, as H.R. Woudhuysen observes, no catalogues exist of early modern manuscripts of the sort that make medieval manuscripts relatively easy to locate. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 3–4. The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000).

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England B.xi, an Anglo-Saxon manuscript later destroyed by fire. If not for Nowell, that manuscript’s version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Laws of Alfred, to say nothing of the poem ‘Seasons for Fasting’ and the calculation of the Burghal Hidage that allows modern historians to work out the size of Anglo-Saxon fortifications, would now be lost. Since the most famous early modern collector of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts was Archbishop Parker, medievalists, when they have enlarged their field of view from the manuscripts, have largely assumed that the impetus for all Tudor Anglo-Saxon research was Parker’s polemical needs in his pamphlet wars.25 Broad statements to this effect generally preface discussions of Tudor Anglo-Saxonism, and, in the case of Parker himself and his secretary John Joscelyn, they are true.26 But I do not think they tell the story for Nowell and Lambarde. Carl Berkhout, the most active researcher in establishing Nowell’s biography and identifying Nowell’s manuscripts, observed over ten years ago that their notes do not point to any polemical aim: It has often, too often, been remarked that the impetus for the sixteenthcentury genesis of Anglo-Saxon studies was polemical, not altogether scholarly, and thus suspect or reprehensible. Old English texts were to be preserved and quarried for their ancient vindication of the established Anglican church. Such a motive was to some extent true of the immediate Parker circle. … As for Nowell, and for that matter Lambarde, there is no evidence of any such motive.27

Berkhout is unquestionably right. Even when Nowell focused on religious texts, such as the Old English homilies in London, British Library Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, his notations are entirely lexical in nature and do not reflect the manuscript’s content, in contrast to the notes of John Joscelyn in

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For Parker’s use of medieval manuscripts in producing polemic, see R.I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications: 1993); more recent are two articles by Aaron Kleist, ‘Monks, Marriage, and Manuscripts: Matthew Parker’s Manipulation (?) of Ælfric of Eynsham,’ JEGP 105 (2006): 312–327; and ‘Matthew Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage,’ in Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,’ ed. Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 106–133. An early example is Eleanor Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566–1800 (1917; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970), 11–41; see also Franzen, Desire for Origins, 27–50; and Kidd, British Identities, 106. Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (1530–ca. 1570),’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 14.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books the same manuscript. Nowell and Joscelyn had different uses for these texts. Lambarde’s interests, while they lay more in the direction of religious debate, were not exclusively concerned with polemic either. I would go even further, however, and query the very notion that medieval studies arising from political or social goals were ‘suspect and reprehensible.’ The motives and the uses of medievalism in the early modern period are a large part of what makes it interesting and important, as Allen Frantzen has argued in his ground-breaking Desire for Origins and as the early modernists’ studies of Tudor antiquarianism have shown.28 In this book, I borrow an approach from literary studies to show how this boundary between medievalists-who-study-manuscripts and earlymodernists-who-study-culture might be broken down. Scholars of literary texts provide a counterpoint to the focus on print, as they have worked extensively on manuscripts and in this context have demonstrated the ‘social and interpretive value placed on the products of scribal production.’29 Somewhat revising the binary of print/manuscript from public/secretive to public/intimate, many early modern authors worked in close relationships with their friends and patrons and produced highly valued, handwritten artifacts that were shared among members of these groups. Arthur Marotti, in his influential work on John Donne, outlines this culture of manuscript circulation in early modern England and describes how Donne sent his manuscript verse to an audience of friends in a practice that Marotti terms ‘coterie poetry.’30 Donne’s poetry was written for this audience, and their shared interests and experiences provided him with some of his subject matter. The notion of similar ‘literary circles’ as key to textual interpretation has guided much subsequent study of sixteenthcentury and seventeenth-century authors and led to an emphasis on manuscript circulation of their writings before, sometimes long before, they were printed.31 The potential analogy of scholarly circles to literary circles, and the 28 29 30 31

Franzen, Desire for Origins, especially 1–26. Cathy Shrank, ‘“These fewe scribbled rules”: Representing Scribal Intimacy in Early Modern Print,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004): 295. Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), especially 3–34. For instance, Woudhuysen argues about the importance of understanding manuscript culture and circulation in Sir Philip Sidney. The circle metaphor has itself been questioned, however; the introduction and essays in Literary Circles and Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), give examples both of the utility of this avenue of study, and also some of the questions now being raised about it.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England consequent importance of manuscripts even 160 years after Caxton, provides a valuable perspective on Tudor Anglo-Saxon studies. Stewart Mottram’s examination of English nationalism also indicates that audience is crucial: But the study of Tudor literature should surely be alert to the cultural conditions within which that literature was produced. If it were, then all Tudor texts would be approached as political documents, read in relation to whatever we can glean about the author’s political leanings and client relationships, whatever we can surmise about their reasons for writing and intended readership.32

Mottram’s argument about ‘client relationships’ can clearly extend past texts now considered literature to other textual productions, including antiquarian ones. Understanding patronage circles can illuminate Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon studies as well as more literary works, and makes clear the ways that even documents with (in our view) no obvious political motive further nationalist goals. Lateral relationships among people who were engaged with the same powerful figure potentially form part of the ‘intended readership,’ even if few traces remain that allow us clear knowledge of manuscript circulation. Admittedly, Nowell’s manuscripts could not have been recopied as easily as Donne’s poetry was, especially when he wrote in Old English (which he usually did in an imitation insular minuscule script that would have taken some practice to master even if the copyist could understand the text). However, copying was not impossible, either, as Francis Thynne later transcribed some of Nowell’s manuscripts after they passed into Lambarde’s keeping.33 Considering (especially) Nowell’s efforts as a kind of ‘coterie scholarship,’ texts produced in and for a network of colleagues and associates, drives home both the ways that even non-literary manuscripts such as transcriptions and lexical compilations could circulate and become influential, and the ways that cultural concerns could shape the studies of a man who had, by all appearances, no interest in seeing his works printed.34 Nowell sent nothing to a press in his 32 33 34

Stewart Mottram, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 5. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 122. Cathy Shrank has a similar approach of ‘viewing manuscripts as a publishing medium’ even with texts that are not now considered ‘literary.’ Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (2004; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21. Shrank also shows that, conversely, printed works could try to imitate manuscripts to give the impression of intimacy normally associated with handwritten works. ‘“These fewe scribbled rules,”’ 295–314. Achsah Guibbory has even expanded the notion of a literary circle in the

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books lifetime and was not particularly interested in Romano-Celtic Britain, as many if not most of the other antiquaries were. However, neither did he engage in Protestant polemic. Working as secretary to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary and one of her most important ministers, he focused his labors in Anglo-Saxon studies on lexical research, law codes, and place names, all topics that spoke to the sense of English national identity that Cecil wished to foster. Cecil is at the center of Nowell’s coterie, which must be understood as Timothy Raylor describes another ‘literary circle’: ‘less a single unitary circle than a complex solar system’ with the most politically and socially powerful figures at the center.35 Nowell’s social and professional circumstances therefore not only indicate but helped form the impetus for his scholarly work, which then had the opportunity to circulate among thinkers and statesmen orbiting near the top of the Elizabethan power structure. Lambarde did not have Nowell’s ties to Cecil, and his environment is less easily conceived of as a ‘coterie,’ but his residence in Lincoln’s Inn and his positions in the Court of Requests and Chancery would have brought him into contact with several influential statesmen and writers during the later Elizabethan period. Lambarde did see some of his works through the press, but not all, and even some of the ones that remained in manuscript were read by men such as Edward Coke and Francis Bacon. Works in manuscript could be influential if they found the right audience, as the ‘literary circles’ concept and the history of Lambarde’s works make clear, and both the manuscripts and the audience must be fully considered if we are to understand the ways that the early modern centuries constructed the early medieval ones. For the rest of this chapter, I will briefly discuss Nowell’s and Lambarde’s lives and the major figures in their immediate social and professional circles, and describe Nowell’s annotated copy of Richard Howlet’s Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum, which perhaps more than any other artifact demonstrates the need to examine both sixteenthcentury manuscripts and sixteenth-century culture together to understand the importance of Anglo-Saxon studies in Elizabethan historical writing.

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seventeenth century to include printed works. Guibbory, ‘Conversation, Conversion, Messianic Redemption: Margaret Fell, Menasseh Ben Israel, and the Jews,’ in Summers and Pebworth, Literary Circles, 210–234. Timothy Raylor, ‘Newcastle’s Ghosts: Robert Payne, Ben Jonson, and the “Cavendish Circle,”’ in Summers and Pebworth, Literary Circles, 96.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England NOWELL, LAMBARDE, AND THE ABCEDARIUM Laurence Nowell has been fortunate in his modern biographers, especially Carl Berkhout, who has put together the most complete picture of the antiquary’s life.36 Nowell was born in 1530 or 1531 in Whalley, Lancashire. After taking a B.A. at Christ Church, Oxford in 1552, he traveled on the Continent and throughout Britain and Ireland in the 1550s and early 1560s, and was employed by William Cecil in 1562 as a tutor for Cecil’s ward, the young Earl of Oxford, who lived in Cecil’s house. The first solidly datable evidence of Nowell’s interest in Anglo-Saxon studies dates from the same year: his transcription of Cotton Otho B.xi, completed in 1562. He lived with Cecil and continued his research until he left for the Continent in 1567 to search for medieval manuscripts in Continental repositories. Nowell’s close association with Cecil gave his Anglo-Saxon studies the opportunity to circulate broadly among some of the most influential people of his day, but his time in Cecil’s household is not well understood. He was certainly the tutor to the Earl of Oxford for a time, and Berkhout observes that, although no record remains ‘of the primary capacity in which Cecil employed him,’ most of Cecil’s correspondents refer to Nowell as Cecil’s secretary.37 Archbishop Matthew Parker probably had Nowell in mind when he referred, in a letter to Cecil, to Cecil’s ‘singular artificer,’ indicating that Parker and Cecil knew of Nowell’s skill with medieval manuscripts.38 Cecil was an avid manuscript collector, proud of his Greek and Latin learning, and Nowell may have helped with his collection. A comparison has often been made between Cecil’s employment of Nowell and Parker’s employment of John Joscelyn.39 If their relationships 36

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Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell,’ 3–17. The first modern discussion of Nowell’s life and work was that of Robin Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 46–73; reprinted in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–27. All quotations are from the 1990 reprint. Perhaps the single most significant biological find was the evidence put forth by Retha Warnicke in ‘Note on a Court of Requests Case 1571,’ English Language Notes 11 (1974): 250–256, demonstrating that Laurence Nowell the Anglo-Saxonist was not Laurence Nowell the dean of Lichfield (the two were first cousins). Other significant studies include Pamela Black, ‘Some New Light on the Career of Laurence Nowell the Antiquary,’ Antiquaries Journal 62 (1982): 116–123; Thomas Hahn, ‘The Identity of the Antiquary Laurence Nowell,’ English Language Notes 20 (1983): 10–18; and Carl Berkhout, ‘The Pedigree of Laurence Nowell the Antiquary,’ English Language Notes 23 (1985): 15–26. Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell,’ 7. Ibid. Robin Flower first suggests this comparison in ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books to their employers were similar, then perhaps Nowell as well as Joscelyn was influenced in his antiquarian research by his patron’s interests. This is certainly true of Joscelyn, who researched sermons extensively and helped Archbishop Parker translate the Paschal sermon of the Anglo-Saxon homilist Ælfric of Eynsham for publication as Protestant propaganda. Nowell, I believe, similarly let his research interests be led by Cecil’s concerns. Although Cecil was not himself an Anglo-Saxonist, as Parker was, and may not have directly governed Nowell’s work and its directions, the patronage system alone would have encouraged Nowell to focus his research in areas that his employer would find interesting and useful. Perhaps Nowell hoped to be advanced in his position in Cecil’s household, for the position of personal secretary to an official of Cecil’s stature could be both influential and lucrative.40 Cecil’s concern with national identity formation in the 1560s probably helped motivate and guide Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon studies, and Cecil formed the center of the circle in which Nowell ‘orbited.’ Cecil (1520–1598), made first Baron of Burghley in 1571, was called by his most recent biographer ‘the most powerful man in Elizabethan England’; during the time Nowell worked for him he was royal Secretary and Secretary of the Privy Council.41 Cecil influenced many of Elizabeth’s policy decisions, and he was also keenly aware of the power of propaganda. Conyers Read, in a ground-breaking essay on Cecil’s use of pamphlet literature, describes how the Secretary often penned tracts himself in order to swing popular opinion to support the Queen and her causes.42 Many of these centered on the issue of religion, for Protestantism was the main focus of English identity formation in this period. In addition, the Privy Council (probably guided by Cecil) also encouraged the printing of anti-

40 41

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England,’ 6. For an extensive study of Joscelyn’s work in Old English, see Timothy Graham, ‘John Joscelyn, Pioneer of Old English Lexicography,’ in Graham, Recovery of Old English, 83–140. Alan G.R. Smith, ‘The Secretariats of the Cecils, circa 1580–1612,’ English Historical Review 83 (1968): 481–504. Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), xi. For other studies of Cecil’s career, see Michael Graves, Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (New York: Longman, 1998); and Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (1955; repr., The Bedford Historical Series, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). Conyers Read, ‘William Cecil and Elizabethan Public Relations,’ in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to John Neale, ed. S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C.H. Williams (1961; repr., London: Athlone, 1964), 21–55.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England quarian texts.43 The printer John Day, with whom Cecil was closely associated, printed Parker’s Testimony of Antiquity.44 He also printed John Foxe’s antiquarian works, as well as Lambarde’s Archaionomia, so Cecil’s associate put to press works that intimately concerned several areas of antiquarian research. Cecil and Day understood that ancient English history could provide support for several nationalist rallying-points, and this probably encouraged Nowell’s work as well as giving it a potential audience. Cecil, of course, was also one of the main architects of Elizabethan foreign policy, which, Jane Dawson argues, he saw in terms of Britain, not just England; he wished to solidify relations with Scotland and conquer Ireland so that the Atlantic archipelago should be more or less united under the English crown.45 His reasons for doing so stemmed from his desire for national security—identical, in his mind, with the security of Elizabeth on the throne. If Scotland were not allied with France, nor Ireland with Spain, then England itself could not be attacked from a near neighbor, and Elizabeth’s country would be more secure from threat of invasion. The relationship with Scotland was particularly troubling to Cecil, as Mary, Queen of Scots had some claim to the throne of England and was one of the logical successors to Elizabeth, making her attractive to foreign and domestic conspirators who might plot to kill or depose Elizabeth.46 Part of his view was therefore geographic, and Nowell, as part of his chorographic writings, produced what is perhaps the first modern map of Britain and Ireland. Nowell’s studies could provide Cecil with tactical, geographical, and political information; they could also provide propaganda, the use of which Cecil knew well. Cecil was also the patron of a number of scholars and writers, and, as J.A. van Dorsten points out, ‘Cecil House was England’s nearest equivalent

43

44

45 46

Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, ‘Print, Profit and Propaganda: The Elizabethan Privy Council and the 1570 Edition of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,”’ English Historical Review 119 (2004): 288–307. Cecil, through an intermediary, rented land in Lincolnshire to Day so that, as ‘Michael Wood,’ he could print tracts against Mary Tudor while she reigned, and ‘unless one of the great statesmen of the sixteenth century was being uncharacteristically naïve, William Cecil rented the land in the full knowledge that Day would print illicit works there.’ Elizabeth Evenden, ‘The Michael Wood Mystery: William Cecil and the Lincolnshire Printing of John Day,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004): 388. Jane Dawson, ‘William Cecil and the British Dimension of Early Elizabethan Foreign Policy,’ History 74 (1989): 196–216. Read describes Cecil’s concern with Scotland, in particular, in the early years of the 1560s in Mr Secretary Cecil, 218–238; Alford also argues that Scotland was a major concern in Cecil’s years as Secretary. Burghley, 121–138.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books of a humanist salon since the days of More.’47 Nowell moved in this circle of Tudor intellectuals who centered themselves on Cecil’s house, where Nowell lived. The writer and pedagogue Roger Ascham was a frequent visitor; he had been one of Cecil’s tutors at St. John’s, Cambridge and the two remained friends.48 Nor was Nowell the only scholar actually living in Cecil’s house; John Hart, who wrote extensively about the English language, lived there also in the 1560s. So did Arthur Golding, who translated several works from classical Latin, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses.49 Nowell and Golding must have known each other especially well, as Golding was in charge of the affairs of the Earl of Oxford, whom Nowell was tutoring. Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon researches might seem quite different from the classical humanism of Golding, but he applied the same concern with textual accuracy to Old English as Golding had done to Latin; his subject was different but his methods familiar. The two also appear to have similar (and perhaps mutually reinforcing) ideas about translation into English and shared goals for the language they ‘edified’ by their labors. In addition to his wealth of contacts as a resident of Cecil’s home, and the potential areas of study that these contacts could have introduced to him, Nowell was, of course, closely associated with Lambarde who studied at Lincoln’s Inn during most of the 1560s. They collaborated in their study of the Old English laws, and Lambarde shared Nowell’s interest in topography and mapping. When Nowell departed for the Continent to look for more manuscripts in 1567, he left his books in Lambarde’s hands; when Nowell died abroad some time in 1570 or 1571, Lambarde inherited them. As Nowell’s literary executor he extended their Anglo-Saxon studies to the nationalist discourses of the later Elizabethan period. Born in 1536, Lambarde was the oldest son of John Lambarde, a wealthy draper who died when William was eighteen. Retha Warnicke observes a passage in Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description that could indicate that he studied for a time at Oxford, but nothing of his education is known for certain until he entered Lincoln’s Inn at the age of 19.50 As Berkhout has now placed

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50

J.A. van Dorsten, ‘Mr. Secretary Cecil, Patron of Letters,’ English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 50 (1969): 548. Alford discusses Cecil’s St. John’s connections, many of whom remained lifelong friends of his. Burghley, 12–23. Alford, Burghley, 147–148. The standard biography of Golding, which discusses his time at Cecil House, is Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan: Arthur Golding the Translator of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and also of John Calvin’s ‘Sermons’ (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1937). Retha Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary (London: Phillimore, 1973), 14.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Nowell’s birthdate in 1530 or 1531, not 1520 as previously thought, Lambarde was only five or six years his junior.51 The first known association of the two was in 1559, when Nowell’s travel notes in his commonplace book state that he went to Wiltshire ‘cum lamberto.’52 Such expeditions did not speed Lambarde’s legal education. He took a long time to progress to the bar, probably because his legal training was prolonged by his interest in learning Old English and in studying the Anglo-Saxon laws particularly. A student of Lincoln’s Inn would usually take seven years before being called to the bar; Lambarde took eleven and was called up in 1567, a little over a month after Nowell left for the Continent.53 Unlike Nowell, Lambarde saw some works through the press. His first printed book was the 1568 Archaionomia, an edition and facing-page translation of the Anglo-Saxon law codes that drew on his and Nowell’s joint research on Old English law. Lambarde, in the introduction to Archaionomia, states that Nowell had given to him all the latter’s work on Old English laws with instructions to publish it. Several of Nowell’s transcriptions were of great use to him for this project, for some of the unusual readings that his Old English version gives came from portions of the text that Nowell ‘filled in’ by back-translating the Quadripartitus, a twelfthcentury translation into Latin of the Old English laws. Lambarde, reading Nowell’s notebooks, did not realize that these portions were not original. Nowell’s translations, although imperfect, nevertheless fooled scholars until Kenneth Sisam pointed out in 1923 that they were probably not authentic.54 While Lambarde completed his edition of the Old English laws, he also worked on his Perambulation of Kent, which was largely

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Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell,’ 3. Ibid., 6. For a biography of Lambarde and a discussion of his slow progress to the bar, see Wilbur Dunkel, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Jurist (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 33; see also Warnicke, William Lambarde. This article, ‘The Authenticity of Certain Texts in Lambarde’s “Archaionomia” 1568,’ was reprinted in Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 232–258; all citations are from this later edition. Roland Torkar believes that, at least for Nowell’s copy of Judex in British Library Add. 43703, Nowell did see a manuscript now lost; Patrick Wormald found Torkar’s arguments convincing. Torkar, Eine altenglische Übersetzung von Alcuins De Virtutibus et Vitiis, Kap. 20 (Liebermanns Judex). Untersuchungen und Textausgabe mit einem Anhang: Die Gesetze II und V Æthelstan nach Otho B.XI und Add. 43703, Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie, ed. Helmut Gneuss and Wolfgang Weiss, Vol. 7 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981); and Wormald, ‘The Lambarde Problem: Eighty Years On,’ in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 237–275.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books finished in 1570 although it was not printed until 1576. Nowell knew that Lambarde shared his interests not only in legal but also in chorographical studies, for when he wrote for Lambarde the first Old English-to-Modern English dictionary, the Vocabularium Anglosaxonicum, he included numerous place names for Lambarde’s reference.55 Lambarde worked on his own place-name index in manuscript, which was printed in the eighteenth century as the Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum et Historicum (the book was also given an English title, An Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales, either by Lambarde or by the eighteenth-century editor).56 Nowell and Lambarde worked in parallel, if not in collaboration, for more than just the study of Anglo-Saxon law. However, Lambarde’s focus became more and more fixed on law and most of his texts have to do with the English legal system. Lambarde’s most influential work in his own day was his Eirenarcha, a handbook for justices of the peace; the first edition appeared in 1581 and several more editions were produced in the following years. Before his book, no practical handbook was readily available for this office, one of the most common in England. Lambarde’s last influential legal work, the manuscript Archeion (which was printed decades later in 1635), combines his antiquarian research skills and his legal training as no other work does; while his handbooks concern themselves with practical, technical matters, the Archeion addresses the role of history in the legal system, and tries to extrapolate from the most ancient English laws the principles which, Lambarde believed, governed contemporary practice. Nowell’s friend took the abilities and knowledge he had gained from studying Old English law and formed cogent explanations of key judicial issues, and it is mainly through Lambarde that their Anglo-Saxon research reached later generations of common lawyers such as Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, both of whom knew Lambarde’s work.57

55

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Nowell’s dictionary, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden supra 63, was published in the twentieth century as Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, ed. Albert H. Marckwardt, University of Michigan Studies in Language and Literature 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952). William Lambarde, Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places of England and Wales, ed. Fletcher Gyles (London, 1730), 418. Also available at . Bacon refers to ‘Lamberts book,’ probably a manuscript version of the Archeion, in a memorandum. Bacon, Letters and Life, vol. 4, ed. James Spedding (London: Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), 54. Also available at . Edward Coke likewise owned both printed and manuscript works of Lambarde’s, discussed in this book’s Chapter Seven.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Lambarde’s dissemination of Anglo-Saxon studies moves beyond the coterie model of Nowell’s; Lambarde had independent means and did not need to attach himself to a figure such as Cecil. Still, even though his inclinations were more towards print and even though he was not dominated by a central figure, some of Lambarde’s close associations with men such as Thomas Egerton and Francis Thynne provide key evidence for the dissemination and potential influence of Anglo-Saxon studies. His circle of colleagues continued to grow throughout his life, as he was appointed to positions in the Office of Alienations and in Chancery. In these appointments, Lambarde took upon himself to write about the institution with which he was associated—a history of the Office of Alienations and a collection of records and precedents for Chancery.58 When the Society of Antiquaries was formed in the 1580s, Lambarde became a member. Toward the end of his life, he became Keeper of Rolls in the Tower of London. In this last office, he compiled an Index of the Rolls which he presented to Queen Elizabeth herself. This interview included her famous reference to one of Shakespeare’s plays—‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’— and was the capstone of Lambarde’s career. He died a few weeks later on August 19, 1601.59 Nowell’s and Lambarde’s antiquarian writings are my main focus for exploring the role of Anglo-Saxon studies in the intellectual and political world of Elizabethan England. My discussion of Nowell’s manuscripts will center, in Chapters Two and Four, on one artifact in particular—his heavily annotated copy of Richard Howlet’s Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum, now in the University of Illinois’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Urbana, Illinois.60 Howlet’s bilingual dictionary provides readers with Latin equivalents for Early Modern English words. In his Abcedarium Nowell wrote thousands of Old English equivalents next to the Modern English–Latin entries, copied a glossary of Anglo-Saxon legal terms on the flyleaf, and interleaved a place-name index in which he recorded older versions of English names and events that happened at each locale. I focus on this book for several reasons. The three sets of notes in the Abcedarium bring together in a single codex Nowell’s chief research interests: learning to read

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Dunkel, William Lambarde, 144–145. Ibid., 176–178; W. Nicholas Knight, ‘Equity, the Merchant of Venice and William Lambarde,’ Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 93–104. The author’s name has usually been given as ‘Huloet,’ but R.W. McConchie persuasively argues that, in English, it should be ‘Howlet.’ ‘Richard Huloet, Right or Wrong?’ Notes and Queries n.s. 47 (2000): 26–27.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books the Old English language, studying the Anglo-Saxon laws, and describing English places and their history. The Abcedarium shows how arbitrary the division between printed books and manuscripts can be in the sixteenth century, demonstrating, in Sherman’s words, ‘reading so active and appropriative that it challenges the integrity of the entire printed book.’61 Nowell’s copious handwritten notes make this codex as much a ‘manuscript’ as the main dictionary’s text makes it a printed book—it cannot be exclusively categorized as either. It is a major artifact for the history of early AngloSaxon studies, but has not been the subject of extended study. It also presents us with a puzzle: why would Nowell combine such seemingly disparate projects into one volume? The codicology of the Abcedarium makes clear that Nowell himself wanted all three of the projects he undertook in this volume together. The printed English-to-Latin dictionary of Richard Howlet is laid out in two columns on each page, providing Nowell with writing space in the outside and top and bottom margins, between columns, and above and below headings, and Nowell used these spaces to compile some 4,500 Old English entries. The Old English–Latin legal dictionary is written chiefly on the two sides of the dictionary’s flyleaf, but the last two entries are written on the title page of the printed book, which shows that Nowell put the leaf in the book himself. Nowell meant the legal dictionary to accompany the printed dictionary and (presumably) the lexical glosses he made in it. One could argue that perhaps the flyleaf served as just a handy scrap of paper for what he knew would be a short dictionary—paper, after all, was not an inconsiderable expense—but the interleaving of the place-name index into the codex argues even more strongly that Nowell wanted these three projects together. The fifty-seven interleaves, mostly bifolia, contain place names organized by first letter and are folded into the dictionary at that letter of the alphabet; most of these interleaves have a watermark of an urn with an off-center foot, which C.M. Briquet numbers 12787.62 This watermark appears on none of the dictionary’s other leaves. It does, however, appear in another of Nowell’s manuscripts—his handwritten copy of John Leland’s place-name dictionary from the index of Leland’s Genethliacon, now bound with Nowell’s copy of another of Leland’s works, the Cygnea Cantio (London, British Library, C.95.18). The shared water-

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Used Books, 9. C.M. Briquet, Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire Historique des Marques du Papier dès leur Apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600 (1907; repr., Amsterdam: Paper Publications Society, 1968).

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England mark argues that the Abcedarium’s interleaves were written on paper that Nowell had loose. The paper was separable, not already bound into the dictionary as James Rosier suggested, and Nowell could have written his place-name index as its own notebook.63 Instead, he deliberately placed the pages into the Abcedarium. That he did so, rather than Lambarde after the latter inherited Nowell’s books, is shown by two place-name entries Nowell wrote in the dictionary’s bottom margins, on the recto and verso of the leaf containing the ‘Q’ entries of the English–Latin dictionary. Since Q was on a single leaf, Nowell could not place a bifolium between pages and instead used the printed dictionary’s margins for the appropriate entries. Nowell himself placed these three projects together, using some of his own supply of paper to enable his work, and in doing so produced a codex that strikes most modern readers as enigmatic, to say the least. Why gloss an Early Modern English dictionary with Old English at all, and why then attach a legal glossary gathered from a twelfth-century text and a lengthy (although still incomplete) index of English place names? How were these investigations related to each other? The answer to this cannot come from just examining the Abcedarium itself, but requires consideration of Nowell’s environment and connections. The English language, the English countryside, and the English legal system could serve as focal points for English identity by claiming to have deep roots in the past, and Cecil wanted exactly such identity fostered. The Abcedarium traces these roots and displays how Nowell’s manuscript study and production focused on key areas of secular nationalism. It also guides our attention to the ways that Lambarde’s studies at first followed the same lines of exploration. Lambarde’s own projects, completed after Nowell left for the Continent, kept these focuses and these forms at first, although his ideas on how to present his research shifted and his interests eventually centered themselves exclusively on legal topics. The Abcedarium demonstrates what medievalists’ attention to manuscripts and codicology can reveal to early modernists, what early modernists’ sensitivity to intellectual and cultural currents can show medievalists, and what an approach modeled on literary studies can add to discussions of historiography. Part I of this book details the interaction between Anglo-Saxon studies and contemporary debates about the shape of the English language. The second chapter examines the 4,500 lexical glosses written into the margins of the Abcedarium. Since the printed text is alphabetized on Early Modern 63

James L. Rosier, ‘A New Old English Glossary: Nowell upon Huloet,’ Studia Neophilologica 49 (1977): 189–194.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books English headwords, Nowell’s glosses could not have served as any kind of lexical aid for him as he interacted with medieval manuscripts—he would need to already know what the Old English word meant to look it up. This massive project, which ink color and layout show was carried out over some period of time, challenges the notion that Old English was studied only to facilitate access to Anglo-Saxon materials (especially religious ones). Nowell’s use particularly of the Anglo-Saxon writer Ælfric for this lexical enterprise mimics the interest that Archbishop Parker had in Ælfric’s homilies, but Nowell’s attraction to Ælfric and his Glossary and Grammar indicates that for Nowell, Ælfric was important because he offered a way to standardize Old English. Nowell’s concern with standardization and with English lexicography, in turn, probably reflects contemporary debates over the shape of the English language, its mixed heritage of Germanic and Latinate vocabulary, and the desirability of lexical expansion. Such interests would have been natural for Nowell, who certainly knew Arthur Golding and John Hart, and probably Roger Ascham. Even though his lexical project drew largely on an Anglo-Saxon writer whom his contemporaries were putting to service for polemic, Nowell’s interests in Ælfric, revealed in his manuscript marginalia and in the Abcedarium, were shaped by his own associations with other writers and translators into areas more lexical and linguistic than polemical. Lambarde shared Nowell’s interest in the interplay between the study of Old English and debates about the standardization of Early Modern English. As Chapter Three argues, these debates, eventually known as the Inkhorn Controversy, provide crucial context for understanding Nowell’s Abcedarium, his English translation of the Laws of King Alfred, and several of Nowell’s and Lambarde’s other manuscript leavings and marginalia. Lambarde’s notes on some of the materials Nowell left him, his legal glossary in the Archaionomia, and, especially, his marginal additions to Sir Thomas Smith’s treatise on spelling reform, De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione (On the True and Corrected Writing of the English Language; henceforth De Recta Scriptione), closely tie his own understanding of the history of the English language to patriotically charged claims about its fallen status and need for reform. Lambarde’s marginal notes in De Recta Scriptione extend and (mostly) support Smith’s claims about the foundational nature of Old English, the language of ‘our ancestors,’ the Anglo-Saxons (a term which Smith coined in De Recta Scriptione). Part II examines works dealing with the places and the land of England itself. The fourth chapter discusses Nowell’s other large-scale project in the Abcedarium, the extensive index of English place names, organized in

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England loosely alphabetical order on either Early Modern English or common Latin names. Each entry compiles information about that place from earlier documents, focusing on early medieval history and noting versions of the name itself as well as events that happened there. Here also, Nowell’s approach appears enigmatic, for although he could read Old English well, and did include a few entries from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and both the Latin and Old English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, he does not draw on these texts, treasuries of Anglo-Saxon place names, as heavily as we might expect. Instead, the majority of the entries come from postConquest sources, especially Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglia and two printed works of John Leland’s from the 1530s. Why did Nowell mine these later works so much more thoroughly? I suggest that he did so because both these authors themselves set out to present England as a unified entity, in a way that, particularly in the case of Leland, fostered national identity. Nowell used these authors extensively because they perhaps seemed to him more ideologically congruent with his aims than texts written while ‘England’ still existed as separate kingdoms. Nowell’s desire for the category of English to become the pre-eminent one also guided his organization of the place-name index, for he writes names according to where they exist in the alphabet and not their geographic location, according to shire or county, as most contemporary chorographers would do. Lambarde’s chorographical works, the subject of Chapter Five, from the start waver between holding Nowell’s national focus and exploring more local identities. His Alphabetical Description contains both regional and national organization; it initially lists towns according to county but the bulk of the text is gathered, like the Abcedarium’s place-name index, in groups based on the first letter of the name of the place being discussed. His Perambulation of Kent is the first English county history and as such is clearly a more local work, but a strongly national argument runs through the book, concerning the struggle between the English monarch and the Catholic clergy throughout England’s history. Lambarde did not work for Cecil, and could explore more regional and local identities than Nowell chose to do; his emphasis shifted over time from a nearly exclusive national framework to one that places national and local identities on a more equal footing. However framed, both these identities remain bound to the Anglo-Saxon period by Lambarde’s consistent use of ‘Saxon’ etymologies to explain the meanings of place names and by his reference to Old English legal works as foundational—even definitional—to the places he describes.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books The visual arguments that Nowell makes in his maps and the contexts in which some of these are found explain the differences between Nowell’s work and Lambarde’s eventual strategies of argument. Nowell’s maps of Britain and Ireland, one of which, London, British Library Additional 62540, he probably drew for Cecil’s use, forcefully construct and contrast English identity and the Irish Other. Nor is Additional 62540 his only manuscript that contains maps or descriptions of Ireland. A notebook now part of London, British Library Cotton Domitian xviii contains detailed maps of Ireland alternating with a text justifying military conquest of the island. These are grouped after an edition of the AngloSaxon Chronicle and before a series of large-scale maps of southern Britain in which Nowell writes the names of towns in ‘Old English,’ mostly reconstructed from the towns’ contemporary names. These maps and their accompanying texts, discussed in Chapter Six, demonstrate Nowell’s persistent vision of both Britain and Ireland, and I argue that his focus on the Irish Other caused his vehement attempts to solidify English identity against it. Nowell’s concern with Ireland and his interest in Anglo-Saxon England coexist in the Domitian notebook, and the former shaped some aspects of the latter. The text Nowell chose to intersperse with his maps resembles in several ways Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the View and the contexts of English calls for conquest of Ireland throughout the sixteenth century. Although none of Lambarde’s surviving writings directly take up the issue of Anglo-Irish relationships, his membership in the Society of Antiquaries and friendship with Thomas Egerton could have brought him into contact with Spenser, and introduced the latter to Nowell’s work on the subject. Lambarde, even for those areas of study that did not interest him directly, remains crucial for dissemination of Anglo-Saxon studies and their coordination with the issue of Ireland after Nowell’s departure from England in 1567. The text in Nowell’s Irish materials emphasizes English common law as a marker of England’s identity and cultural superiority, and this book’s final chapter explores the study of Old English laws. In this area especially, Nowell’s work has become inseparable from that of Lambarde. By piecing together Lambarde’s conception of Anglo-Saxon law’s role in English common law, and his claims for the necessity of English common law in defining what was English, we can see how Lambarde completed what Nowell began, especially as Nowell ultimately left his legal materials in Lambarde’s hands to publish. Lambarde may have been less focused than Nowell on specifically national identity in his chorographic works, but not

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England in his legal studies, which continue his re-integration of Anglo-Saxon research with a specifically Protestant English identity. Lambarde’s texts, some of which were printed, some of which circulated in manuscript, also blur the division between published and ‘private’ works, and demonstrate, once again, that both types of evidence must be considered, and in relation to broad cultural aims of the day, if we are to understand the crucial role of Anglo-Saxon studies in the formation of English nationalism. My argument that Nowell’s and Lambarde’s studies were undertaken in the service of English national identity formation requires clarification. The subject of nation-building, of when and how and why nations come into being, remains a debated topic in pre-modern studies. Can England under Elizabeth be called a ‘nation’? Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation of nations and their birth would argue no, that true nationalism is not possible when the monarchy still precludes English subjects from imagining themselves as entirely communal with each other in ways that they are not with members of their same social class on the Continent.64 Anderson’s conclusion has been questioned, however, particularly by Richard Helgerson, Andrew Escobedo, Cathy Shrank, and Stewart Mottram.65 Trying to define what a nation is, in order to establish the parameters of one’s exploration, has proven a profitable exercise for many writers, and their discussions and disagreements have furthered our understanding of history and literature. This is true both of studies that include and those that exclude the Elizabethan period in England as validly ‘national.’ However, the critical debate is over how to define the phenomenon of fostering affinity for one’s country in the early modern period, not questioning whether such a phenomenon occurred. In any case, it is not crucial to my study whether or not Tudor England can be called, from our retrospective view, a ‘nation.’ The discourses I examine all had potential— exploited by many writers—to encourage national affection and feelings of community in their audience. The English language, the English common law, and the English names for their rivers and towns were all unique to the inhabitants of southern Britain, and could be made to contrast with the habits of others. As such, they could be made a locus of an emotional, or at least non-rational, appeal, not only for the individual cultural or geo-

64 65

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), especially 19–36. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially 266–294; Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 1–24; Shrank, Writing the Nation, 2–7; Mottram, Empire and Nation, 1–34.

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The Anglo-Saxonists and Their Books graphic systems in question but for the concept of ‘Englishness’ to which the systems were linked. Such discourses certainly existed, as Richard Helgerson has shown in his study of several of the younger Elizabethans such as Spenser and Coke, and in fact his foundational Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England has sections addressing works on common law, on language and poetic arts, and topographical writings. These were not the only areas of such common feeling—several other factors contributed to nationalism, most notably Protestantism and the person of Elizabeth herself. These could be mutually reinforcing as well. Especially in the work of Lambarde, the attempts to promote a sense of English identity in law, language, and landscape often do so by figuring them as Protestant or by relating them to the Queen. Ultimately, what matters for my purpose is less whether these attempts at forming national identity succeeded to the extent that we can retrospectively call Tudor England a ‘nation’ and more that the attempts were being made by Cecil and the political and intellectual figures with whom he surrounded himself, including Laurence Nowell, and by chorographic and legal writers such as William Lambarde. Although this book spends a good deal of space closely examining the Abcedarium’s major projects and thoroughly discussing their sources, it should be clear from the above discussion that this is not a narrow study of a single codex, even in Chapters Two and Four where the Abcedarium is a main organizing principle. Rather, Nowell’s Abcedarium serves as a test case of how Anglo-Saxon studies were carried out, and shows the importance of recognizing both previously unnoticed manuscripts and the cultural milieu in which those manuscripts were produced. Lambarde’s works allow us, in the discussions focusing on him, to trace the ongoing development of Anglo-Saxon research and examine how this branch of antiquarianism continued to play out in the decades after Nowell’s death. This combination of detailed attention to codicology and manuscript transmission with consideration of contemporary concerns makes this book one that bridges the separate focuses of medievalists and early modernists in studying Tudor medievalism. It offers a fuller explanation of why the sixteenth century saw the origin of Anglo-Saxon studies, in contrast to the supposed ‘Renaissance’ disdain for the post-Classical period, and deepens our understanding of both the origins of medievalism and the intellectual history of Tudor England. It should also demonstrate, finally, that early Anglo-Saxon studies need to be placed in the context of sixteenth-century intellectual concerns, if we are to understand either one.

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PART I

ANGLO-SAXON TEXTS AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England

Figure 1. Laurence Nowell’s lexical glosses in the Abcedarium. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Library.

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Chapter 2 THE ABCEDARIUM GLOSSARY: SOURCES AND METHODS OF NOWELL’S OLD ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY

ndoubtedly, one of the greatest obstacles that early Anglo-Saxonists faced was the lack of dictionaries: their initial challenge, to begin sorting out Old English vocabulary in the manuscripts that interested them. The first person to do so with any real success, Laurence Nowell, became known as a preeminent (perhaps the preeminent) Tudor AngloSaxonist mainly because of his lexical work. Correspondingly, of the projects Nowell undertook in the Abcedarium, present-day AngloSaxonists have paid the most attention to the collection of lexical glosses written into the margin of the book’s printed dictionary. James Rosier’s article, the only previous study of Nowell’s Abcedarium, focuses on these; Ronald Buckalew gives them some attention in his discussions of Nowell’s transcript of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, and other analyses of Nowell have mentioned them.1 The Abcedarium notes have been mostly considered as a preliminary or adjunct to Nowell’s best-known work of Old English lexicography, the Vocabularium Saxonicum, a manuscript dictionary of Old English–Early Modern English, now Oxford, Bodleian Library Selden supra 63. Albert Marckwardt edited the Vocabularium in

U

1

James L. Rosier, ‘A New Old English Glossary: Nowell upon Huloet,’ Studia Neophilologica 49 (1977): 189–194; Ronald Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland: The Significance of Laurence Nowell’s Transcript of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary,’ in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl Berkhout and Milton McCormick Gatch (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 19–50; Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (1530–ca. 1570),’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 3–17.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England 1952, making it easily accessible for modern scholars and facilitating the study of Nowell’s work on Old English.2 The Abcedarium glosses and the Vocabularium are certainly similar in their approach to Old English lexicography. Nowell alone among the early Anglo-Saxonists consistently placed Old English beside Early Modern English.3 His Vocabularium translates Old English into Early Modern English (with occasional Latin definitions as a supplement), unlike other lexicographers such as John Joscelyn, who translated mainly into Latin (with occasional English definitions as a supplement).4 Nowell’s focus on Early Modern English is not limited to the Vocabularium. He edited the Laws of King Alfred and translated them into English, not into Latin, and, of course, his Abcedarium notes are written into an English–Latin dictionary. However, despite their similar focus on Early Modern English, the two works are not as clearly related as has been assumed. The form of the Abcedarium glossary would require Nowell to already know what an Old English word meant to find it, and does not have enough in common with the Vocabularium to have been a source for the later work. This chapter poses a question that it and the next chapter will attempt to answer: what was the Abcedarium glossary for, and why did it take the form that it did? I will examine Nowell’s lexical notes in the Abcedarium’s margins in a widening series of contexts, first closely studying the Abcedarium itself, then tracing its medieval sources and drawing out from them and Nowell’s other manuscripts his approach to his materials. The Abcedarium reveals an interest in the works of the Anglo-Saxon writer Ælfric of Eynsham, whose works were also studied by Joscelyn and Matthew Parker, but, I argue, for different reasons. Both Nowell’s use of Ælfric and his translations of Old English texts into Early Modern English show his awareness of language’s variety and mutability, not just in the past but in his own present. John Considine’s notion of ‘heroic’ lexicography provides a lens with which to examine Nowell’s Old English dictionary and 2

3

4

Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, ed. Albert H. Marckwardt, University of Michigan Studies in Language and Literature 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952). Although technically the English of the sixteenth century is Modern (as opposed to Old or Middle) English, most discussions distinguish between Early Modern English (EME) and Present-Day English (PDE). Timothy Graham discusses Joscelyn’s approach to Old English lexicography in ‘John Joscelyn, Pioneer of Old English Lexicography,’ in The Recovery of Old English: AngloSaxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 91.

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The Abcedarium Glossary the Abcedarium glosses. Considine observes that the adjective ‘heroic’ has often been applied to dictionaries and their compilers, and argues that this use reflects a chronological as much as a moral meaning: ‘the heroic world is that past world on which the present is founded, and which informs or is re-embodied or emulated by the present.’5 In Nowell’s regular placement of Old English next to its descendant, Nowell’s understanding of the ‘heroic’ past both reflects and shapes his concern with the present, as Considine continues: ‘what defines [the heroic] is … its difference from the present, and its place in the cultural ancestry of the present. The people of the heroic age are the forerunners of the living, its institutions are the forerunners of living institutions and its language is connected with living language.’6 Drawing on the work of David Lowenthal, Considine shows that this desire is to find in the past the ‘heritage’ rather than the ‘history’ of the present. As Lowenthal argues, ‘heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes.’7 Since Considine shows also that language change was mostly discussed in terms of alterations in vocabulary rather than in grammar or morphology, a dictionary that places Old English words next to Early Modern English words is a logical way to explore the ‘heritage’ that Early Modern English had from its ancestor, and that its speakers had from the medieval period.8 This makes clear that Nowell’s concern with the English language’s history and use is not simply ‘academic’ and antiquarian. Nowell’s own circumstances living in Cecil’s house closely tie him to some key figures in contemporary language debates, and only by reading his manuscripts and his environment together can we begin to understand his own role in this discourse. Although this chapter will primarily discuss the Abcedarium and Nowell’s lexicographical work, it and the next chapter also show what new directions this investigation can give to our understanding of Lambarde as well. When we follow the direction that the Abcedarium’s glosses point us, then the interests of Lambarde as well as those of Nowell become more clearly visible, as both were concerned with English language history and with debates about standardization of the lexicon and of orthography. Closely examining Nowell’s Abcedarium glosses and what they can tell us 5 6 7 8

John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7. Ibid. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1968; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x. Considine, Dictionaries, 14–15.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England about how he used his manuscript sources allows us to connect both of their Elizabethan Anglo-Saxon studies with contemporary concerns about the Early Modern English language. THE ABCEDARIUM GLOSSES Nowell wrote over 4,500 entries in the Abcedarium’s margins, although since he often writes the same Old English word next to various modern synonyms, this does not make a total of over forty-five hundred different Old English words.9 Nowell generally tries to record verbs in the infinitive and nouns and adjectives in the nominative singular (with some errors and exceptions), as he does in his Vocabularium Saxonicum, rather than write the inflected forms he found in the manuscripts as John Joscelyn would do.10 Often Nowell writes several Old English entries next to the same printed entry, sometimes including descriptive phrases and spelling variants of the same word. Next to the word ‘husbandman,’ for instance, Nowell writes: ‘Æcermann. se þe æcer begaþ. Æcer ceorl. eorðtylia. Bigeng [sic]. Æcerman’ (Farmer. he who cultivates the field. plowman. earth-tiller. cultivator. farmer). Howlet similarly writes several near-synonyms in his Latin entries, and Rosier suggested that Nowell’s practice ‘is induced by Huloet’s citation of Latin synonyms.’11 Probably it also stems from his recording of words from multiple sources. The net result is as much a rudimentary Old English thesaurus as a glossary. Rosier observes that ‘after each entry or word in an entry Nowell puts a point, suggesting that he intended his entries to be consistent with Huloet’s or the printer’s format.’12 However, the printed dictionary contains two formats, the one for the English entries (the source language of the bilingual dictionary) and the other for the Latin entries (the target language). Howlet’s Latin entries have a variety of punctuation, such as a triangular arrangement of points and paraph marks. Sometimes he uses a stylized et ligature. The English headwords are all followed by a point. Nowell uses none of the various Latin punctuation marks in his Old English entries; he limits himself to a simple point, the system used for the Modern English entries.

9

10 11 12

A finding-list of Nowell’s entries and Howlet’s Modern English headwords appears as Appendix A of Rebecca Brackmann, ‘Language, Land, and Law: Laurence Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon Studies in Elizabethan England’ (PhD diss. University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 2005), 262–322. Graham, ‘John Joscelyn,’ 90–91. Rosier, ‘New Old English Glossary,’ 192. Ibid., 191.

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The Abcedarium Glossary Rather than use the same et ligature within his Old English entries, he uses the Tironian symbol 7. As the dictionary’s target languages, Old English and Latin serve a similar function for the reader—they are the languages that one learns about when consulting the book. However, Nowell’s punctuation and abbreviations distinguish the two and instead correlate Old English to Early Modern English. Sometimes Nowell’s entries are less specific than Howlet’s lemmata, and he seems to intend the Old English to only accompany the first word or two of Howlet’s Early Modern English. At ‘Hony mone, a terme prouerbially applied to such as be newe maried …’ Nowell writes ‘hunig’; the Old English word means honey, the first word of the English entry; it does not mean honeymoon. Often Nowell supplements Howlet’s available headwords and writes in the top or bottom margins of the book, giving Early Modern English, Old English, and sometimes Latin definitions. Occasionally he writes an Old English word or phrase in the margin and defines it only in Latin, which might challenge the notion that he was concerned with Early Modern English’s development from Old English. However, such entries appear at alphabetical locations that show he was still thinking in English even if he did not bother to write it in his entry; for instance, ‘warna þæt þu þæt ne do. Caue ne hoc facias’ has no English translation, but appears on a B page of the dictionary that suggests a Early Modern English lemma of Beware. From its inception, the work of glossing the Abcedarium with Old English was meant to be a large and on-going project. Nowell worked on this book in stages and laid out his entries to facilitate the writing of later ones. This is easiest to see when he wrote in the left margin of the verso of a leaf. Nowell usually wrote the first few words in these entries out by the edge of the leaf, away from the printed word that translates them, leaving space for subsequent entries. The different shades of ink that appear in the book show that Nowell worked on it in stages. We can also see that Nowell returned to this book on several occasions by the number of times he repeats an Old English gloss next to the same Modern English word when he makes additions in the top and bottom margin. At the beginning of B ante A, he writes in the top margin ‘Babtisme. Fulluht.’13 Next to the printed entry for ‘baptisme’ he again writes ‘fulluht,’ and at the bottom of the same page, in a distinctly lighter ink, he has written ‘baptisme. fulluht. fontbæðe.’ 13

Howlet’s dictionary has headings giving the first two letters of words on that page (unlike modern dictionaries which usually give the first and last word included); I use these as locators when discussing Nowell’s text.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Probably his replication of words came from the number of sources he used in compiling the glosses, but the organization of the glosses shows that he allowed for the possibility of multiple entries from the beginning. MANUSCRIPT SOURCES One of the first questions scholars have about early lexicographic projects is what sources were used in their compilation. Identifying particular texts, or even specific manuscripts when that proves possible, as Nowell’s sources can add to our knowledge of the material resources he had available to him, and can show which Old English texts drew the most consistent attention from him. It also allows us to examine how he used the sources he had, and his approaches to the medieval documents at his disposal can in turn hint at his underlying interests. Albert Marckwardt, in his introduction to the edition of the Vocabularium and in a separate article on the subject, meticulously traces the sources of the words in Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, his manuscript Old English–Early Modern English dictionary; Nowell’s Abcedarium uses many of the same materials.14 The main difference between the sources of the two lexicographic projects is the Abcedarium glosses’ heavier reliance on Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham’s Grammar and Glossary, which provided the majority of Nowell’s entries. The Abcedarium’s deeper engagement with Ælfric probably stems from ideological similarities between the Grammar and Glossary and Nowell’s concern with the importance of ancient and modern English. I will discuss several of Nowell’s other sources first, to lay some groundwork for Nowell’s interests and methods, before turning to the works of Ælfric and Nowell’s treatment of them. Some caveats must be given first, however, as the identification of Nowell’s sources for any individual word is rarely straightforward. Although Nowell’s notes in the Abcedarium occur in various ink colors, this unfortunately proves less useful for identifying sources than one might hope. Words from Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary seem to have been entered first, in a light brown ink. Written last are the words from a glossary of plant names in London, British Library Harley 978, which appear in a greyish-brown ink. However, the words in between these are much more difficult to source. Nowell compiled wordlists from various manuscripts, as we can see in the two leaves bound in London, Lambeth Palace 692, described below, which gather words from both the Old 14

Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium, 1–19; ‘The Sources of Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum,’ Studies in Philology 45 (1948): 21–36.

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The Abcedarium Glossary English Bede and the homilies in London, British Library Cotton Vespasian D.xiv. Doubtless Nowell made lists from some of his other manuscript sources as well, such as texts of Archbishop Wulfstan’s homilies and the Rule of St. Benedict. The compilation of Old English words from various texts into lists means that when he copied words from those lists into the Abcedarium, the ink colors are often the same for entries from different Old English manuscripts. Nowell did not give sources after his words, as he occasionally did in the Vocabularium, nor did he write the inflected forms he found in manuscripts, which further complicates the identification of exact sources for individual Abcedarium glosses. Nowell’s spelling is often untrustworthy, especially since he could not always perfectly determine what form an infinitive verb should take and sometimes confused strong and weak verbs. He could be cavalier about the difference among a, æ, and e, and did not understand the difference among –a, –u, –e, and –an at the ends of nouns. Raymond Grant has analyzed Nowell’s accuracy in his transcript of London, British Library Cotton Otho B.xi, and concludes that Nowell’s notes can serve little practical purpose in determining the orthography of his original.15 However, Ronald Buckalew and Roland Torkar disagree with Grant’s conclusion. Buckalew examines Grant’s evidence and argues that, after one removes the interchange of æ and e and of þ and ð, ‘his deviations, when they can be checked against extant manuscripts, are usually at less than one percent.’16 Torkar, while admitting that Nowell’s transcript presents the editor with ‘nicht unerhebliche Probleme’ (not insignificant problems), likewise feels that Nowell’s alterations are consistent enough that the original can be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy.17 Grant, Torkar, and Buckalew, however, focus on Nowell’s transcriptions of medieval texts, which is not quite the same as his lexicographic enterprise. It appears that in his Abcedarium glosses he attempted to ‘standardize’ the Old English lexicon, listing nouns in nominative singular and verbs in the infinitive, and to write all the texts in the late West Saxon literary dialect represented by Ælfric’s texts, since on the whole he not only mines Ælfric’s texts more fully but also preserves their spellings more consistently than

15 16 17

Grant, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Transcript of Cotton Otho B.XI,’ Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 111–124. Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland,’ 40. Torkar, Eine altenglische Übersetzung von Alcuins De Virtutibus et Vitiis, Kap. 20 (Liebermanns Judex). Untersuchungen und Textausgabe mit einem Anhang: Die Gesetze II und V Æthelstan nach Otho B.XI und Add. 43703, Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie, ed. Helmut Gneuss and Wolfgang Weiss, vol. 7 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981), 166–167.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England he does for his other sources. Such altered orthography for entries from non-Ælfrician texts complicates our attempts to find exact sources for individual words, but provides a significant indication of Nowell’s goals for the Abcedarium. Nowell also attempts to recreate Old English words, sometimes introducing back-formations that are not attested in the Old English corpus. As Marckwardt points out, swangettan is not attested as an Old English verb, but it is included in both of Nowell’s lexical projects (next to the headwords ‘wagge’ and ‘shake with fever’ in the Abcedarium). Nowell probably created it from the noun swangettung.18 Similarly, Nowell includes the unattested fiðele (which he defines ‘a fidle, a croude, a viole’) in the Vocabularium, probably taking it from the attested fiðelere (‘A fidler, a crowder, all such as play on any instrument with the bowe’).19 Toga, which occurs in compounds such as heretoga (‘the capitayne or generall of an armie’ in the Vocabularium) is not attested on its own but appears in the Vocabularium (‘a duke, a capitayne’) and the Abcedarium. Nowell’s habits of back-forming and reconstructing words caution us to be fairly conservative when identifying a text as the source of any one word—if Nowell’s notes contain a word that only occurs in one Old English text (a hapax legomenon), we cannot automatically assume that he read a manuscript that contains that text if the word is one he could have formed from a similar root in another part of speech. For the purposes of this exploration, I take a conservative approach, and consider a text as a possible source for a word only if that text contains the word in the same part of speech—for instance, if Nowell writes a verb in his Abcedarium glosses, I will not consider a manuscript that contains only a noun or adjective from the same root a possible source, even though he could have deduced the verb from these forms. With all that said, however, some sources for the Abcedarium glosses can be cautiously identified. By and large, Nowell’s sources for the Abcedarium glosses are the same as the ones he used to compile the Vocabularium. The Abcedarium notes were drawn from fewer sources—it does not appear that the Latin–Old English glossaries in London, British Library Cotton Cleopatra A.iii were used, for instance, nor the interlinear Old English glosses in the Lindisfarne Gospels—but so far, no new manuscripts have emerged as sources of the Abcedarium glosses that were not also mined for the compilation of the larger dictionary. Nowell probably took a few Abcedarium entries from the 18 19

Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium, 12. Ibid.

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The Abcedarium Glossary homilies of Wulfstan and perhaps from the Old English Rule of St. Benedict. Some words came from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Old English law codes, texts that Nowell used in his other projects and that I will discuss in later chapters. A comprehensive discussion of all Nowell’s possible sources is beyond the scope of this book, which will focus instead on his major sources and on texts that show his methods and interests in compilation: the glossary of plant names found in London, British Library Harley 978, his notes in London, British Library Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, and his extractions of vocabulary words from this Vespasian manuscript and from London, British Library Additional 43703/Otho B.xi onto a wordlist now in London, Lambeth Palace Library 692. The discussion will finish by considering Nowell’s use of Abbot Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, the major source text for the Abcedarium glosses. London, British Library Harley 978 Harley 978 contains some notable literary and musical works, such as the best early witness to the lais of Marie de France and the famous Middle English song ‘Sumer is icumen in.’ The manuscript also contains a Latin–English glossary of plant names that Nowell mined for the Abcedarium—over fifty words come from this brief, specialized glossary, slightly more than a third of its total.20 The Harley herbal glossary is not technically Old English, but rather early Middle English. Perhaps Nowell could not tell the difference; however, he did recognize that several of the readings he found in this manuscript varied from the ‘standard’ Old English he was attempting to compile, for the orthographic changes from Harley 978 to the Abcedarium glosses are both significant and systematic. Nowell consistently changes the second element of compounds from wurt to wyrt and substitutes an f for a manuscript u; he writes blacberie for blakeberie, alters hemeluc to hemlac, and makes other spelling changes that attempt to reconstruct the ‘Old English’ versions of these Middle English words. The Abcedarium entries from Harley 978 represent an extreme example of Nowell’s attempt to normalize spellings in his lexical projects. The Harley glossary shows most clearly that Nowell was not simply recording readings as he found them, but attempted, in his dictionary, to reconstruct a lexicon based on the late West Saxon dialect that resulted from the tenth-century Benedictine reform, and that found its most 20

The Harley herbal glossary is edited by Thomas Wright and Richard Wulker in AngloSaxon and Old English Vocabularies, 2nd ed. (1884; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), I.554–559. Original version available on .

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England prolific practitioner in Ælfric. Modern dictionaries of Old English use the same strategy, so his choice could easily seem ‘natural’ to us. However, Nowell’s notes show a desire to establish a literary standard for Old English that is unlikely to be separate from his attitudes and knowledge about the English language of his own day. Why Nowell would spend so much energy on a dictionary of plant names can only be conjectured. His interests were wide-ranging, and might have included botany. Also, his employer, William Cecil, was an avid gardener who continually sought to beautify his homes with well-kept grounds. In the middle of a 1561 letter scolding his son Thomas for his profligate lifestyle on the Continent, Cecil asks his son to look for ‘any things meet for my garden.’21 Thomas Windebank, the young Cecil’s chaperone, got even more explicit instructions: ‘I pray you, Windebank, if ye think that ye can pleasure me with sending me in the season of the year things meet for my orchard or garden, help me; and if also ye can procure for me an apt man for mine orchard or garden.’22 Perhaps Cecil’s known love of his gardens and trees guided Nowell to search out antique names for the plants his employer so coveted. This is, of course, only speculation, but here as elsewhere Cecil’s interests can suggest motives for some of Nowell’s labors. London, British Library Cotton Otho B.xi/London, British Library Additional 43703 The most famous of Nowell’s manuscripts, Additional 43703 is his copy of Cotton Otho B.xi, which would be almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian library fire at Ashburnham house in the eighteenth century.23 Nowell certainly took some of his lexical entries from the Old English Bede, either from the original or his copy; his work on transcribing Bede will be discussed in Chapter Four so I will not describe it in detail here. The fragments that remain of Otho B.xi do not show his hand, only those of Robert Cotton and William L’Isle;24 neither does he annotate his copy of Bede in

21 22 23

24

Quoted in Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 116. Ibid. Nowell’s notebook is described by Robin Flower in his groundbreaking article on Nowell, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 46–73; reprinted in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–27. All quotations are from the 1990 reprint. Torkar’s Altenglische Übersetzung includes the fullest discussion of the manuscript. Torkar, Altenglische Übersetzung, 52.

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The Abcedarium Glossary Add. 43703 with an eye to lexicography. Nevertheless, his use of the Bede as a source for vocabulary to include in his lexical projects cannot be disputed, for he wrote a wordlist, now preserved in Lambeth Palace Library MS 692, discussed below, which drew on the Otho B.xi Bede.25 Cotton Vespasian D.xiv This codex contains two originally distinct manuscripts: the first is a twelfth-century compilation of homilies in Old English, mostly from Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies; the second is a copy of Isidore of Seville’s Liber synonymorum.26 Sixteenth-century marginalia appear in the portion of the manuscript written in Old English. The second item in the manuscript is an excerpt from the letter of Ælfric to Sigefyrð, beginning ‘Ælfric abbod gret Sigefyrð freonlice’ (Ælfric the abbot warmly greets Sigefyrð). This salutation and the number of Ælfric’s sermons in the first manuscript perhaps led Nowell and Lambarde to assume that all the homiletic texts were by him, as indeed most of them are. As Marckwardt observes in his discussion of Nowell’s Vocabularium and its sources, the Vespasian manuscript has some Early Modern English interlinear glosses in it in Nowell’s hand, most notably on folio 16r and verso, and several other words on this leaf are underscored.27 The leaf comes near the beginning of Ælfric’s homily on the ‘Twelve Abuses of the World’; why this particular homily should merit interlinear glosses on one of its leaves is not clear. Some of the Old English words so glossed and/or underscored appear in Nowell’s Abcedarium index, and some do not. However, the most notable thing about Nowell’s glosses is that they are all in English, rather than Latin, again displaying his usual use of English for his Old English lexical work in contrast to the other antiquaries.28 Nowell’s treatment of the remainder of this codex is somewhat enigmatic. After folio 16, Nowell writes nothing for several folios, then begins 25 26

27 28

Graham, ‘John Joscelyn,’ 137. Jonathan Wilcox lists the contents of the manuscript in his companion volume to AngloSaxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 8: Wulfstan and Other Homiletic Materials, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and A.N. Doane (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994), 53; Malcolm Godden has identified the Ælfrician homilies in his introduction to his edition of the Second Series of Catholic Homilies. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary, Early English Text Society s.s. 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Marckwardt, ‘Sources,’ 27. For a list of the underscored words and their interlinear English translation see Brackmann, ‘Language, Land, and Law,’ 42–43.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England annotating again on folio 24. For the rest of the volume, his markings mostly take the form of underscorings, with a few exceptions such as the marginal ‘leornin[g] cnihta’ next to an underscored gingre on folio 25r. He probably took this definition from Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary; it appears twice in the Abcedarium. Some underscored words have dots below them. When a line of text contains a word marked by a dot, a corresponding dot appears in the margin of that line. Each dotted word in the line has a dot in the margin, so that some lines have as many as three marginal dots. Nowell’s system, for system it must have been, is not entirely clear. Perhaps the dots marked the degree of familiarity he had with the word, or how certain he was of its meaning. That the underscorings and dots are his is likely from the high degree of correspondence between underlined words in Vespasian D.xiv and Nowell’s Lambeth wordlist. A second hand, probably Lambarde’s, has also entered some definitions in the Vespasian manuscript. Lam[*****] appears next to an underscored hlafmæsse on folio 33r, the last word in the first part of Ælfric’s Homily II.24 for the Kalends of August. Hlæfmæsse does not appear in the Abcedarium, but is a lemma in the Vocabularium where Nowell defines it as Lammasse; we can assume that this is the word that was written in the margin. Lambarde’s continuation of the Vocabularium entry Hlæfmæsse notes ‘the first day of August. Alfricus Abbas in Opere Sermonum, fol. 34.’ Lambarde’s note matches the sixteenth-century folio numbers in the Vespasian manuscript; apparently he compared Nowell’s dictionary to the medieval codex. Lambarde’s description ‘opere sermonum’ is ambiguous; the ‘work of sermons’ could imply that Lambarde thought that all the sermons in Vespasian D.xiv were Ælfric’s. A last marginal note in Nowell’s hand appears on folio 146v, [P]eterborowe, next to an underscored ‘petroces stowe.’ His underscorings, however, appear continually through the Old English texts in the Vespasian homily collection. Other sixteenth-century hands, probably of scholars associated with Archbishop Parker, appear sporadically in Vespasian D.xiv, mostly making notes relating to the content of the sermons. Nowell’s notes in Vespasian D.xiv, in contrast, show attention to lexical detail rather than any particular interest in the manuscript’s content. He gives no indication of comparing the texts of the homilies to other manuscript versions, as he does elsewhere with the Old English Bede, the law codes of King Alfred, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, texts whose content interested him. No transcriptions of homilies from Vespasian D.xiv appear in his surviving notebooks. Lambarde’s note in the Vocabularium suggests why the Vespasian homiliary drew such attention from Nowell, despite the fact that

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The Abcedarium Glossary its content does not seem to have particularly interested him. Nowell and Lambarde may have assumed that Ælfric was the author of all the sermons in the first part of Vespasian D.xiv. Since words from Vespasian D.xiv made their way onto the Lambeth wordlist and from there to the margins of the Abcedarium, and since the Abcedarium also includes 3,000 words from the Grammar and Glossary, words from texts by and attributed to Ælfric have an overwhelming majority in Nowell’s lexical project. London, Lambeth Palace 692 fols. 29 and 32 Lambeth 692 primarily contains a set of wordlists written by John Joscelyn, Nowell’s contemporary and the compiler of the sixteenth century’s largest Old English dictionary. Timothy Graham has described the manuscript in detail in his essay on Joscelyn, and only the points pertinent to this discussion need be mentioned here.29 Among Joscelyn’s pages is a bifolium in Nowell’s hand, the first fruit of Nowell’s lexicographic labors in Otho B.xi and Vespasian D.xiv. These leaves are the current folios 29 and 32 (a bifolium of Joscelyn’s is placed between them). They are worn and wrinkled towards the bottom, and were probably loose before Joscelyn (or a later owner) placed them in his volume of notes. The chance survival of these two leaves gives us our only glimpse at Nowell’s method of compilation for his lexicographic projects. Nowell’s notes take the form of Old English words, sporadically capitalized, followed by a punctus and a word defining the Old English. The entries are arranged in three columns per side. Usually the definitions are in Latin, as are Joscelyn’s, but every so often Nowell writes an English definition (such as ‘Hogigen. to care’ on folio 29r) or gives equivalents in both languages. This is interesting; it shows that it was at least as natural for him to think in Latin as in Early Modern English when translating Old English, and underscores that his decision to use Modern English in his more finished projects such as the Vocabularium and his edition of the laws was indeed a decision, and by no means arose from inadequate knowledge of Latin. As Graham observes, Nowell’s notes are taken from the Old English Bede in Otho B.xi and from Cotton Vespasian D.xiv.30 The references from the Vespasian manuscript are often accompanied by folio numbers, corresponding to the sixteenth-century numbering of the manuscript (some four or five leaves behind modern folio numbers). The Vespasian wordlist in the Lambeth bifolium begins part-way down the first column on folio 29r, and 29 30

Graham, ‘John Joscelyn,’ 104–133. Ibid., 106.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England the ink color changes from a light brown to a dark brown or black as the source changes from Bede to the Vespasian homilies. The Vespasian entries then continue to the end of the third column on folio 29v. On folio 32, the words once again are drawn from Bede. It may appear in the Lambeth bifolium that Nowell switched from working with Bede to drawing from the Vespasian homiliary, and then returned to Bede, but I do not think this is the case. Given the worn state of the leaves, the direction of the fold was probably unclear and Joscelyn folded the bifolium in backwards—the leaf, now folio 32, with both sides drawn from Bede, ought to precede the folio with only a few Bede items. The slightly greyish tinge to the ink at the end of folio 32v and the ink of the Bede entries on folio 29 supports this. As the Bede entries on folio 32 appear to begin with Book II and go through Book V, and the entries from folio 29 also appear to be from Book V, the pair was probably either a stand-alone bifolium or the central one of a gathering. After he finished with his notes from Bede, Nowell may have allowed some time to elapse before he returned to his wordlist, and used slightly darker ink to make his notes from Vespasian D. xiv. Nowell’s notes from Vespasian D.xiv do not extend through the end of the homiliary, but rather break off at folio 140 (folio 135 in the sixteenthcentury numbering). Perhaps the leaf was followed by another, which would have included the remainder of the Vespasian words. Harder to explain is why Nowell did not begin his notes from Vespasian D.xiv at the start of the codex—his first Vespasian entry notes that it comes from folio ‘48a’ (modern folio 52r). This is particularly odd given that most of his notes in the codex are on folio 16, the leaf on which he not only underscored but glossed words interlinearly—those words may have been written on a separate leaf, or perhaps Nowell changed his mind about how to proceed. Although not every underlined word in Vespasian D.xiv appears on the list, and not every word in Lambeth 692 is underlined in the medieval manuscript, there is a high rate of correspondence between the underscored words and the items in the Lambeth wordlist. Nowell seems to have focused on the words he had marked. The correspondence also indicates that the Vespasian underscorings are Nowell’s instead of Lambarde’s or Joscelyn’s. The Lambeth folios are direct sources for some of the entries in the Abcedarium. As Nowell wrote English or Latin definitions for most of the words on the Lambeth wordlist, we are in the happy position of knowing what he thought the words meant when he jotted them down, which can help pin down sources for some of his Abcedarium notes. For instance, when he glosses ‘gereord’ on folio 29v with ‘domus’ (house), we can assume

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The Abcedarium Glossary this was not his source for the Abcedarium gloss which notes ‘gereord’ next to ‘speache.’ The bifolium contains 533 fully legible entries (a few entries are missing all or part of the Old English due to damage to the edge of folio 32). Of these, about 225 entries, none of which can also be found in Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, can be found entered in the Abcedarium. This constitutes about 42% of the list, and strikes me as too high a percentage to be accidental. The separate components work out to approximately the same percentage. Of the 270 entries from Bede, 122 (45%) match Abcedarium entries for words that do not appear in Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary and in the Vespasian portion of the wordlist, 39% are distinct entries. In such a small sample, these percentages seem consistent. Of course, when one counts entries that duplicate information found in the Grammar and Glossary and which could therefore have come from either source, the rate of correspondence becomes even higher. The consistent rate of use suggests that Nowell took the words from the list itself, instead of or in addition to the manuscript or transcript from which the wordlist was compiled. The Lambeth wordlist would seem to have been a major source for Nowell, and it is frustrating in its partial nature. Were there more leaves such as these? Probably there were, but they do not survive. Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary The Grammar and Glossary of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, written in the late tenth century, was one of the most valuable resources for Tudor antiquaries wishing to learn Old English.31 The text contains a preface, in which Ælfric sets out his aims for the work, a grammar, in which he explains and gives paradigms for Latin declensions and conjugations, and a glossary, in which he gives a brief vocabulary of Latin and Old English, organized topically.32 Ælfric wrote his text to teach his students Latin; it is the earliest vernacular grammar of the language every churchman had to know.33 Melinda Menzer has shown that Ælfric’s text also facilitated the study of Old English by providing a grammatical vocabulary with which to understand it.34

31

32

33 34

A good general discussion of Abbot Ælfric’s life and writings is James Hurt, Ælfric (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972); see also the introduction to Jonathan Wilcox’s edition of the prefaces to Ælfric’s works, Ælfric’s Prefaces (Durham: Durham Medieval Texts, 1994). The standard edition of the Grammar and Glossary is Ælfric of Eynsham, Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar Text und Varianten, trans. and ed. Julius Zupitza (1880; repr., Berlin: Max Niehans Verlag, 1966), 166. Original edition available at . Hurt, Ælfric, 104–119. Melinda Menzer, ‘Ælfric’s English Grammar,’ JEGP 103 (2004): 106–124.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Ælfric explains parts of speech and the various conjugations and declensions, giving several examples of each in Latin and providing their Old English equivalents so his students could learn vocabulary while they grasped the basics of grammar. Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary proved popular and, one assumes, useful to its Anglo-Saxon audience; fourteen medieval copies still exist, and Buckalew demonstrates that two more manuscript copies survived into the sixteenth century.35 Tudor researchers, who knew Latin, could use Ælfric as a starting point for learning Old English, as it provided them with a wealth of vocabulary and some idea of morphology. Buckalew’s article shows that Ælfric’s text was of great importance to the Elizabethan antiquaries, and the seventeenth-century researcher William Somner attached the Grammar to his 1659 Old English Dictionarium.36 That Nowell not only saw the Grammar and Glossary but had a fair amount of time with it is clear from a near-complete transcription he made of the text, now London, Westminster Abbey Library MS 30. Nowell’s Westminster transcription abbreviates some parts of the Grammar, particularly several paradigms in the middle of the text, and omits the Latin preface.37 Otherwise his transcription is complete except for the end of the Glossary, an omission which Buckalew believes stemmed from a missing leaf in Nowell’s now-lost exemplar.38 Nowell glosses several words interlinearly in Latin in the Old English preface, where a reader would not have the Latin of the Grammar to aid his understanding. Most of the marginal notes in Westminster 30, however, are written by Lambarde. The main text is written in a fairly neat ‘insular minuscule’ script, perhaps not as tidy a hand as Nowell could produce, but nonetheless legible for readers other than its author—and probably it went into Lambarde’s hands even before Nowell passed on all his materials to his friend in 1567. Lambarde inscribed the book, ‘Guillhelmi Lambardi ex dono Laurentij Nowelli, 1565,’ two years before Nowell left for the Continent. As Buckalew points out, the Westminster transcript as it has come down to us gives the appearance of having been designed from the start with Lambarde’s use in mind.39

35 36

37 38

39

Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland,’ 43. Somner is discussed in Angelika Lutz, ‘The Study of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the Seventeenth Century and the Establishment of Old English Studies in the Universities,’ in Graham, Recovery of Old English, 42–43. Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland,’ 23. Ibid. Nowell also saw a second copy of the Grammar (but not the Glossary) in London, British Library Harley 3271, a manuscript from which he copied some excerpts into Canterbury, Cathedral Library Lit. E 1. Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland,’ 23.

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The Abcedarium Glossary Before Nowell passed this transcription along to his friend, however, he underscored words and took lexical notes from it that made their way into his Vocabularium Saxonicum. Nowell’s notes derive from the Old English words that Ælfric used in his text to explain the meanings of his Latin examples to his original readers. Marckwardt, in his article on the sources of the Vocabularium, plays down the contribution that Ælfric’s work had made to its compilation.40 Marckwardt wished to show that Nowell’s researches had ranged more widely than the most obvious of source texts, and his points about the breadth of Nowell’s reading are sound. However, he underestimated the utility of Ælfric to Nowell. Nowell’s transcript in Westminster 30 was a key text for the compilation of the Vocabularium.41 In particular, words that are underscored in the main text of Westminster 30 have a high rate of correspondence with Vocabularium lemmata, often with the same Latin definition in addition to a Modern English one. Buckalew notes that some spellings, particularly ‘lotmann’ for ‘flotman,’ are peculiar to this transcript of Ælfric, and appear in both the Vocabularium and the Abcedarium.42 Another corrupted word in the Westminster manuscript, ‘ælweodige’ (for ælþeodig), made its way to the Abcedarium (next to Howlet’s ‘Straunger’) but in this case Nowell wrote the correct ‘Ælðeodig’ in the Vocabularium. Correspondence between the Old English words in the Grammar and Glossary and the Abcedarium glosses is even higher, and is not limited to words underscored in Westminster 30. The text of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary was Nowell’s major source for the Abcedarium glosses, providing over 3,000 entries. Although exact numbers are not possible for the reasons listed already, nearly every Old English word that Ælfric used to define a Latin word appears in the margins of the Abcedarium, showing that Nowell used it more intensively for his Abcedarium notes than he had done for the Vocabularium. Nowell, at some point in or after 1565, sat down with his copy of the Abcedarium and with the Grammar and Glossary, and began copying nearly every Old English word from the latter into the printed book. Nowell also copied out several phrases from Ælfric, such as ‘Se ðe loccas hæfð’ which Ælfric uses to define ‘comatus’ and Nowell writes next to ‘Bush hedded, or he that hath a good bussh of heare, wel trymmed behynd.’ Sometimes Nowell had to sort out what the Old English words might mean from a possible semantic range. For instance, when Ælfric notes ‘sapio ic wat oððe ic smæcce,’ Nowell had to realize that neither of these two 40 41 42

Marckwardt, ‘Sources,’ 36. Buckalew, ‘Nowell, Lambarde, and Leland,’ 36. Ibid., 37.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Old English words exactly overlaps with the semantic range of sapio.43 Rather, ‘ic wat’ means ‘I know,’ while ‘ic smæcce’ means ‘I taste’—Nowell needed to determine which possible meanings of sapio each of these Old English words represents. Occasionally Nowell enters the Old English word in places that reflect the range of meanings possible to Ælfric’s Latin gloss, as he does with ‘geomrian.’ In the Grammar, Ælfric uses ‘ic geomrige’ to gloss ‘gemo.’44 Accordingly, Nowell wrote ‘geomrian’ in the Abcedarium next to both ‘groan’ and ‘lament,’ two related but distinct meanings of the Latin word; in both places ‘geomrian’ is in the same shade of brown ink and is the first entry in a string of Old English words next to a Modern English headword. Nowell probably entered ‘geomrian’ in the two places at the same time, while he made his entries from the Grammar and Glossary. While Marckwardt is right about the range of Nowell’s reading, Nowell systematically mined Ælfric’s book for all it could teach him about grammar and, especially, vocabulary. Here was a text, produced by a native speaker of Old English and good Latinist, in which Old English equivalents were given for Latin words which Nowell knew. If we include entries from Vespasian D.xiv, which contains several homilies of Ælfric, entries from Ælfric’s works constitute an even more overwhelming majority of the Abcedarium’s Old English words. Words from the Grammar and Glossary are not only notable for their abundance, however. Nowell preserves the orthography of the original much more consistently—even carefully—with words from this source than he does any of this other sources. In the Abcedarium, this even extended to the clearly erroneous ælweodig where at some point a manuscript thorn had been misread as a wynn. Nowell, who nonchalantly interchanges æ, a, and e in his transcriptions, preserves them more carefully when copying from Ælfric into the Abcedarium; very little variation appears. Excluding alterations to the end of verbs where Nowell has to supply the correct ending (Ælfric gave verbs in the first person singular present indicative active; Nowell preferred the infinitive), Nowell left the orthography of this text to stand more consistently than any other. Some routine substitutions do appear—Nowell often writes –ness(e) at the end of abstract nouns where his manuscript read –nyss. However, the spelling –nes(s) also appears in the Westminster Ælfric, for instance ‘arfæstnes,’ ‘eaðmodness,’ ‘rihtwisness’ on page 8.45 In this case, the exception demon43 44 45

Ælfrics Grammatik, 166. Ibid., 167. Lambarde or Nowell wrote page numbers rather than folio numbers in this manuscript.

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The Abcedarium Glossary strates the rule; Nowell had to pick one or the other to be the standard and opted for the one closer to the usual Early Modern English ending. He wanted a standard spelling for Old English words based on Ælfric’s West Saxon dialect, suppressing even the variation within Ælfric to create it. Nowell was hardly alone in devoting continued attention to Ælfric’s works. The first printed text of Old English, Matthew Parker’s Testimonie of Antiquity, contained a sermon of Ælfric’s on the eucharist; Parker’s A Defence of Priestes Mariages similarly drew on Ælfric’s writings.46 Given the importance of Ælfric in the sixteenth century, it seems worthwhile to discuss why this particular Anglo-Saxon writer might have had such an appeal. Some of the possible reasons for Ælfric’s popularity are fairly obvious. Ælfric was the most prolific Old English writer, and he was also concerned that his homilies and letters be known as his—he did not want them circulating anonymously. Such sentiments would appeal to what Martin Elsky calls ‘the humanist reverence for the very idea of the author.’47 An ancient sermon that (supposedly) argued a eucharistic view sympathetic to Anglican belief was more concrete, somehow, if it was authored by a well-known Anglo-Saxon writer, one whose texts were considered doctrinally and procedurally orthodox in his own day, as Matthew Parker observes that Ælfric’s texts were.48 The concept that an argument could stem from personal author-ity had taken root, and Ælfric is one of the few Anglo-Saxon authors whose name could be applied to his compositions. Ælfric had also translated portions of the Bible, which would have made him attractive to Protestant propagandists arguing for the validity of English translations of sacred texts.49 Ælfric had also, of course, written the Grammar and Glossary, a text that was of great importance in the learning of Old English in the sixteenth 46

47 48 49

Theodore Leinbaugh, ‘Ælfric’s Sermo De Sacrificio in Die Pascae: Anglican Polemic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Berkhout and Gatch, Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, 51–68; Aaron Kleist has also examined Parker’s use of Ælfric in ‘Matthew Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage,’ Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,’ ed. Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 106–133; and ‘Monks, Marriage, and Manuscripts: Matthew Parker’s Manipulation (?) of Ælfric of Eynsham,’ JEGP 105 (2006): 312–327. Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 41. Matthew Parker, A Testimonie of Antiquitie Shewing the Auncient Fayth in the Church of England (London: John Day, 1566), 11. Hurt comments that Ælfric himself was somewhat ambivalent about his translations and the possibility for misunderstanding by the unlearned who might encounter them. Ælfric, 87–90.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England century. However, it seems worth pointing out that the Grammar and Glossary was by no means the only avenue that Tudor antiquaries could have taken to gain reading knowledge of Old English. Several other manuscript glossaries survived from the Anglo-Saxon period, such as the ones in British Library Cotton Cleopatra A.iii.50 Add to their number the Latin manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels that are glossed interlinearly in Old English, a practice that allowed the antiquaries to reconstruct Old English morphology, and Latin texts such as Bede that were translated into Old English, and one can see that Tudor scholars had many more texts to help them than Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary. Indeed, William L’Isle, writing in the 1620s, explains how he taught himself Old English and does not mention the grammatical works of Ælfric.51 The keen attention that Nowell, who was not averse to cutting his own path in his Anglo-Saxon studies, paid to Ælfric in general and the Grammar and Glossary in particular argues that, in addition to being useful, he found it ideologically appealing. Martin Elsky’s discussion of early modern grammars suggests one reason why this should be. Elsky observes that humanist grammars formulated themselves as a reaction against medieval scholastic grammars, and the humanists’ concept of grammar itself ‘became separate from logic and was instead devoted to the rules of speech based on the usage of authors, the very principle that Scholastic speculative grammarians tried to nullify.’52 In modern terms, they wished to write grammars that were more descriptive—reflecting the real use of the language instead of an artificial idea of words, meanings, and the rules governing their use. The humanist tradition was a reversion to the sorts of grammars that were written before the advent of scholastic thought in Europe. Ælfric’s grammar predated scholasticism and was therefore closer to the early modern conception of how grammars ought to be written than texts from later in the Middle Ages. As his Old English preface to the Grammar and Glossary makes clear, Ælfric wrote his text to assist his pupils’ attempts to read Latin books: ‘Ic, Ælfric, wolde þas lytlan boc awendan to Engliscum gereorde of ðam stæfcræfte, þe is gehaten Grammatica … for ðan ðe stæfcræft is seo cæg ðe ðæra boca andgit unlicð’ (I, Ælfric, wanted to translate this little book of

50 51 52

Patrizia Lendinara discusses these in detail in Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Glossaries, Varorium Collected Studies Series (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999). For a discussion of L’Isle’s course of study, see Phillip Pulsiano, ‘William L’Isle and the Editing of Old English,’ in Graham, Recovery of Old English, 177–184. Elsky, Authorizing Words, 39.

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The Abcedarium Glossary grammar, which is called the Grammatica, into the English speech … because grammar is the key which unlocks the understanding of these books).53 Ælfric’s focus is textual; he wants to teach Latin grammar so that his students can read Latin books. Ælfric also wants to promote vernacular literacy as well, as he explains later in the Old English preface: ‘[ðeos boc] byð swaðeah sum angyn to ægðrum gereorde, gif heo hwam licað’ (this book will be nevertheless some introduction to either speech, if it pleases anyone).54 Ælfric’s focus on grammar as the ‘key’ for understanding books resonates with the humanist idea of explaining language as it is used, and his introduction would have also dovetailed with the early modern interest not only in Latin but in the vernacular language, as English writers attempted to establish their linguistic heritage. The Old English preface may also have appealed to Nowell personally. By the time he compiled the Abcedarium notes in the second half of the 1560s, Nowell had worked as an educator for nearly a decade. He tutored the sons of James Harington and conducted them through Italy and France in the 1550s, and of course he also taught the Earl of Oxford while living in Cecil’s house. Even though Carl Berkhout has shown that Laurence Nowell the antiquary was not Laurence Nowell the schoolmaster of Sutton Coldfield, our Nowell seems to have spent much of his professional life teaching and overseeing the travels of some of his wealthy patrons’ sons.55 And, although William Lambarde seems to have been Nowell’s good friend, he was also something of a student, a protégé in Nowell’s Old English studies who then became Nowell’s junior colleague in working with Old English texts. Education was a key theme of Nowell’s career. Ælfric’s argument in the Old English preface to the Grammar and Glossary for the importance of education, particularly as it relates to salvation, is worth quoting in full: Iungum mannum gedafenað þæt hi leornion sumne wisdom, and ðam ealdum gedafenað þæt hi tæcon sum gerad heora iunglingum, for ðan ðe ðurh lare byð se geleafa gehealden and ælc man, ðe wisdom lufað, byð gesælig. And se ðe naðor nele ne learnian ne tæcan, gif he mæg, þonne acolað his andgyt fram ðære halgan lare and he gewit swa lytlum and lytlum

53

54 55

Ælfric’s Prefaces, 115; Ælfric states that his book is a translation of Priscian’s Grammatica, but by ‘translation’ he means not literal conveying of Priscian’s text from one language to another, but rather the application of Priscian’s idea, that of teaching grammar, into an English work. Wilcox, Ælfric’s Prefaces, 64. Ælfric’s Prefaces, 116 The schoolmaster was Nowell’s first cousin, also named Laurence Nowell, who later became dean of Lichfield. Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell,’ 4.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England fram Gode. Hwanon sceolon cuman wise lareowas on Godes folce, buton he on iugoðe leornion?56 [It is fitting for young men that they should learn some wisdom, and it is fitting for the old that they teach some of their wisdom to the young, because through teaching is faith obtained and each man who loves wisdom will be blessed. And he who does not wish to either learn or teach, if he may, then his understanding grows cold from the holy teachings and he departs, little by little, from God. Whence shall come wise teachers to the people of God, except those who learned in youth?]

Such an emphasis on the role of teaching in the dissemination of the true faith fits well with the humanist (and Protestant) emphasis on education. Education mattered for the sixteenth-century humanists; Laurence Ryan argues that for many of them publishing was secondary: ‘a scholar’s reputation depended, rather, upon his success as a teacher, whether by diligent tutoring or effective public reading he managed to inspire his pupils’ (another reason for us to beware overestimating the importance of printed works).57 It is probably worth pointing out again that the book in which Nowell wrote his collection of Old English lexical notes was the Abcedarium—a dictionary for schoolboys. Nowell, himself a tutor, a Protestant, and a scholar, could have felt this passage from Ælfric entirely sympathetic to his life and his work. THE ABCEDARIUM AND THE VOCABULARIUM Nowell’s project in the Abcedarium raises the question of its relationship, if any, to his other large lexicographic work, the Vocabularium. Marckwardt’s edition of the Vocabularium is accurate on the whole, although, as Carl Berkhout has observed, he incorrectly states that the first two lines on the flyleaf are in Nowell’s hand. In fact, the entire contents of the flyleaf, which will be discussed in the next chapter, were written by Lambarde. The Vocabularium proper also contains a few notes in Lambarde’s hand, but the main text was written by Nowell, producing a tidy Old English–Early Modern English (and, occasionally, Latin) dictionary. Nowell used a fairly rapid work hand for the Vocabularium, but the text is written out neatly— he was neither lettering as carefully as he did in his edition of the Laws of King Alfred, nor as hastily as he did in some of his own notes, such as the interleaved place-name index in the Abcedarium. The ink color of the main 56 57

Ælfric’s Prefaces, 115. Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 47.

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The Abcedarium Glossary text, a light brown, remains consistent, in contrast to Lambarde’s additions which are written in a darker ink. The neatness of the text and the uniform ink color indicate that Nowell copied this out from pre-existing alphabetized wordlists, and did so in a short period of time. Nowell mistakenly places all the words beginning with ‘Hn’ after those beginning with ‘Ho,’ noting in the text that the words are in the wrong place; apparently he had mixed up two of the alphabetized sheets from which he was copying and did not realize his error until he had begun writing out the words beginning with ‘Ho.’ Some words in the Vocabularium have ticks in front of them in the same ink as the copy text (as does the legal glossary on the Abcedarium’s flyleaf). Nowell may have marked entries in this manner if he was in doubt about the word’s meaning or the infinitive or nominative form in which he had written it. Although the text is mostly written out evenly, Nowell left periodic gaps after some place names, leaving Lambarde space for his own topographic notes. Since the Vocabularium gives every indication of being a finished product in its even spacing and the neatness of its text, it seems reasonable that Nowell wrote the book for Lambarde, as he had already done with the transcript of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary. It would be logical for Nowell to give Lambarde such texts before Nowell left for Europe—with his teacher gone, Lambarde would have need of reading aids, especially since (as Lambarde tells us in the preface to his Archaionomia) Nowell had charged him with preparing an edition of Anglo-Saxon laws. Finally, Lambarde’s own comment on the flyleaf, ‘W.L. ex Dono L. Nowelli auctoris’ with a date of 1567, suggests that the Vocabularium was composed for and given to Lambarde specifically, aside from most of Nowell’s other notebooks which he left with Lambarde for the latter’s use, and which Lambarde inherited, but which are not inscribed by Lambarde as ‘gifts.’ Berkhout is dubious about the assumption that the Vocabularium was a gift, but I see no reason to doubt Lambarde’s inscription.58 Nowell might well have written out a tidy, legible dictionary of Old English for his friend before he left the country. Nowell’s Vocabularium definitions give a few tantalizing glimpses of the individual behind them. Nowell generally translates words that could be taken as obscene or indelicate as obliquely as possible, although that could be a reflection of Lambarde’s sensibilities if the book was indeed composed for him. Nowell notes ‘the place of honest avoydance’ at Old English Erse, 58

Carl Berkhout, ‘William Lambarde’s Old English Ex Libris,’ Notes and Queries 229 (1984): 298.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England rather than the obvious Early Modern English derivative, arse. At ‘Scitta. The laske, the flux. The whomly terme of our forfathers’ he adds the apologetic note at the end in awareness that the Old English provided the root of the early modern (and modern) profanity, shit. Perhaps the most enigmatic of all the notes is the one that suggests that Nowell had a sense of humor. At Feltun, he notes ‘Secessus, latrina, sterquilinium, a Jakes, a privie. Note: Mr. Felton hath a clenly name.’ Who is this mysterious Mr. Felton, about whose name Nowell apparently believes Lambarde would not mind a joke? Was he a friend or rival of Nowell or Lambarde? No likely candidates turn up in the Dictionary of National Biography or in the modern biographies of Lambarde, and Mr. Felton of the cleanly name remains, for now, a mystery. The Abcedarium and the Vocabularium overlap less often than one might expect. Although they probably have many of the same wordlists as sources, the Abcedarium has fewer sources but includes words from its sources more consistently. As we have seen, Nowell includes nearly every Old English word from Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary in the Abcedarium’s glosses, which he does not do for the Vocabularium. Neither the interlinear glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels nor the three Old English and Latin glossaries in Cotton Cleopatra A.iii were used for the Abcedarium. Graham estimates that the Vocabularium contains over 6,000 Old English words; the number of discrete entries in the Abcedarium is probably only twothirds of that (although the Abcedarium has 4,500 entries, many of them duplicate each other and the number of individual Old English words is fewer than the total number of entries).59 A quick study of one letter’s words bears this out. The Vocabularium contains 352 entries beginning with L, including Old English words and phrases that come within entries but not entries that are only cross-referenced with another word. Sixteen of these are proper nouns, which Nowell did not enter in the Abcedarium’s margins, so 336 words remain that he might have drawn from the Abcedarium (or vice versa). Of these, only 185 actually appear in the Abcedarium. Sometimes the Abcedarium will have one of two forms that are given in the Vocabularium, as at the entry, ‘Ladian 7 beLadian’ of which the Abcedarium only has beladian. Words are also written in the Abcedarium which do not appear in the Vocabularium; from the words written in the A and B portions of the dictionary, roughly 20% have no corresponding definition in the Vocabularium. Clearly neither work could have been a direct source for the other; these were separate projects done for different reasons. Simply put, nothing in 59

Graham, ‘John Joscelyn,’ 94.

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The Abcedarium Glossary the Abcedarium’s relationship to the Vocabularium explains why, sometime in or after 1565, Nowell sat down with a copy of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary and the Abcedarium and began copying words into the printed book. What was Nowell’s purpose in compiling lexical notes in the margins of a printed Early Modern English–Latin dictionary? The notes would not provide him (or Lambarde) with a resource for reading Old English manuscripts, since he could not look up the words according to the Old English. In order to find an Old English word in the Abcedarium, Nowell would need to already know the Early Modern English meaning. How did this project, an extensive one to which he must have devoted a substantial amount of time, fit into his work? What piqued his interest in writing Old English and Early Modern English together, not just in the Abcedarium but in the majority of his manuscripts? The idea of heritage and its importance in national identity formation offers one context. The English language could be claimed as part of that heritage, but this claim required its past to be traced and its history made known in ways that supported the linguistic ideals of the present. Nowell’s work allowed that history to be known to his circle. Before discussing such contexts, we should consider another possible use for the book. Did Nowell undertake this project to facilitate composition in Old English? Kenneth Sisam has convincingly argued that Nowell did compose Old English in some of his transcriptions of the laws, supplying Old English translations of missing portions of the codes from the corresponding section of the Latin Quadripartitus.60 Robin Flower also observes sections in Nowell’s transcription of the Old English Bede where Nowell seems to have added to the text his own translation from the Latin Historia, although Carl Berkhout will suggest in a planned article that some of the questionable text may be from an Old English version of Bede after all.61 Could the Abcedarium’s notes have been intended to help with similar Old English compositions? Certainly this cannot be ruled out, but the only Old English compositions that Nowell seems to have undertaken were translations from Latin, not Early Modern English. If Nowell wanted a bilingual dictionary for composition, why did he not gloss a Latin dictionary with Old English, since Latin words would be the ones he needed to

60

61

Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Authenticity of Certain Texts in Lambarde’s “Archaionomia” 1568,’ Modern Language Review 20 (1925): 253–269; reprinted in Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 232–258. All citations are from the later edition. Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England,’ 26–27 n. 16.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England translate? Thomas Elyot’s Latin–English dictionary, the Bibliotheca, circulated widely during the 1560s, so Nowell could have gotten a Latin dictionary to hand if he had wished. Instead, he jotted Old English words in a dictionary that organized itself around Early Modern English, standardizing spellings and introducing back-formations to ‘complete’ the lexicon, and leaving himself room for more entries to be added later. Why would Nowell expend such effort compiling a functionally trilingual dictionary, with a source language of Early Modern English and two target languages of Old English and Latin? The exploration of Nowell’s Abcedarium must widen beyond an investigation of Old English studies into contemporary discourses about the shape and value of the Early Modern English next to which Nowell consistently placed his Old English lexical works. Those debates, and Nowell’s and Lambarde’s role in them, are the subject of the next chapter.

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Chapter 3 INKHORNS, ORTHOGRAPHERS, AND ANTIQUARIES: STANDARDIZED ENGLISH AND THE DAWN OF ANGLO-SAXON STUDIES

N

OWELL’S USE of medieval manuscripts and the form of his Old English lexicographic works show his desire to establish a complete, regular, and stable canon of Old English words, juxtaposed with the modern language that had descended from it. His interest in English vocabulary past and present dovetails with the so-called ‘inkhorn controversy,’ a debate among Tudor thinkers and writers over the vocabulary of Early Modern English, and a critical issue for the writers and translators whom he knew.1 Many of these writers were closely associated with Nowell’s employer, William Cecil: Roger Ascham and Sir Thomas Smith had known him for decades; John Hart and Arthur Golding lived, like Nowell, in Cecil’s house. These authors all wrote about the contemporary English language with an eye to its nationalist potential. Nowell was surrounded by people who argued about the standardization of English vocabulary and spelling, and this context can supply answers to the enigma of his Abcedarium glossary. In contrast with Nowell, William Lambarde is not regarded as a major figure in the history of Old English lexicography. He did not share Nowell’s impulse for dictionary-making in his manuscript notebooks, and unlike Nowell, when Lambarde translated Anglo-Saxon laws he chose to translate them into Latin, not English. His legal glossary at the beginning of Archaionomia is also written in Latin and alphabetized on Latin words, not Old English ones. However, his annotations in some of his books show

1

For a useful overview of the inkhorn debates, see Helmut Gneuss, English Language Scholarship: A Survey and Bibliography from the Beginnings to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996), 21–22.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England a fuller picture of his own interest in Old English as the wellspring for Modern English. His relationship to the Vocabularium Saxonicum (which was probably written for him by Nowell), and his annotations both in it and in Sir Thomas Smith’s book on English orthography demonstrate Lambarde’s interest in the history of the English language and its nationalist potential. In fact, a closer look at the Archaionomia’s glossary shows that, despite its organization around Latin headwords, Lambarde is equally interested in Old English legal vocabulary and its relationship to Modern English. This chapter will not only explore Nowell’s intellectual milieu and see the light that it can shed on his Old English lexicography, but will also describe Lambarde’s interaction with Old English lexicography and English language debates in the sixteenth century. THE INKHORN CONTROVERSY IN NOWELL’S CIRCLE Tudor writers and rhetoricians, many of them closely associated with William Cecil, studied and argued widely about the English language. Their wish to fix the shape of the English lexicon came in reaction to the largest expansion of English vocabulary in history. As Geoffrey Hughes describes, ‘in the course of a mere century, the annual increment of new words and meanings rose some sevenfold, from an average increment of about fifty in 1500 to an astonishing peak of approximately 350 in 1600.’2 These words were imported from classical Greek and Latin, and Continental Romance languages. The impetus for word-formation from classical languages arose from humanist enthusiasm for their study, and the words from contemporary languages came from the upsurge in trade and international travel as England’s merchant navy increased.3 Reactions to the influx of new words varied. Charles Barber’s ground-breaking Early Modern English distinguishes three camps in the debates about the vocabulary of English; the Neologizers, the Purists, and the Archaizers.4 The Neologizers believed that English vocabulary was inelegant, unwieldy, and barbaric, and deliberately set out to introduce Latinate neologisms— dubbed ‘inkhorn terms’ by their opponents—into the English language. The Purists took the opposite view; they wanted the lexicon to remain stable, and opposed neologisms from anything but existing English roots. The Archaizers, who as Barber mentions are really a subset of the Purists,

2 3 4

Geoffrey Hughes, A History of English Words (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 152. Ibid., 151. Charles Barber, Early Modern English (London: André Deutsch, 1976), 78.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries wanted to revive obsolete English words; since some of these words still existed in dialect, they could also be seen as wanting to incorporate more varied dialects.5 Although these are not absolutely discrete categories, and do not define all possible approaches that Renaissance writers could take to English vocabulary, Barber’s taxonomies fit the majority of early modern ideas about English. Although in some regards the vocabulary of English really was insufficient—for technical discussions of geometry and rhetoric, for instance— the backlash against the Neologizers and their inkhorn terms arose mainly on two interconnected grounds: religious objections and nationalistic ones.6 The religious arguments against new additions to the English language stemmed mostly from a distrust of any sort of ‘innovation,’ a word that in the early modern period had distinctly negative connotations. Roman Catholics accused Protestants of introducing innovations into the Church, leading to its deterioration. Protestants retorted that their goal was to restore the purity of the earliest Christian church, and that Catholicism had introduced the innovations. For the religious purists, no newfangled words from foreign roots could quite escape the taint of their newness, and the suspicion of innovating; their texts display their belief that established words are best. Tyndale’s 1525 translation of the Bible into English contains a high percentage of English words either from Anglo-Saxon roots or from French roots that by then had been part of the lexicon for centuries.7 This legacy of using well-established words in English Bibles or works that called for reversion to a state of religious purity continued throughout the sixteenth century. Those who argued against neologisms on nationalistic grounds worried less about the newness of the inkhorn terms than their foreignness. John Cheke (1514–1557), William Cecil’s tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge and, later, his brother-in-law, complained about inkhorn terms as a matter of nationalistic concern in his often-quoted letter at the end of Thomas Hoby’s 1557 translation of The Courtier: I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with borowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed bi tijm [i.e. time] euer borowing and neuer payeng, she shall be

5 6

7

Ibid. Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (1953; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 68–93. Hughes, History of English Words, 159.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie vtter her meaning, whan she bouroweth no conterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but vseth plainlie her own.8

Cheke expresses concern for the language using an economic metaphor— the English language will go broke if it does not put a halt to its borrowing. The image with which he ends his metaphor, that of dress, appears in other writers’ diatribes against inkhorn terms. Hughes quotes Thomas Wilson’s critique in Arte of Rhetorique of those who ‘affect any straunge [foreign] ynkehorne termes’: These fine Englishe clerkes [scholars] wil saie thei speake in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them with counterfeityng the kynges English. Some farre jorneid jentlemen at their returne home, like as they loue to go in forrein apparell, so thei wil pouder their talke with oversea langauge.9

Wilson’s paragraph is the first recorded usage of the phrase ‘the king’s English,’ and he is generally considered to have coined it.10 As the monarch was a major focus of national feeling in the early modern period, this concept of a ‘king’s English’ involves not only a purity of dialect, but the very identity of the speaker as a good English subject. The comparison in Cheke and Wilson between inkhorn terms and foreign dress itself had national resonance. Extravagant dress, especially in foreign costume or in foreign goods, was considered a problem of national security. English citizens who bought foreign goods to wear were blamed for poverty and lawlessness, and certainly in a nation which participated heavily in the fabric trade buying foreign was unpopular. Indeed, William Cecil drafted a bill in 1563, subsequently made law, restricting sales of foreign clothing on credit.11 Cheke’s and Wilson’s images of the English language adorning itself in foreign goods therefore suggest both compromised identity and moral decay. Cheke goes on to present a solution to the problem: no one ought to go searching far afield for new words ‘if either the mould of our own tung could serue vs to fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned 8 9 10

11

Quoted in Jones, Triumph, 102. Quoted in Hughes, History of English Words, 154. Cathy Shrank observes that the OED does not cite this phrase until Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. ‘Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community: The Role of the King’s English in Mid-Tudor Writing,’ in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, and Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 187. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (1955; repr., London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 270–271.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries wordes could content and ease this neede.’12 Cheke suggests that rather than venturing into other languages for loanwords, writers should revive outdated English words, and it has been suggested that by this he meant Anglo-Saxon ones, although Cathy Shrank disagrees that this was necessarily the case.13 In Cheke and in other writers, the valorization of older forms of English over Romance or Latinate neologisms becomes a discernible thread of sixteenthcentury discourse about the nature of English. Cheke’s own translation of the Gospel of Matthew used such outré coinages from archaic English that C.S. Lewis calls him ‘something of a crank’ for his odd vocabulary.14 Lewis rather dismissively cites Cheke’s inventions of ‘moond’ for ‘lunatic,’ ‘frosent’ for ‘apostle,’ and ‘crossed’ for ‘crucified’ as evidence that ‘Cheke, like so many purists, had not given much serious thought to the language he wanted to purify’ since in other places he retains Romance or Latinate words.15 However, Cheke’s ‘denisoned’ words did not exclude any vocabulary from Latinate roots, as Cathy Shrank points out: ‘despite frequent misreading, however, neither Cheke nor any of his supporters advocated blanket avoidance of borrowings.’16 Rather, he sought to use words which were established, whether Germanic or Latinate, in preference to new coinages. Lexicographers also played a part in the attention to English in the early modern period. Even though no monolingual English dictionary existed in Nowell’s lifetime, Douglas Kibbee has argued that bilingual English dictionaries such as the 1530 English–French dictionary of John Palsgrave attempted, in part, to establish a standard English vocabulary.17 Palsgrave claimed to have incorporated all the words of English, including some for which he did not provide a French equivalent. Other English headwords were given English definitions as well as French translations. Kibbee concludes that Palsgrave’s dictionary shows an interest in ‘edifying the source language.’18 Even before Robert Cawdry’s ground-breaking English dictionary of 1604, bilingual lexicography had contributed to the concern with the nature and shape of the English language, as part of the

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

Quoted in Jones, Triumph, 103. Cathy Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions,’ 185. C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 283. Ibid. Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions,’ 185. Douglas Kibbee, ‘The Humanist Period in Renaissance Bilingual Lexicography,’ in The History of Lexicography: Papers from the Dictionary Research Centre Seminar in Exeter 8 (1986): 137–146. Ibid., 145.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England heritage of the English people. And heritage, as John Considine observes, requires the fashioning of the past as the support of the present.19 Considine further argues that, in the early modern period, understanding of language change through history focused almost exclusively on vocabulary, rather than grammar. Dictionaries, therefore, even though they did not reflect major changes in English grammar and morphology, were the logical form for investigation of the language’s history.20 This aspect of contemporary discussions sheds light on the Abcedarium’s glosses; Nowell’s notes could help trace the heritage of Early Modern English. Of all the Elizabethan antiquaries, Nowell (and through him, Lambarde) was perhaps in the best position to be aware of this debate about English vocabulary, for it is noteworthy how many of the authors most commonly cited in discussions of the inkhorn debates were associated with Cecil. John Cheke was his brother-in-law and a close friend from Cecil’s days at university. Sir Thomas Smith was another associate of Cecil’s from Cambridge; his tract on English spelling was not printed until 1568 but was begun in the 1540s and clearly circulated before seeing print.21 Smith was in France as an ambassador for most of the time that Nowell lived in Cecil House, and Nowell may not have had much interaction with him, but he would have had several opportunities to discuss the English language with educational theorist and archery enthusiast Roger Ascham, a frequent visitor of Cecil’s, and with Arthur Golding, Edward DeVere’s uncle and guardian, who like Nowell lived at Cecil’s home until 1565.22 Also part of Cecil’s household was the orthographer and linguist John Hart, who wrote three books (heavily indebted to Smith’s) on English spelling.23 Cecil’s house would have provided for cross-pollination among Nowell and all these men, several of whom were involved in a cadre, discussed by Shrank, that wished ‘to construct and enforce a national identity in midTudor England through a programme of linguistic standardisation.’24 This environment provides both a context for Nowell’s Abcedarium, and a lens 19 20 21

22 23 24

John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11. Ibid., 14–15. Cathy Shrank discusses the probable date of composition of Smith’s De Recta Scriptione in ‘Rhetorical Constructions,’ 182; Richard Jones also observes that Smith’s treatise must have been completed after 1562. Triumph, 145. Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan: Arthur Golding the Translator of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and also of John Calvin’s ‘Sermons’ (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1937), 58. Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 147. Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions,’ 180.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries with which to view his only extended work in Early Modern English, a translation of the law codes of King Alfred the Great. Roger Ascham, who had served as tutor to the young Princess Elizabeth, was appointed her Latin secretary when she became queen. Ascham had been one of Cecil’s teachers at St. John’s, and was often in Cecil’s house; indeed the introduction to his last work, The Scholemaster, is set at a dinner table in Cecil’s company.25 In addition to Ascham’s contact with Cecil, Nowell might also have known Ascham through his first cousin Alexander, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Alexander Nowell was a good friend of Ascham’s, and preached the sermon at Ascham’s funeral.26 Nowell and Ascham would have had an immediate point of common communication: both had spent several years as tutors to the sons or wards of rich patrons. Ascham’s 1570 Scholemaster, in fact, is written for teachers in exactly that position. Ascham’s writing career was marked by a preoccupation with language and its stylistic features, especially vocabulary. He has been criticized by Lewis for his supposed view that ‘style (and that very narrowly conceived) [was] the whole of learning.’27 Alvin Vos challenges that description, arguing that Ascham believed that style and content could not be separated: ‘The concern about words among English Ciceronians springs … from a fuller awareness of the orator’s deepest personal allegiances to God, England, and classicism. … The orator’s style of speaking becomes a window into the deepest reaches of his psyche.’28 Ascham’s own lexical choices show him to be fairly moderate; he states in the 1545 Toxophilus that he writes so that common people can understand him. He chooses to write in English also, he states, because Latin and Greek have had every topic ‘so excellently done in them, that none can do better: In the Englysh tonge contrary, euery thinge in a maner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.’29 Toxophilus shortly afterwards brings up the idea of the English language and its treatment at the hand of authors, in a statement that encapsulates his point of view: He that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste folowe thys councel of Aristotle, to speake as the common people do, to thinke as wise men do: and 25 26 27 28 29

Alford, Burghley, 17. Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 248. Lewis, English Literature, 281. Alvin Vos, ‘“Good Matter and Good Utterance”: The Character of English Ciceronianism,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 19 (1979): 7. Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (1545), ed. Peter Medine (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 40.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England so shoulde euery man vnderstand hym, and the iudgement of wyse men alowe hym. Many English writers haue not done so, but vsinge straunge wordes as latin, french, and Italian, do make all thinges darke and harde.30

Ascham continues with a well-known anecdote of his conversation with one such author, who defended his stylistic choice with the comment that a feast at which a man might drink wine, ale and beer at dinner surely ought to be praised. Ascham retorts that ‘they be all good, euery one taken by hym selfe alone, but if you putte Maluesye and sacke, read wyne and white, ale and beere, and al in one pot, you shall make a drynke, neyther easie to be knowen, nor yet holsom for the bodye.’31 Not only have the linguistic bad habits of its practitioners made English literature easy to improve, they could potentially sicken those who ‘ingest’ them. The subject matter of most English-language texts has not in Ascham’s view done anything to alleviate this: Englyshe writers by diuersitie of tyme, haue taken diuerse matters in hande. In our fathers tyme nothing was red, but bookes of fayned cheualrie, wherin a man by redinge, shuld be led to none other ende, but onely to manslaughter and baudrye.32

Ascham’s claim that his book is written in English because the language cannot go anywhere but up is based on not only vocabulary, but content, as Vos contends. ‘Form’ was not just a matter of aesthetics, but an issue with possible nationalist implications. It is not hard to imagine that Ascham might have been very interested in the researches of a younger scholar at William Cecil’s house whose exploration of Old English not only had the potential to identify and restore the ‘true’ English words but also to demonstrate ancient English writings that were not romances but historical and homiletic. Although he wrote some shorter works entirely of his own composition, Arthur Golding’s modern fame rests on his translations from Latin, particularly his 1567 Metamorphosis, which was probably the English version of Ovid’s poem consulted by Shakespeare and which Golding translated during the 1560s while Nowell was active in his Old English research.33 30 31

32 33

Ibid. Ibid., 40–41. Various people, including Thomas Elyot, have been suggested as the interlocutor; Per Sivefors recently argued it was Nicholas Udall. ‘Ascham and Udall: The Unknown Language Reformer in Toxophilus,’ Notes and Queries n.s. 53 (2006): 34–35. Toxophilus, 41. For an overview of the discussion of Shakespeare’s use of Golding’s Ovid, see Jonathan Bate, ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid,’ in Arthur Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (1965; repr., Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), xli–xlx.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries Golding and Nowell must have worked together closely on DeVere’s education and upbringing, and the two men also shared interests in history, and in translating ancient languages into Modern English. I have compared the overall strategies of translation of Nowell and Golding elsewhere, so I will limit my discussion here to Golding’s diction in his Metamorphosis and his writings about English more generally.34 C.S. Lewis dismisses Golding’s Ovid, objecting to ‘the indulgence which more than one writer has extended to his ugly fourteeners,’ probably in reaction to Ezra Pound’s enthusiastic claim (which Lewis does not cite) that Golding’s Ovid was the most beautiful book in the English language.35 Since then, however, Golding has gotten more even-handed attention from critics. John Nims, in the introduction to his edition of Golding’s Metamorphosis, observes, ‘Golding does not translate quality or tone, but he infallibly “Englishes” the stories,’ and goes on to give some examples: Golding refers to Jove’s council of gods as a ‘Court of Parliament,’ calls ancient weapons ‘guns,’ and even translates place names such as the Aegean Sea (‘Goat Sea’).36 More recent work by Raphael Lyne discusses Golding’s Englishings as less a matter of artistic inability and more a deliberate attempt to infuse the ancient Roman text with a modern English identity to support both England’s need for literary works and its imperial ambitions.37 Such concern with what is ‘English,’ even in a work translated from another language, resonates with Nowell’s researches and with the concern over language and national identity in the sixteenth century. Golding’s choices in diction resemble those of the other writers associated with Cecil. He avoids new coinages from foreign roots (not always the easiest task when translating Latin or French), using established English words instead or trying to invent words based on older English ones. A few moments in some of his later writings hint at his underlying philosophy of English language and its use. Gordon Braden quotes a sentence from Golding’s dedication of his translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Work Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion: great care hath bene taken, by forming and deryving of fit names and termes, out of the fountaynes of our owne tongue, though not altogether

34

35 36 37

Rebecca Brackmann, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Edition and Translation of the Laws of Alfred,’ Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 14 (2010), online. . Lewis, English Literature, 251. Nims, ‘Introduction: Ovid, Golding, and the Craft of Poetry,’ in Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xxxi. Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English ‘Metamorphoses,’ 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 27–79.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England most usuall, yet alwaies conceyvable and easie to be understood; rather than by usurping the Latin termes, or by borrowing the words of any forreine language. …38

Golding’s description of his approach, which Braden calls ‘indigenously and sensibly English,’ could have been written by John Cheke in its desire to use ‘the fountaynes of our owne tongue,’ and it also obliquely shows the need to establish these headwaters of English.39 Golding’s only known work of original verse, a prefatory poem for Baret’s Alvearie (1580), also makes clear his opinion of foreign loanwords: And were wee giuen as well to like our owne [i.e. language], And for two clense it from the noisome weede Of affectation which hath ouergrowne Ungraciously the good and natiue seede, As for to borrowe where wee have no neede: It would pricke neere the learned tungs in strength, Perchaunce and match mee some of them at length.40

This metaphor evokes the Biblical parable of the sower of seeds (Matthew 13:3–23). The ‘good and natiue seed’ of the English language, Golding suggests in this figure, can be compared to the ‘seed’ of God’s Word in the parable; the ‘weeds’ of foreign loanwords to the concerns with worldly affairs that choke the seed of the Word. Golding’s poem neatly underscores the worldly concerns that motivate the ‘affectation’ writers put on when they borrow from other languages, and argues that vocabulary is tied up in matters of salvation, also implied in the play on ‘grace’ in ‘ungraciously.’41 It also hints at the need for vernacular versions of sacred and religious texts— the Word needs to be in words of English (hardly a surprising view for a staunch Puritan). Given this attitude towards the moral valences of etymology, it does not surprise that Golding’s Metamorphosis leans toward Archaizing. The list of ‘Golding-isms’ that Nims includes in his introduction consists of several words that come from Old or Middle English: ‘throatboll’ for ‘Adam’s apple’ or ‘leechcraft’ for ‘medical science.’42 Few of

38 39 40 41

42

Quoted in Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 16. Ibid. Printed in Louis Thorn Golding, Elizabethan Puritan, 201. I am indebted to the students in my spring 2008 History of the English Language class for their insights on this passage, and particularly to Desireé Murr for drawing my attention to the word ‘ungraciously’ in this context. Nims, ‘Introduction,’ xxxv.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries the words Nims lists were neologisms on Golding’s part; most were in use in the sixteenth century. However, he consistently chose words derived from older forms of English. Vocabulary was not the only aspect of English with which Golding concerned himself. His prefatory poem to Baret’s Alvearie also addresses spelling: There lakt in him [Baret] no forewardnesse of minde To haue set downe a sownd Orthographie: Through want whereof all good inditers find Our Inglish tung driuen almost out of kind, Dismembred, hacked, maymed, rent, and torne, Defaced, patched, mard, and made a skorne.43

As with vocabulary, the spelling of English has been ‘driuen almost out of kind,’ but that phrase raises the question of what the ‘kind’ of English even is. To argue that the language’s orthography has indeed been subject to the horrific violence that Golding suggests, one must compare its current state to a past version, with a more regular orthography. Golding’s ideas about both vocabulary and lexicon point to a need to understand past, ‘unmarred’ versions of the language. Golding, who would eventually become a member of the Society of Antiquaries formed after Nowell’s death, shows a profound concern with English and its linguistic history in his writings.44 English orthography was the particular focus of John Hart, another member of Cecil’s household and part of Sir Thomas Smith’s, Ascham’s, and Thomas Wilson’s circle arguing for the reforming of English.45 Hart is best known for two printed treatises on spelling reform and an earlier, manuscript version of one of the treatises, in all of which he argues that pronunciation should dictate the orthography of English words. Hart’s discussion (heavily indebted to Smith’s, discussed below) of the need for overhauling the English alphabet and spelling system describes from the outset the need for language standardization in terms of spiritual purity and national security. Writing that best reflects speech, Hart writes in the 1569 Orthographie, is important because it is through writing that ‘is left vnto us from right auncient times, of our most worthy predecessors, the 43 44

45

Quoted in Louis Thorn Golding, Elizabethan Puritan, 200. Louis Thorn Golding mentions Golding’s membership in the Society, based on a list of members which he reproduces in an appendix. Elizabethan Puritan, 67 and 267. For the Society of Antiquaries see Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). Alford, Burghley, 147–148.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England most holy will of God, and necessary doctrines of many of his elect by diuine inspiration.’46 Writing that is unclear or not adequately representative of the sound-system of a language (what Hart, following Smith, calls its ‘voices’) can interfere with the knowledge necessary for salvation. In the manuscript work The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung (1551), which served as a basis for the Orthography, Hart describes the ‘manifest evils’ of English writing, ‘in so moch as he that is soundest wedded thereunto can not Justli sai but that it is veri vicious’—that is, full of vice.47 Hart compares his proposed orthographic reform to religious reform to refute objections that custom should dictate English spelling: For their argument proveth that we ought not to speake against the bisshop of Rome his usurped authoritie in the most part of all Europa, yf that which crepeth into a peoples maner of lyving by lytell and litell, and so take his use of a great continewance, shuld therefore be thought lawfull and good. …48

Hart also relates spelling errors creeping in to ‘sinne … which is naturalli in the flesh.’49 Hart’s descriptions make clear that orthographic reform is not just a matter of clarification or space-saving (although it is that, too); it, like vocabulary, relates to the crucial issues of salvation and ‘right’ religion, and with the second, to England’s post-Reformation need for identity. The analogy with Catholicism again suggests that there must have been a period before the creeping errors of religion and spelling. In the Orthography, Hart uses the example of history to argue against the codification of current ‘errors’ of spelling: And the liuing doe knowe themselues no further bounde to this our instant maner, than our predecessors were to the Saxon letters and writing, which hath bene altered as the speach hath chaunged, much differing from that which was vsed with in these fiue hundreth, I maye say within these two hundreth yeares.50

Hart later, following Smith, includes Old English letters in his new 46

47 48 49 50

John Hart, John Hart’s Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation 1551. 1569. 1570 Part I: Biographical and Bibliographical Introductions Texts and Index Verborum, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1955), 17. Although I cite where necessary from Danielsson’s edition (Part I) because it is the most commonly used and available, the commentary in Part II is made problematic by Danielsson’s use of several verbatim passages taken without attribution from Richard Foster Jones’s Triumph of the English Language, and I do not use it. Hart, John Hart’s Works, 117. Ibid., 120. Ibid. Ibid., 173.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries alphabet. His name for the people that wrote these letters is telling: ‘the english Saxons.’51 In part this is to distinguish from his other use of ‘Saxon’ (i.e. German) and echoes Smith’s ‘Anglosaxones,’ but it also assigns an ‘English’ identity to the earlier period, whose letters can fill the needs of the contemporary period in correction of those ‘errors’ which, simultaneous to those of Catholicism, insinuated themselves into the language. Even as historical linguistics makes permissible the altering of custom, it also suggests solutions to the problems that custom has bequeathed to contemporary English in its letters that, Hart and Smith believed, could help disambiguate spelling’s relationship to pronunciations. Hart’s concern for English, then, was in part a concern for the history of English, a feature which persisted in his discussions of the language. He writes in the preface to his 1570 A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned that ‘eyther blind affectation in some, and nice curiositie, or vaine imitation in others, haue caused our predecessors to consent to certaine straunge termes, when their owne mother speach might much better expresse the qualitie of the thing (from the mother and nurse) to their succession.’52 Hart ends with the lament that their ‘predecessours … woulde haue chaunged the whole Englishe Saxon language, to the French tongue, or nere vnto it.’53 Again, ‘English’ and ‘Saxon’ are near-synonyms; the ‘real’ English language is the ‘Saxon’ one. Hart’s ideas show one other area in which antiquarian research into Old English lexicography could have been crucial; if ‘real’ English comes from ‘Saxon,’ then it would have been necessary to know what the ‘Saxon’ words were and what they meant, as well as what they could teach about true spelling. Nowell himself, unlike Golding, Ascham, or Hart, did not write explicitly about Modern English and its development (or decline) from older varieties of the language. However, his manuscripts show him consistently thinking about Old English in terms of Early Modern English. He glossed words in Early Modern English in Vespasian D.xiv, wrote Early Modern English definitions in the Vocabularium, and chose Howlet’s Abcedarium to take notes in. His Vocabularium also shows an interest in the language of his day broader even than his medieval explorations; as Marckwardt notes, Nowell frequently includes dialect words from his native Lancashire, such as ‘Samboren. Dead born; abortivus. Lanc. stilleborn’ and ‘Wemme. A blotte, a spotte, a fault. Lanc., a wemme,’ making the Vocabularium the first 51 52 53

Ibid., 194. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 234.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England dictionary to include dialect vocabulary.54 In this, he perhaps differed from his associates who wanted to regulate English; Nowell seems happy to list dialect alternatives to the ‘mainstream’ English words, although his clear marking of them shows their status as somehow different from ‘normal’ English vocabulary. Nowell placed Old English alongside its modern descendant consistently—including in his edition and translation of the laws of King Alfred, now in the British Library, Henry Davis Collection of Bookbindings MS 59. With his cultural context in mind, we can now examine the one extended example of Nowell’s own Early Modern English, the translation that appears in this manuscript. This enigmatic little book is a manuscript showpiece, written on expensive vellum in a variety of ink colors, including gold.55 Nowell wrote both the Old English and the facing-page Early Modern English translation in his very neatest hand, including an elaborate tall e in the Old English. The translation is the only Early Modern English composition of Nowell’s own available for general study.56 As a test case, let us examine the Old English text and Nowell’s Early Modern English translation at the beginning of the codex: I King ÆLFREDE gathered together & commanded to be writen of those thinges whiche our praedecessours obserued, so many as liked me & such as I liked not, I reiected by the aduise of my counseyllours, & commaunded them to be otherwise obserued bycause I durst not praesume to putte in writing any multitude of myne owne decrees, bycause I was vncertayne what would please them that whiche were to cumme after us.

Ic ÆLFRED cyning þæs togædere gegaderod 7 awritan het monige þære þe ure foregengan heoldon þa me licodon; 7 þa þe me ne licodon ic awearp mid minra witena geþeahte: 7 on oþre wisan bebead to healdanne: for þam ic ne dorst gþrist [sic] læcan þæra minra awuht feala on gewrit settan: for þam me wæs uncuþ hwæt þæs þam lician wold þe æfter us wæren:

At first glance, Nowell’s translation looks Latinate, and by and large it is. However, he cannot be accused of employing inkhorn terms, since all of the 54

55 56

Marckwardt, ‘The Sources of Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum,’ Studies in Philology 45 (1948): 21; see also Marckwardt’s full discussion of the dialect words in Nowell, ‘An Unnoted Source of English Dialect Vocabulary,’ JEGP 46 (1947): 177–182. I have described the codicology of the book in detail in ‘Laurence Nowell’s Edition.’ A similar edition and translation of the laws of Ine exists, but it is in private hands. Carl Berkhout has examined it; I am indebted to him for alerting me to its existence and look forward to his planned article on the manuscript.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries Latinate words in this passage were well established in the English lexicon by the 1560s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, most of the words are first attested in the fourteenth century, such as ‘commaunded’ (1300), ‘praesume’ (1380), and ‘multitude’ (1350). ‘Praedecessours’ entered the English vocabulary even earlier, first attested in 1292; the latest comer in Nowell’s sentences is ‘reiected’ which first appeared in 1494, still a good sixty to seventy years before Nowell composed his translation. Nowell does not use his own coinages from either Latin or Old English in this introduction; his words, even the Latinate ones, are well-established, ‘denizened’ vocabulary. Nowell, however, eventually introduces into Henry Davis 59 some words which he coins from Old English, often words that he wants to retain a special status as ‘technical’ terms. Nowell renders ‘ge mid were ge mid wite’ as ‘bothe with were & wite,’ a technical use of the term ‘were’ (i.e., wergeld) which the OED does not record in print until Cowell’s 1607 Interpreter.57 Nowell’s subsequent use of the word ‘wergild’ to translate the Old English ‘wergylde’ is perhaps the first in the sixteenth century and the word stands out as an unusual and obviously technical term.58 Other Early Modern English words that seem to be Nowell’s own coinages from Old English are ‘borgbreache’ for ‘borhbryce,’ ‘the kinges ferme’ for ‘cyninges feorm,’ and ‘merecpence’ for ‘mærcna peninga.’59 In a later passage Nowell also translates ‘borhbryce’ as ‘suretiebreache’; while this is not the near transliteration that ‘borgbreache’ is, it shows that Nowell did know what the word meant and it is itself a neologism—from both an (established) Old French and an Old English root!60 Nowell alternates the new coinages with more familiar words, as a way to include new vocabulary without confusing his audience. Probably it is no accident that these ‘new’ Modern English words from Old English are all legal terms. Legal documents often used archaic vocabulary, and as Considine observes, lawyers drove much of the Old English lexicography in the century after Nowell’s death.61 The desire to retain technical vocabulary led to Nowell’s coinages, as I have argued elsewhere, and these coinages take forms of which his associates at Cecil House would probably approve.62 At other places Nowell, like Golding, chooses English words from Germanic roots rather than Latinate options 57 58 59 60 61 62

Fol. 5v and 6r. The manuscript is not numbered; all folio numbers are my own. Fol. 7r and 6v. Fol. 5r, 4v, 6r, and 5v. Fol. 5v and 6r. Considine, Dictionaries, 11. Brackmann, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Edition.’

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England which were also available to him: he translates ‘gang dagas,’ for example, as ‘gang dayes.’63 ‘Gang days’ was by no means unknown in this period, but the Latinate ‘Rogation Days’ was also in circulation; the OED notes that John Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes used ‘Rogation Days.’ Although English translators often find themselves using cognate or derivative words in their initial drafts, the Henry Davis manuscript can hardly represent Nowell’s first attempt to render the laws into English, as it is written on expensive vellum and elaborately lettered. As he certainly would not compose a translation for the first time on such expensive material, Nowell’s archaic words, remaining in the text through the several drafts that must have preceded Henry Davis 59, must have been a deliberate choice on his part. If Nowell must be put into one of Barber’s categories, then, we might label him as a moderate Archaizer. He was willing to make up words from antique vocabulary if he felt that Early Modern English lacked the technical lexicon to express the necessary ideas, but he did not deliberately avoid anything Latinate, as his translation of the introduction shows. He was no extremist, but he recognized a need to have a ‘special’ vocabulary for the laws, one that appropriately reflected their ancient concepts and roots. Nowell’s approach to his translation in Henry Davis 59 indicates that his path through the contentious territory of Early Modern English vocabulary was shaped by both his knowledge of Old English, and his interactions with other writers and their interests in historical linguistics. Their interests, of course, may have been shaped in turn by what they knew of Nowell’s own work. The cross-pollination that almost certainly took place between Nowell, Golding, and Hart, and could have taken place between all of them and Ascham, would have produced a web of mutual influence and intersecting ideas. However, if Old English could shape their concepts of Early Modern English, the reverse is also true. Nowell’s approaches to Old English attempt to reshape it into a language that could be called ‘standard,’ despite what he must have known about the multiplicity of dialects and spellings from his reading of manuscripts such as the glossed Lindisfarne Gospels. Nowell’s attempt in the Abcedarium to take the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, an Anglo-Saxon writer who was both prolific and ideologically appealing to Nowell and his contemporaries, and build an Old English lexicon standardized on Ælfric’s late West Saxon dialect, shows him actively stabilizing Old English, not merely passively representing it. The fact that nearly all

63

Fol. 9v and 10r.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries modern dictionaries of Old English follow the same principle should not obscure his choice, but make visible the influence that such a concern for a standard continues to have. Nowell’s desire for a standard dialect of Old English was inseparable from his desire to have a standard form of Early Modern English, a desire that rose from a complex of emotional and nationalist desires. LAMBARDE’S ‘SAXON’ AND ENGLISH WORDS Certainly William Lambarde understood Nowell’s lexicographic work in the context of the historical development and heritage of English, and even after Nowell’s departure for the Continent Lambarde continued to unite the study of Old English with arguments about standardizing contemporary English. As the relationship between Nowell and writers such as Golding explains some of Nowell’s strategies for approaching Old English, these strategies in turn make visible some of Lambarde’s similar interests, which have gone largely unnoticed. Lambarde’s notes in some of his own books, as well as his glossary in the Archaionomia, continued the juxtaposition of Old English with modern language debates. This begins with his notes on the title page of the Vocabularium Saxonicum (folio 1v). Two lines of neoOld English verse appear at the top of the leaf, with identifying information: ‘Mid hiht Ic þolige. L.N. / Butan hiht ic ahnige. W.L.’ Interlinearly, the initials are further identified: ‘Laur Nowel’ ‘Will Lombard.’ ‘1567’ is written next to the first line. Even though the first line has Nowell’s name and initials next to it, the hand is Lambarde’s.64 The first line ‘Mid hiht Ic þolige’ (with hope I endure) is, I suspect, meant to be a couplet with the ‘Butan hiht ic ahnige’ (without hope I perish) written below it. Berkhout believes that ‘Mid hiht Ic þolige’ was a tag that Nowell composed, based on its similarity to the quotation from Hesiod that appears under Nowell’s self-portrait on one of his maps (see Chapter Six).65 The second line is probably Lambarde’s composition. As such, it might have been a form of eulogy written in 1570 (the latest date on the title page) by Lambarde. Lambarde wrote his friend and teacher’s phrase about hope, dated it, then

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Although Marckwardt’s edition states that the first two lines are in Nowell’s hand, this is incorrect. Nowell, Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, ed. Albert H. Marckwardt, University of Michigan Studies in Language and Literature 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952), 21. Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (1530–ca. 1570),’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 12.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England noted his own lack of hope now that Nowell was gone. He also wrote on this page and on the first page of the dictionary proper several ‘Old English’ and Latin puns on his name: ‘wæccaþ þine leohfæt,’ ‘Invigila Lampadi,’ and ‘wille ham lamwyrhte’; he would continue to use the Old English puns as ownership inscriptions in books for the rest of his life (even when the books had nothing to do with his Anglo-Saxon studies).66 After the tribute to Nowell, Lambarde wrote on folio 1v a list of texts which he also emphasized with a maniculus: for the degrees of the declination of the old Inglishe, or Saxon tongue, .1. read the Lawes before the Conquest: .2. the Saxon chron. of peterborough, after the Conquest. .3. The Saxon writte of .H.3. to oxfordshyre: in ye little booke of olde Lawes, fo. .4. The pater nostre, & Crede, of Rob. Gosted: in the booke of patrices purgatorie &c. .5. The rythme of Jacob: in the booke called flos florum. .6. the Chronicles called Brute: Gower, Chaucier, &c. by the which and suche like it may appeare, how, and by what steps, our language is fallen from the old Inglishe, and drawen nearer to the frenche: This may wel be lightened by shorte examples, taken from theise bookes, and is meete to be discouered when this Dictionarie shalbe emprinted.67

Berkhout calls this ‘the earliest known reading list for the history of the English language’ and identifies the items Lambarde mentions in it, adding that ‘he may have been expecting the publication of selections from this list along with the Old English lexicon upon Nowell’s return.’68 Lambarde may be considering grammar and morphology as well as the lexicon in his catalogue of historical documents and their witness to change; it is impossible to tell. What is clear is that he wanted this historical development explained in tandem with Nowell’s Vocabularium (‘discovered’ often had a meaning of ‘explained’ or ‘expounded’ in the sixteenth century), placing reading knowledge of Old English in a context of English language change. Lambarde’s view of this alteration is also clear. ‘Declination,’ while it can mean simply ‘development,’ can also have overtones of moral ‘decline.’ His choice of the word ‘fallen,’ rather than a more neutral ‘changed,’ is even

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Berkhout discusses these inscriptions in Lambarde’s books in ‘William Lambarde’s Old English Ex Libris,’ Notes and Queries 229 (1984): 297–298. Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium, 21; I have expanded abbreviations which Marckwardt represents with a macron. Berkhout, ‘William Lambarde and Old English,’ Notes and Queries 245 (2000): 415.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries more overtly charged with Biblical implications: the ‘pre-lapsarian’ (preNorman) Saxon language was the ideal state, and the new, ‘fallen’ form corrupted and polluted by foreign contact. The past of English shows the deficiencies in the modern language and, tacitly, suggests how it might be altered to better fit its heritage. Although Berkhout suggests that Lambarde’s plans for publication were tied to Nowell’s return, if indeed the couplet at the top of the same page has an elegiac meaning then when Lambarde wrote this in 1570 he knew that Nowell was not coming back. Lambarde’s plan that the Vocabularium should be ‘emprinted’ was probably his own, and he, like Nowell, considered knowledge of Old English vocabulary necessary not only for the reading of texts but also for understanding contemporary English. As Berkhout observes, the first item on Lambarde’s list, ‘the Lawes before the Conquest,’ probably refers to his own text of those laws in his 1568 Archaionomia.69 This work, the first printed edition of Old English law and the third printed book to contain Old English, has received sustained attention from scholars of Old English law, and that aspect of it will be discussed in this book’s final chapter. Less studied, however, is the prefatory glossary in Lambarde’s book, titled ‘Rerum & verborum in hac translatione praecipue difficilium explicatio’ (An explanation of especially difficult things and words in this translation).70 As the title indicates, the focus here is on Latin words and concepts in Lambarde’s translation that might confuse the reader; the glossary is alphabetized on Latin headwords, each with an explanatory paragraph. Lambarde knew most of his readers would turn first to the translation and not to the Old English codes themselves, and this cannot be classified as a glossary of Old English. His readers are nonetheless never permitted to turn too far from the original language of the laws. Each paragraph gives not only the Old English word which the Latin headword translates, but explains its etymology and, when possible, notes survival of the word into modern English. The beginning of the entry for ‘Capitales inimicitiae’ is typical: Capitales inimicitiae, Saxonicè feoþh [sic, for feohþ]. nomen a fah quod aduersarium sonat exortum, atque a borealibus Anglis hac nostra memoria usurpatum. Illi vero dictione non ita multum a priori dissidente, fewd & Deadly fewd appellant. [Mortal enmity. in Saxon ‘feoþh.’ the name came from ‘fah’ which means ‘enemy,’ and was used in this way by the northern English in our memory. 69 70

Berkhout, ‘William Lambarde and Old English,’ 416. Sig. Biiv.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Truly, the saying not much at varience from the earlier one, they name [it] ‘fewd’ and ‘Deadly fewd.’]71

Lambarde often notes these contemporary descendants of Old English words in Early Modern English or in Law French in the margin, such as ‘Base tenant,’ ‘Earle,’ and ‘Tithing,’ allowing his reader to quickly scan and locate the ancestors for modern legal terms.72 Less frequently, he adds a marginal note with a conceptual rather than a linguistic relationship to the text, such as ‘Rowte’ which appears next to his entry on ‘Turma, Saxonicè hloþe.’73 Lambarde explains (as usual) the meaning of ‘hloþe’: ‘Vocabulum a hlyde quod tumultum sonat diductum. Est quidem hloþ hominum manus ad rapinam parata, manipulus furum’ (The word is drawn from hlyde which means disturbance. Indeed, hloþ is a gang of men ready for plunder, a band of thieves). Lambarde goes on to explain that he translated it ‘turma’ because that was the larger sort of band in Roman law. The English word ‘rout’ does not appear, but Lambarde includes it as a parallel to the idea of legislation dealing with persons assembled for criminal activities. Although the glossary is organized on Latin, it gives etymologies and explanations for the Old English words which Lambarde is translating, presenting information about the Old English language beyond what is necessary for the Archaionomia’s reader to understand the ancient laws in the main text. It also gives several words and concepts drawn from French, such as ‘distreine’ and ‘distresse’ in the entry on ‘Praefectus, vel praepositus, Saxonicè gerefa.’74 The Archaionomia demonstrates not only Early Modern English’s development from Old English, but also its divergence. Archaionomia could display how the modern language (especially legal language) had ‘drawn nearer the French’ and lost touch with its heroic origins, even as a few words retained glimpses of the lost ancestral language. OLD ENGLISH AND NEW SPELLING: LAMBARDE’S COPY OF DE RECTA SCRIPTIONE This discussion began with a study of Nowell’s Old English notes in his copy of a printed dictionary, and it seems fitting to conclude with an examination of Old English notes left by Lambarde in one of his books—a

71 72 73 74

Sig. B.iiir. Sig. C.iiiir and sig. B.iiiiv. Sig. D.iiir. Sig. C.iiiiv–D.iv.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries treatise on English orthography. In 1568, Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) revised and had printed his De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione (On the True and Corrected Writing of the English Language, hereafter referred to as De Recta Scriptione), a tract proposing sweeping spelling and alphabet reforms for English. More clearly than any other artifact, perhaps, Lambarde’s copy of De Recta Scriptione demonstrates the relationship between Old English studies and English language debates in the sixteenth century. This interaction begins with the printed text itself: Smith employed some Anglo-Saxon characters in his new alphabet, commenting that ‘maiores nostros & primos illos Anglosaxones multo curiosius intuitos esse naturam literarum, quam nos hodie facimus, rectiusque scripsisse’ (‘our ancestors, the original Anglo-Saxons, looked much more closely into the nature of letters, and wrote more correctly than we do today’).75 The Viking incursions had begun a process of deterioration from this level of correctness which was completed when, in Smith’s words: ‘Post adventum Normanorum Gallicam imitati sumus linguam, & scriptionem, quae certe est ineptissime confusa, alias ad fastidium otiosus suffarcta literis, alias ad mendicitatem inops & ieiuna, nunquam sibi contans, & raro rationi consona’ (‘After the coming of the Normans we copied the French language and writing which is certainly most awkwardly confused, sometimes horribly stuffed with useless letters, sometimes as scantily provided and starving as a beggar; never consistent and seldom reasonable’).76 By now, it should be no surprise to see the idea of standardization of English tied to emotionally charged narratives of lost ancestral values and to issues of national identity (however startling it may be to anyone who has worked extensively in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to learn that Old English had achieved any such ideal). Smith deliberately employs the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (a word which he coined) period of history as the lost ideal for Tudor England to aspire to. Lambarde’s annotations in Smith’s text continue on the line of Nowell’s Abcedarium glosses to underscore the ways that language debates and the study of Old English coincided in the discourse of English nationalism in the sixteenth century. The De Recta Scriptione fits, at first glance, oddly in Sir Thomas Smith’s oeuvre. After becoming Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1543, Smith

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Translations of De Recta Scriptione are from Danielsson’s facing-page facsimile and translation. Smith, Sir Thomas Smith: Literary and Linguistic Works [1542. 1549. 1568]. Part II: A Critical Edition of De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione, Dialogus, ed. and trans. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983), 141 and 143. Smith, De Recta Scriptione, 143.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England joined the household of Protector Somerset in 1547, serving first as Master of Requests then as one of two royal Secretaries.77 He was knighted in 1549, only to fall with Somerset in October of that same year.78 Smith kept a low profile after that, not entirely by his own choice, serving as provost of Eton College for the rest of Edward’s reign and the reign of Mary Tudor. Things looked more promising when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, especially since William Cecil was one of Smith’s former students at Cambridge and the two had remained friends. Smith’s fortunes did not soar, however, probably because he and Cecil quarreled in 1559; they did not reconcile until 1562.79 He was sent in that year as the ambassador to France, an appointment that he hated and in which he seems to have engaged most notably in vitriolic fighting with his fellow ambassador, Nicholas Throckmorton (the two actually drew daggers on each other at one point but were separated quickly by their servants).80 In 1565, while in France, he penned his best-known work, the De Republica Anglorum, which circulated in manuscript in his lifetime and was published posthumously in 1583. He was finally allowed to return to England in 1566, and two years later (after serving once more as an envoy to France) he revised and published the De Recta Scriptione, which had been written in the 1540s. De Republica, in Mary Dewar’s words ‘a complete survey of the workings of Elizabethan government throughout society,’ remains the work for which Smith is best known.81 Its nationalist overtones are clear, in its very subject matter as well as in Smith’s asides. To give just one example, Smith comments on the English system of pleading, ‘I have not perceived nor reade as yet so wise, so just, and so well devised a meane found out by any man among us in Europe.’82 Anne McClaren has argued that the whole treatise is an outpouring of Protestant nationalism, as ‘[Smith’s] agenda entailed constructing a historical as well as a providential national identity—the Ancient Constitution as well as the Elect Nation—as two sides of the same coin in a godly empire.’83 McClaren even suggests that the De Republica can be read as ‘Protestant polemic.’ The English legal system, 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone, 1964), 9–25. Ibid., 25–66. Ibid., 82–85. Ibid., 85–103. Dewar, ‘Introduction,’ in Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. Smith, De Republica, 96. Anne McClaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Polemic,’ Historical Journal 42 (1999): 912.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries differing (as Smith and others observed) from the majority of other European systems which were based on Roman law, could serve as a point of pride, inspiring loyalty to an English identity that men such as Cecil wished to foster in Elizabeth’s subjects.84 Smith probably revised the De Recta Scriptione alongside the De Republica in the 1560s, and setting the two together suggests that the De Recta Scriptione, too, springs from national motives not separable from those in the more overt political treatise. The De Recta Scriptione is framed as a dialogue between ‘Quintus’ and ‘Smithus,’ during which the two discuss spelling in English and read over Smithus’s treatise on the topic which he worked on while he was in France as an ambassador. The treatise itself explains the letters in Smithus’s new spelling system, which uses (by his count) nineteen letters from the Roman alphabet, four from Greek, and six from ‘English’ (including þ, ð and yough); Smith also employs diacritical marks to distinguish long and short vowels, creating a system whereby all English words can be spelled phonetically, with only one possible letter for each sound in the language. At the end of the volume appear several ‘spelling exercises.’85 Cathy Shrank, in her analysis of the De Recta Scriptione, observes that Smith’s rhetorical strategies had political overtones and national implications.86 Smith himself elsewhere described ‘our tongue, our laws, and our religion’ as ‘the true bands of the commonwealth,’ reinforcing the idea that this kind of linguistic exploration could be put to the service of nationalism.87 If ‘our tongue’ was a binding agent for the political unity of the English, then Smith’s discussions of the need for it to be correct and logical were not merely dry puzzles devoid of consequence, but matters of national importance for him as for the other writers this chapter has discussed. The English needed to have a standard way of spelling that represented how they all spoke (or ought to speak), in order to have a uniform Protestant religion giving the Word of God in writing.88 Indeed, Smith’s quick history of letters asserts that early writers ‘dederunt operam vt his simplicissimis sonis characteres darent, quas appellabant literas & elementa’ (‘took pains to give these simplest sounds signs which they called letters or elements’) and goes on to note that this system was, ‘divinum certe inventum & 84 85 86 87 88

Smith, De Republica, 144. Smith, De Recta Scriptione, 179. Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 143. Ibid. (quoting from State Papers), 148. Ibid., 150.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England humano generi maxime necessarium’ (‘undoubtedly a divine invention and most necessary to mankind’).89 Confusion in the letters, then, is a rejection of ‘divine’ aid in writing and a refusal to acknowledge what God Himself must have mandated. Bad spelling equals bad religion. Smith emphasizes his point about the ‘fallen’ nature of English spelling by contrast with the ‘Anglo-Saxons.’ They, ‘our ancestors’ ‘wrote more correctly’ than Smith’s contemporaries.90 Smith stresses his reading of Old English to support his ideas about the appropriate ‘value’ of modern letters. Discussing what sound the letter c ought to represent, he writes: ‘Certe qui vetustae illius Anglosaxonicae linguae & scriptionis periti sunt, contendunt apud illos atavos nostros Anglosaxones, c literam, maxime ante e & i, eum habuisse sonum, quem & nos pro vero τό c sono agnoscimus’ (‘Certainly those of us who are skilled in the old Anglo-Saxon tongue and writing assert that with our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, the letter c, particularly before e and i, had the sound which we recognize as the real sound of c’).91 The Anglo-Saxons, in other words, got it right. Smith also emphasizes the archival nature of his research, stating that he has seen ‘in the most ancient Anglo-Saxon books’ evidence that eth and thorn strongly distinguished voiced and unvoiced sounds, another aspect of the ancient language that he wishes to reintroduce to its degenerate descendant.92 Cathy Shrank observes that ‘Smith’s recourse to Anglo-Saxon is only skin-deep, wrapping innovation in a rhetoric of precedent to authorize an approach that is, in fact, a radical break from the past. …’93 Such a shallow approach to Old English is hardly surprising; if Smith already included his discussion of Anglo-Saxon English in the text in the original version from the 1540s, his access to manuscripts would have been haphazard and limited, and almost no one could have helped him puzzle through them. If, on the other hand, these sections date from the revision in the 1560s, then perhaps he could have learned some of his Old English from Nowell. Even then, however, they would have had little time in which to collaborate on this: Smith was already in France when Nowell probably joined Cecil’s household in 1562 or early 1563. When Smith returned to England in 1566 (only to be sent a short time later back to France) there would not have been much opportunity for him to interact with Nowell before Nowell himself left for the Continent, a trip from which he would not return to England. Arguing that 89 90 91 92 93

Smith, De Recta Scriptione, 44 and 45. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 98–101. The sound to which Smith refers is /č/. Ibid., 139. Shrank, Writing the Nation, 152.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries Smith’s knowledge of Old English was, despite his claims, superficial makes sense, since wide reading in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts would have revealed to him a variety of spelling and dialect. However, Lambarde’s knowledge of Old English was anything but superficial when he began to annotate his copy of Smith’s treatise. Lambarde knew Smith’s other work; the first attribution of Smith’s Discourse on the Commonweal of England (which circulated anonymously in manuscript) to Smith was a note that Lambarde wrote in his own copy that he had heard the book was written by Smith. Although I do not know of an extant copy of Smith’s De Republica Anglorum in which Lambarde’s signature appears, it would have fit squarely in the range of Lambarde’s interests in law and government, and he may very well have read it also. Lambarde’s copy of De Recta Scriptione (now in the University of Virginia Library) bears the marks of sustained interest, not only in Smith’s argument for reforming English spelling but in his association of Anglo-Saxon with the ‘foundational’ moment in England’s past. Lambarde’s marginal annotations in his copy of De Recta Scriptione are by-and-large supportive of Smith’s arguments, especially those about the Anglo-Saxons. The first extensive note Lambarde writes is typical; it correlates ‘A longa’ in the main text to the Old English: ‘A. longam denotabant maiores nostri anglosaxones, hoc [m]odo, Ác. Oke, quercus. gát. gote, capra.’ (the Anglo-Saxons our ancestors denoted long A in this manner: Ác. Oke, quercus. gát. gote, capra.)94 At this point in the text, Smith shows how his new alphabet will denote ‘a longa’ with diacritical marks and, to clarify what sound this letter will represent, gives examples of both short and long a in a list: A breuis Homo Man longe far petaso aut galerus hat

A longa iuba equi män vale bene färwel odisse hät

ma-n fâr-wel ha-t

and so on.95 Smith’s main point here is to show his series of diacritical marks; to differentiate the sounds, he writes the Latin equivalents of ‘man,’ ‘mane,’ ‘far,’ ‘farewell,’ ‘hat,’ and ‘hate’ so that his readers know the sound in 94 95

Fol. 10v. I use bold type to denote Lambarde’s imitation insular minuscule script. Smith, De Recta Scriptione, 50.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England question (and avoiding the need to use contemporary spelling of any English words, which are entirely written in his new system in the treatise). Lambarde retains the customary spelling of Early Modern English, but also provides a Latin equivalent for his Old English words, which appear to support both Smith’s argument that long a should be distinguished and his claim that the Anglo-Saxons wrote more correctly, since Lambarde shows the mark that periodically distinguishes long a in Old English script. Lambarde wrote similar notes throughout the volume; although some have been damaged by trimming, usually the missing portion can be reconstructed. When Smith argues that ‘u dupli’ is not a valid way to represent the sound of w, Lambarde observes that Old English did not use w but instead had its own letter for that sound: wynn, an Old English runic letter: ‘hoc caractere .w [vsi] sunt Anglosaxones wudu, wood, syl[ua] weorc. work, op[us] et .L. ante wlác, Lukewarme tepidum. wlite, beautie, or venustas’ (The Anglo-Saxons used this letter w wudu, wood, syl[ua] weorc. work, op[us] and before L wlác, Lukewarme tepidum. wlite, beautie, or venustas).96 Next to the section of the text where Smith discusses semi-vowels such as l and argues that it is unnecessary to write any vowel before or after them in words such as ‘able’ or ‘feeble’ (‘äbl’ and ‘fëbl’ in Smith’s spelling), Lambarde observes that ‘.l. semiuocalis sic olim Anglosax[o]nes, Adl. sicke, ægro[sus.] Cnosl. issue, prole[s.] husl. eucharistia et similia’ (The Anglo-Saxons [wrote] the semi-vowel l thus: Adl. sicke, ægro[sus.] Cnosl. issue, prole[s.] husl. eucharistia and likewise).97 Lambarde’s notes support Smith’s claim that a final or intermediate vowel next to semivocalic l is unnecessary, and also bolster Smith’s argument that Old English was more correct. A similar note appears at Smith’s discussion of semivocalic m and n: ‘maiores nostri anglosaxones, hac scribendi forma vsi sunt, bosm pro bosome: efn. even, æquale. facn. crafte, fraus’ (the Anglo-Saxons our ancestors used this form of writing bosm for bosome: efn. even, æquale. facn. crafte, fraus). Lambarde emphasizes Smith’s assertions about both ancestral values and spelling, using in his notes ‘Anglosaxones,’ the word that Smith coined for the Germanic inhabitants of southern Britain before the Conquest. The Old English words that Lambarde chooses to illustrate various sounds make a similar case about the ancestral qualities of the AngloSaxons, as the majority of them are clearly related to their Early Modern English descendants: ‘gát. goat,’ ‘wudu. wood,’ ‘bosm. bosome.’ In one case, 96 97

Fol. 19r. What appears as a bold-face w here is a runic wynn. Fol. 27r.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries the modern word’s development from Old English is so obvious that Lambarde does not even write the Early Modern English: ‘husl. eucharistia’ skips from Old English to its Latin equivalent; the Early Modern English ‘housel’ does not appear.98 Certainly Lambarde also includes words that are not ancestors of words in current use, such as ‘cwealm, slaughter, caedes’ where ‘cwealm’ is translated with ‘slaughter’ (the Middle English ‘qualm’ was not in wide use after 1500 according to the Oxford English Dictionary).99 However, the great majority have a clear relationship to the Modern English with which Lambarde translates them, supporting Smith’s claim that Old English and the Anglo-Saxons who spoke it were part of a heroic English past now lost to their descendants. Lambarde also does not hesitate to correct Smith’s knowledge of Old English, as Carl Berkhout points out.100 When Smith argues that an Old English ‘y’ is equivalent to an Early Modern English ‘u’ so that ‘true’ (verus) in Early Modern English is written ‘try’ in Old English, Lambarde points out that in fact the Old English equivalent for ‘true’ is ‘getreowe’ and that ‘try’ is a different word. Still, Lambarde’s annotations bolster Smith’s ideas that Old English had a more ‘correct’ spelling from which Early Modern English has fallen, and that Smith’s reforms are in large part a return to the way English used to be written. Lambarde was not entirely persuaded by Smith’s scheme—as I mentioned, his Early Modern English words are not in Smith’s new spelling—but it intrigued him. He read carefully, correcting typos (printed on an ‘Errata’ notice at the back of the book) that occurred in the text in the ‘newly-spelled’ words (which must have been a printer’s nightmare). He gave a brief try at some of the spelling exercises at the end of the book. And, most of all, he noted places where Smith referred to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as ‘our ancestors.’ Lambarde marked the passage I quoted at the start of this discussion, about the Anglo-Saxons writing more correctly, with both an underscoring and a pointing hand. He adopted Smith’s term ‘Anglosaxones’ for the Germanic inhabitants of southern Britain in his annotations in this book, although he would continue to call them ‘Saxons’ in his own works. He held up what he understood about the pronunciation of Old English to Smith’s explanation of articulatory phonetics, writing Old English examples in the margins for the phenomena Smith described. Lambarde’s marginalia closely tie together reading knowledge of Old

98 99 100

The word is probably most familiar to modern readers from the negative past participle ‘unhouseled’ in Hamlet I.v.77. s.v. ‘qualm’ def. 2. Berkhout, ‘William Lambarde and Old English,’ 418.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England English with the sort of nationalistic, even polemically and politically charged, claims that Smith made about the need for standardizing Early Modern English. Smith’s own knowledge of Old English may have been, as Shrank says, only ‘skin deep,’ but that cannot be said of Lambarde, whose annotated copy bolsters Smith’s ideas. Lambarde knew Old English as well as anyone in the sixteenth century, and the parade of regularized Old English vocabulary (translated into both Early Modern English and Latin) in the margins of De Recta Scriptione interacts with the text to further Smith’s claims about ‘our Anglosaxon ancestors.’ The Old English in these margins supports the arguments for standardization with all of its accompanying national agenda. That same agenda shaped Lambarde’s study of Old English as well, inventing a national standard in the past that could then be used for the needs of the present. Both Nowell’s exploration of Old English in the Abcedarium and Lambarde’s notes in De Recta Scriptione must be placed in the context not just of Anglo-Saxon studies, but of interest in Early Modern English. Nowell’s residence in Cecil’s house and his personal contact with Golding and Hart give a starting point for how those debates may have shaped his studies, which continued in the work of Lambarde. As we have seen, the debates about English vocabulary were intertwined with national identity politics, as Shrank comments: Language … was not solely a means of defining a nation: it was a means of creating one, overriding issues of blood or long-standing alliances by its ability, on a practical as well as a rhetorical level, to gather potentially disparate groups into one cohesive national community, using and understanding one tongue.101

This holds not only for contemporary languages, but also for past ones; a unified Old English could help create Anglo-Saxon England just as a uniform Early Modern English could, in the work of Hart, Golding, Ascham, Smith, and others, create Elizabethan England. Language and its words, far from being a subject for dry linguistic analysis, were a matter of keen and ideologically resonant debate in the sixteenth century. Nowell’s Abcedarium dictionary, enigmatic as it seems at first, fits into such a context; he wanted to learn Old English not only so that he could read Old English texts, but also so he and his associates could construct both Old 101

Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions,’ 181.

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Inkhorns, Orthographers, and Antiquaries and Early Modern English in ways that furthered their goals of creating England in the past and in their own present. When we look in the directions to which the Abcedarium points us, we also acquire a clearer view of how Lambarde, not normally discussed in histories of Old English lexicography, also participated in this, as his notes in the Vocabularium and in Smith’s De Recta Scriptione make clear. These manuscripts and annotations show, more clearly than anything else, the ways that medievalists’ examinations of Old English lexicography and early modernists’ studies of language debates need to intertwine, as the fields themselves did in the sixteenth century.

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PART II

CHOROGRAPHIES AND THE PAST OF ENGLAND

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England

Figure 2. Laurence Nowell’s place-name index in the Abcedarium. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Library.

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Chapter 4 SOMEWHERE IN TIME: THE ABCEDARIUM PLACE-NAME INDEX

A

RCHBISHOP MATTHEW PARKER, in the preface to his 1574 edition of Asser’s Life of Alfred, explains that he has chosen to set the (Latin) text in an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ typeface imitating insular minuscule script to help his reader begin to learn Old English. One of the reasons that knowing Old English is beneficial, he argues, is that it will help with local etymology: quanta huius linguae studioso voluptas erit (& vt periucunda, ita non multi sane laboris) scire, omnium ciuitatum, vrbium, montium, syluarum, fluminum, & viarum nomina, & haec vniuersa vnde deriuentur, & quo quidque quasi e fonte profluxerit intelligere.1 [what a great pleasure it will be for him who studies this language (and just as it will be pleasant, so too it will not require great labor) to know the names of all towns, cities, mountains, forests, rivers, and roads, and whence all these derive, and to understand from where each one of them flowed, as if from a spring.]

Parker, however, does not go on to explain why one would want to learn the ancient place names or understand the derivations of modern ones; this, apparently, is self-explanatory to him. The drive to understand local names was so ingrained as to be invisible to Parker, at least, and probably to many of his contemporaries. It could motivate people to learn Old English, but what motivated it? The next three chapters will examine Nowell’s and Lambarde’s research into place names and local history and how they interacted with the discourses that impelled the early modern

1

Asser, Ælfredi Regis Res Gestæ, [ed. Matthew Parker] (London: John Day, 1574), sig. Aiiiiv.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England vogue for chorography, of which place-name etymology is a part. This chapter will discuss some of the stakes involved in early modern English writing about place, and examine how these are at play in the place-name index interleaved into Nowell’s copy of the Abcedarium. Nowell’s treatment of his sources in this preliminary document demonstrates his predominant interest in national (as opposed to local) identity. This shows most clearly when Nowell’s index is compared with Lambarde’s chorographic works, the unfinished Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places of England and Wales and the 1576 Perambulation of Kent, and Chapter Five discusses the directions that Lambarde chose for his texts, drawing on his Anglo-Saxon studies with Nowell but ultimately opting for a different form and focus for the presentation of his work. The question of why Nowell’s research took a different form from Lambarde’s, and indeed from the research of nearly everyone working in chorography, is addressed in Chapter Six, which examines Nowell’s maps of the British Isles and his closely associated notebook juxtaposing Anglo-Saxon and Irish history. Nowell’s and Lambarde’s eventually diverging forms and goals for their chorographic projects display some of the range of ideological possibilities for those English writers in the sixteenth century who, like Parker, wished to find the ‘spring’ from which English places and the very identity of England itself flowed. Nowell’s index consists of some 470 entries, written on the Abcedarium’s interleaves, which collect a mass of information on English history and onomastics from sources ranging from chronicles to poetry, from centuries-old to fairly contemporary. Although the Abcedarium’s place-name index is clearly a preliminary compilation and not a finished product, we can still determine which sources Nowell used most for it—not always the ones we might have expected—and begin to make some surmises about what he wanted the final index to achieve and what his aims were for writing it. Nowell displays his usual overriding interest in the Anglo-Saxon period, mostly noting events from the pre-Conquest history of the places he records, but does so not by relying most on pre-Conquest texts but rather on later works, especially Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum and John Leland’s printed discussions of historical English place names. Although some of Nowell’s entries derive from Anglo-Saxon texts, he mined more fully those sources that were ideologically closer to his goal of supporting national unity. Nowell’s emphasis on these sources suggests that he understood his work in the context of making history ‘English’ as a way to support the Reformation need for national identity, an enterprise that had been underway for decades. Nowell’s index yokes the twin forces of

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Somewhere in Time history and landscape, imbuing both with an essential Englishness that is furthered by Nowell’s alphabetical, rather than geographic, organization for his project. This fusion of place and past gives history a physical presence in the contemporary landscape, both together endowing the locale (whether it came under a local heading or a national one) and its people with a concrete and visible identity that incorporated the medieval heritage of Elizabethan England. Nowell’s enterprise was one of several that combined historical and geographical exploration in the sixteenth century, as the foundational studies of Richard Helgerson and Graham Parry have shown.2 In the 1540s, Nowell’s and Lambarde’s most important predecessor, John Leland, had proposed a lengthy history of English places, county by county, and the early modern craze for ‘chorography’—depicting a specific place, whether visually (maps, for instance) or textually, and delineating some aspect of its history, name, topography, or architectural features—came into its own. Although I will discuss in more detail some of Leland’s texts in the section of this chapter devoted to Nowell’s sources, it is worth painting his ideas in broad brushstrokes here. Leland’s agenda for publications, presented in his ‘New Year’s Gift’ to King Henry VIII in 1546, drew on his extensive travels with the king’s ‘diploma’ or commission to all the monastic libraries that were in the process of dissolution.3 Leland’s plans were made public in a tract printed as the The Laboryouse Iourney in 1549 by his friend John Bale, who added copious commentary to the epistle. Leland had kept volumes of notes on both the manuscripts he had seen (and, occasionally, carried away) and the locations he had visited, and he imagined all of this material taking shape in a series of dazzlingly ambitious projects, including not only definitive county histories, but maps, a bio-bibliographical index of great British writers, organized chronologically, discussions of the histories and topography of the Hebrides, and a history of the English monarchy from its origins (presumably with the Trojan Brutus) to Henry VIII.4 Leland had had, in succession, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell as patrons

2

3

4

Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). The classic discussion of the fate of the monastic libraries is C.E. Wright, ‘The Dispersal of the Libraries in the Sixteenth Century,’ in The English Library before 1700, ed. Francis Wormald and C.E. Wright (London: Athlone Press, 1958), 148–175. I refer to the facsimile printed in John Leland’s Itinerary: Travels in Tudor England, ed. John Chandler (1993; repr., Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998), 1–15.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England during the 1530s when he undertook his commission to search for ancient manuscripts, and James Carley and Pierre Petitmengin suspect that Leland’s ‘diploma’ related to Cromwell’s need for historical support in Henry’s wrangles with the papacy over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.5 From the beginning, Leland’s explorations were undertaken to serve royal and, eventually, Reformation purposes, and these aims probably structured his conception of the forms in which these printed works would appear. Leland fully understood the power of chorography. In the words of Cathy Shrank, ‘topography is a potent medium, drawing together past and present, memory and landscape. It elucidates the history inscribed in the terrain, imprinted in natural and artificial features jostling for attention in Leland’s texts.’6 Leland wanted to harness this medium in the service of his influential patrons and their royal master. Leland succumbed to insanity before he could complete these works, and few of his goals were realized until William Camden’s 1586 Britannia, a massive history of England, came near to achieving some of the tasks Leland had set. Nowell and Lambarde drew on Leland’s work, and in some ways Nowell’s place-name index in the Abecedarium and his maps of England and the British Isles, and Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description and Perambulation and maps for his own projects, bridge the gap between Leland and Camden. Such projects, textual descriptions and maps, are more distinct in modern thinking and terminology than they were in the sixteenth century. As Helgerson observes, any such work concerning itself with geography or local history, or making visual representations of

5

6

James P. Carley and Pierre Petitmengin, ‘Pre-Conquest Manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey and John Leland’s letter to Beatus Rhenanus Concerning a Lost Copy of Tertullian’s Works,’ Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004): 195–223. Carley has extensively researched Leland’s life and texts; see his ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of His Poetry,’ Studies in Philology 83 (1986): 1–50; ‘Four Poems in Praise of Erasmus,’ Erasmus in English 11 (1981): 26–27; ‘John Leland’s Cygnea Cantio: A Neglected Tudor River Poem,’ Humanistica Lovaniensia 32 (1983): 225–241; ‘The Manuscript Remains of John Leland, “The King’s Antiquary,”’ Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 2 (1985): 111–120. The provenance of Leland’s unpublished manuscripts has been traced by Oliver Harris, ‘“Motheaten, Mouldye, and Rotten”: The Early Custodial History and Dissemination of John Leland’s Manuscript Remains,’ Bodleian Library Record 5 (2005): 460–501. For Leland’s role in establishing the ‘literary history’ of England, see James Simpson, ‘Leland, Bale, and the Laborious Start of English Literary History 1350–1550,’ New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 213–235 and a later version of the same argument in Reform and Cultural Revolution (The Oxford English Literary History vol. 2 1350–1547, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–33. Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (2004; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 83.

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Somewhere in Time English locations, ‘whether a mapbook, prose discourse, or poem, was a “description,” a “survey” or a “chorography.”’7 Nowell and his contemporaries would probably have called his activities in cartography and in compiling his place-name index in the Abcedarium by the same terms and considered them very similar enterprises, for all that the current study will, for reasons of clarity and organization, treat them in separate chapters. This chapter, focusing on the place-name index, will describe some of Nowell’s sources and his treatment of them, especially the works of Leland. Comparing Nowell’s interests and treatment of his material with those of Leland, and of Lambarde, shows his keen interest in endowing the Anglo-Saxon period of English history with a solid—indeed, a physical— identity which could be drawn on to provide the present with the same concrete notion of ‘Englishness.’ THE ABCEDARIUM PLACE-NAME INDEX Nowell’s index is written on forty-six pages of the Abcedarium’s interleaves, although most pages are not completely filled. The codicology of the Abcedarium was explained in Chapter One, but it is worth reiterating the relevant points here. Generally, each page of the place-name index contains a block of entries all beginning with the same letter, and the pages are folded into the dictionary at the corresponding letter. These interleaves usually consist of a bifolium, resulting in two total leaves in each set, although one leaf is missing its twin. Two additional entries, ‘Cuatbrug’ and ‘Quinborow,’ are written in the bottom margins of the main dictionary’s printed pages, one on each side of the folio that contains the ‘Q’ section of the printed text. This is fortuitous, for it shows that Nowell himself placed these leaves in the Abcedarium, rather than Lambarde or another later owner. Nowell meant this index to accompany the lexicographic and legal explorations in his codex. Nowell’s handwriting in this series of notes is not as legible as it is in the legal glossary at the beginning of the Abcedarium; the place-name index was written more hastily and seems to have been preliminary notes for him to work into a tidier project at some future date. Nowell’s index was probably a first attempt at compiling some of the information on English place names and local history that he had marked in several of his books, underscoring words and phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, his Historia Anglorum, and Bede, and jotting notes and names into copies of Leland’s books. 7

Helgerson, Forms, 131.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England As James Rosier observes, the entries in the place-name index generally begin with an English place name in Early Modern English or Latin, followed by older versions, chiefly Old English or Welsh.8 After the name and its variants, Nowell gathers historical information about the place: where the name came from, who built a town there, who fortified it, when it was sacked, what battles have happened there, what kings are buried at the site. His place-name index usually compiles names and events from before the Conquest; although he sometimes notes events after 1066, most of the entries that do so are taken from the printed works of John Leland and even in those such comments are rare. Often at the end of the entry, he gives its source. The following, found on the recto of the leaf placed after the dictionary page A ANTE G is a typical entry: Æscesdune. Aescdune. Asshedune. Cenwalchus westsaxo in regnum restitutus dedit Edredo cognato et adiutori suo 300 villas iuxta Aescdune. gen. fol. 6. anno 648.9 [Ascesdune. Aescdune. Asshedune. Cenwalch the west saxon, restored to the kingship, gave to Edred his kinsman and supporter 300 estates near Aescdune. gen. folio 6, anno 648.]

Nowell gives alternate names, some of which seem to be his own ‘back formations’ from the current name, notes the ceding of the land to Edred, and tells where he found this information. Alternate names and historical events, especially the building or augmenting of towns and religious houses which left a permanent mark on the landscape, remain the focus of his index. The place-name index in the Abcedarium is, above all, preliminary. In some of the entries we see Nowell composing as he writes, for he often deletes words or phrases as he decides to alter the order in which he notes his information. He may at times have taken some of his notes from a list of entries he had already compiled. Sometimes he notes to himself his own conjectures, such as at ‘Cuatbrug. cwatbrug be Seferne ibi Dani anno 896. castrum condiderunt. opinor et verisimile esse Bridgenorth. vocat enim 8 9

James L. Rosier, ‘A New Old English Glossary: Nowell upon Huloet,’ Studia Neophilologica 49 (1977): 190. The interleaved folios will be referred to by the head note of the printed page that either precedes or follows them, depending on whether they are the first leaf of the bifolium or the second. Transcription conventions are as follows: Nowell’s imitation insular minuscule script is represented by bold type. Abbreviated letters are supplied in italics. Letters damaged or illegible in the original are supplied in square brackets if they can be deduced with reasonable certainty; if they cannot an asterisk is inserted. Corrections are supplied, very conservatively, in angle brackets.

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Somewhere in Time alius Brugg’ (Cuatbrug. Cwatbrug by the Severn. There the Danes built a castle in 896. And I think it likely that it is Bridgenorth, for another calls it Brugg.) We also see him begin to answer some of his own questions, as he does at the end of his entry for ‘Temesford’: ‘vide ne sit Chenesford. non est’ (see if it isn’t Chenesford. it isn’t). Similar notes to himself, not yet answered, appear periodically, such as the one at the entry for ‘Gauelford’: ‘vide num sit Gilford’ (see whether it is Gilford). Nowell was trying to compile a master list, placing all of his information in the same general place so he could begin to answer some of these questions for himself. He sporadically cross-references his entries; ‘Vide Northumbriam’ (see Northumbria) appears at the end of an entry on Bernicia, and a similar note referring the reader to ‘Bernicia’ appears at the end of one of his entries on Northumbria. A few entries begin to show Nowell’s conclusions about some of the mass of data he collected. The entry for ‘Henfeld’ observes that it was close to both the ‘muri pictorum’ (wall of the Picts) and to Hagustald; the next entry begins ‘Hagustald igitur non longe abfuit a muro pictorum’ (Therefore Hagustald was not far from the wall of the Picts), a conclusion that seems to follow directly from the previous entry rather than from Nowell’s source for the rest of the entry. He writes contradictory information from different sources, as when he writes ‘Mercii et Middle engli idem’ (Mercians and Middle Angles are the same) and then, two entries later, ‘Mercii et Middle Engli non sunt idem’ (Mercians and Middle Angles are not the same) with evidence from his source (Bede) to support this new conclusion. The content of these entries supports the conclusion, based on his rapid hand, that this was groundwork for a larger, tidier, and more complete project. Nowell’s entries often center on royal activities, which in some ways reflects the interests of his sources, although he still chose to include this information. He also observes origins or alterations of religious foundations, which were perhaps becoming less of an incendiary topic when he compiled his index than they had been for Leland, who wrote as and after they were dissolved and their buildings often destroyed or radically altered. Battles, especially between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, and military fortifications also provide much of the place-name index’s content; again, this may reflect the preoccupations of sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle but Nowell still felt these were worth copying out in his index. All-in-all, Nowell pays the most attention to moments in history that altered the physical location or social climate of a place (building of cities, establishment or relocation of religious houses or episcopal seats) and those that showcased the actions of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs and upper

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England nobility (their battles, their places of coronation and burial). The land and those who controlled it provide his main interest in the entries he jotted into the Abcedarium’s interleaved index. Nowell was aware of what Richard Utz calls ‘the awesome powers of place … in the maintenance of collective memory,’ but for Nowell, sorting through contradictory, rare, and linguistically challenging materials, the memory of the Anglo-Saxon past in the places of England, of ‘Anglo-Saxon England,’ first had to be assembled and created before it could be maintained.10 SOURCES OF THE ABCEDARIUM INDEX Rosier, whose article’s main focus was on the lexicographic notes and not the place-name index, states that Nowell’s place-name entries are ‘extracted largely from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,’ but, as we shall see, this is not the case.11 The items in the Abcedarium index seem to be roughly grouped with others from the same source; those from the source that Nowell labels ‘gen’ (his copy of Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, now San Marino, Huntington Library HM 26341) are often the first ones on the page, then entries from Bede, then the AngloSaxon Chronicle, then notes from other Latin chronicles and historical texts, transcribed in Nowell’s notebooks, then notes taken from John Leland’s works. It is often difficult, however, to identify the exact source for any note without referring back to the originals. For instance, the note on ‘Port’ on the recto of the folio after P ANTE L, ‘Port. pugnauit ibi Ethelhelm missus ab Ethelwulfo rege cum Danis a quibus in fugam versus et occisus est anno 837’ (Port. Here Ethelhelm, sent by Ethelwulf the king, fought with the Danes, by whom he was put to flight and slain. anno 837), probably stems from one of Nowell’s British Library notebooks, but the note itself gives us no clues to the source. The grouping of entries from the same source is not perfectly consistent throughout the Abcedarium index, however. On the folio after M ANTE A, we see a note from ‘gen,’ then from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, then from Bede, then another note from ‘gen,’ a note from Nowell’s notebook in London, British Library Additional 43708, Bede, ‘gen,’ and other Latin chronicles. It is hard to explain this, but perhaps Nowell, finding that his

10 11

Richard Utz, ‘Hic iacet Arthurus? Situating the Medieval King in English Renaissance Memory,’ Studies in Medievalism 15 (2006): 26. Rosier, ‘New Old English Glossary,’ 190.

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Somewhere in Time Latin sources referred back to Bede, looked up the reference in his own copy, leading to the Bede entries nested within blocks of items from other texts. On the whole, the ‘gen’ entries with folio numbers in the 20s often come after entries from Bede, suggesting that Nowell returned to that source after he had made most of his Bede entries. Ink colors offer no help; although often the first few entries on a page are written in a black ink, Nowell had switched to his usual dark brown even before he finished the entries from ‘gen.’ The remainder of the index appears to be in the same ink color, although some fading has occurred, and probably was written at about the same time. Nowell gave himself more than enough room for this project, leaving himself several blank leaves, and rarely filling the leaves on which he jotted notes. If he had known from the beginning exactly how many entries he would have, he would have been better able to estimate how much space the entire project would require. It may also be incomplete as it stands; he may have deliberately left himself extra leaves for notes from other histories such as Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which Nowell certainly read but does not seem to have used directly for this compilation. As the Abcedarium index was probably a step toward a larger, final index of place names, the complete version, had it ever come into being, would probably have consisted of much the same notes, consolidated and copied out neatly without large gaps. The Abcedarium index, in its intermediate status between Nowell’s original sources and his projected final version, shows how Nowell adapted and compiled his material. His endeavors proceeded from his primary sources and his first series of notes, such as the ones on folio 268 of one of his notebooks, now London, British Library Additional 43703. These are jotted hastily, with no organization or continuity, on a leaf at the end of the codex, and contain items such as ‘Euesham. Auonae habitatio opinor’ (Euesham. a residence on the Avon, I think) and ‘wigeraceaster. iterum wiðeraceaster. si non sit corruptum exemplar. Woorcestar’ (wigeraceaster. a second time wiðeraceaster, if the exemplar be not corrupted. Woorcestar). The Abcedarium index is a step toward a more organized final copy, which either has been lost, or, more probably, was not completed. The index also expands our knowledge of how he read and used some of his sources, and I will consider each one in turn. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a series of annals in Old English, was begun in the late ninth century during the reign of King Alfred the Great of Wessex,

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England and perhaps at his instigation. Several major monastic houses, such as the ones at Peterborough, copied out the text after it was formulated, then continued it at their own house in each year that passed. Much of the information about early Anglo-Saxon history came from Bede, but the Chronicle remains one of the best resources for the history of the Viking incursions in Britain, and indeed for late Anglo-Saxon history generally, as the annals become more descriptive and detailed in the years just before and contemporary with its composition.12 Nowell and the other Tudor antiquaries realized the value of the Chronicle immediately; it and the laws receive the most attention in his manuscripts, both in the number of copies he made and in the extent to which he annotated those copies.13 Nowell’s interaction with this text was both thorough and protracted, as his surviving notebooks testify. Nowell first began working with the Chronicle in 1562 as part of his transcript of London, British Library Cotton Otho B.xi.14 Nowell copied the entire manuscript, which included the G version of the Chronicle. Since Otho B.xi was largely destroyed in the Cottonian library fire, Nowell’s transcript, now London, British Library Additional MS 43703, is the main witness to G. As Robin Flower first remarked, Nowell and Lambarde were keenly interested in historical texts as sources for place names, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is probably the single best primary resource for Old English place names.15 Nowell realized this quickly. He and Lambarde underscored and noted place names as well as some other proper

12

13

14 15

For a basic introduction to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, see Donald G. Scragg, ‘Secular Prose,’ in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 274–279. For a discussion of the antiquaries’ use of the Chronicle, see two essays by Angelika Lutz: ‘Das Studium der Angelsächsischen Chronik im 16. Jarhhundert: Nowell und Joscelyn,’ Anglia 100 (1982): 301–356, and ‘The Study of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the Seventeenth Century and the Establishment of Old English Studies in the Universities,’ in The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 1–82. For Nowell’s work on Anglo-Saxon Law, see Patrick Wormald, ‘The Lambarde Problem: Eighty Years On,’ in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 237–275; and Rebecca Brackmann, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Old English Legal Glossary and His Study of Quadripartitus,’ in English Law before Magna Carta: Felix Liebermann and ‘Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen,’ ed. Stefan Jurasinski, Lisi Oliver, and Andrew Rabin (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), 251–272. Lutz, ‘Studium,’ 314. Robin Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935): 46–73; reprinted in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23. All quotations are from the 1990 reprint.

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Somewhere in Time nouns in the margins of every leaf in the Chronicle transcription in Add. 43703. He then proceeded to seek out other versions of the text. He had found them by 1565, when he made a partial transcription, now part of London, British Library Add. 43704, of the Peterborough Chronicle (version E) from Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Misc. 636, supplemented by extracts from the D and C versions of the Chronicle (London, British Library Cotton Tiberius B.iv and Cotton Tiberius B.i, respectively). As Lutz posits, it was as Nowell copied out these texts that he probably returned to his first transcription, Add. 43703, and collated and corrected its readings with alternative ones in these and one other version, London, British Library Cotton Tiberius A.vi.16 He had already jotted the place names in Add. 43703’s margins before this collation took place, perhaps even as he made his copy, as is evident from the way that the comments and corrections flow around them. Nowell also writes place names in the margin of Add. 43704; on the first few folios he does so in red ink, and after that in the same brown ink as the main copy-text. He also, at some point, overdrew the first letters of place names and personal names in red ink in 43703, further distinguishing the proper nouns in the text and in some of the marginalia. The red ink in Add. 43704 and Add. 43703 appears to match, so this infusion of color into Add. 43703 probably took place as he jotted his variants in the margin of his first transcript. Nowell also transcribed the annals 1043–1079 from Cotton Tiberius B.vi into another of his notebooks, now Canterbury, Cathedral Library MS Lit. E. 1. His transcription is tidier in this manuscript than in his Additional notebooks, although he occasionally strikes through a word or phrase, presumably because his eyes skipped ahead and he repeated some words or lines, then realized his error. Nowell notes a few place names in the margin, but on the whole the text is not marked up. It is worth mentioning as an aside that this small volume, with a few notes by Lambarde, William Somner, and a later hand, probably that of William Elstob,17 has not been completely described in Woodruff ’s catalogue of the Canterbury Library manuscripts, for Woodruff only mentions the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in his

16 17

Lutz, ‘Study,’ 78 n. 2. ‘Si comparetur Hoc Fragmentum cum Impressis haud modica Discrepantia apparebit’ (if this fragment is compared with the printed [versions] a discrepancy of hardly small things will appear) is written on fol. 1v, with a signature of ‘WE.’ On fol. 29 verso, the same hand has underscored ‘ellen stub’ in the text and copied it out in the left margin. Next to it is written ‘Elstob.’ William Elstob’s work on Old English law is the subject of Timothy Graham, ‘William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection,’ Poetica 73 (2010): 109–141.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England entry on Lit. E. 1 (and ascribes this notebook and Canterbury Cathedral Lit B. 2 to William Somner, an error first noticed and corrected by Carl Berkhout).18 Lit. E. 1, however, places the Chronicle alongside a series of other historical documents and notes: the Tribal Hidage, a Latin note on various national traits, a calculation of the English equivalent of 30 shekels of silver, an excerpt from Ælfric’s translation of Alcuin’s Interrogationes Sigeuulfi about the dimensions of Noah’s ark, and a discussion of the English equivalents for Latin coins, excerpted from Ælfric’s Grammar. All these items are copied from London, British Library Harley 3271.19 The last item in the manuscript is a charter relating to Worcester, Charter number 1185 in Sawyer (Kemble’s 952).20 Nowell recopied his transcriptions of the Chronicle from Add. 43703, Add. 43704 and Canterbury Cathedral Lit E. 1, unifying them into yet another of his notebooks, now part of London, British Library Cotton Domitian xviii. The contents of this notebook will be discussed fully in Chapter Six; the Chronicle text appears on folios 38 recto through 48 recto. Nowell does not follow the layout of his exemplars as closely in this version. He uses no red ink, nor does he place a paraph mark before the years, as the medieval manuscripts and his Additional transcripts do. The year numbers themselves are not in Roman numerals at the beginning of the annal, but in Arabic numerals in the margin. Angelika Lutz observes that the orthography in Nowell’s Domitian version of the Chronicle often imitates that of Additional 43703, so the latter was probably his base text.21 However, he at times seems to have excerpted annals from his sources, rather than copying them, a pattern he would repeat in several of his transcripts of Latin historical sources. If Nowell copied a source, and did not want it for linguistic purposes but for the information it could give, he often emended or abbreviated it. Neither the Chronicle copy in Canterbury Lit. E. 1 nor the edition in Domitian xviii contains the thorough marginal notations of place names that the two Additional manuscripts display in such 18

19

20 21

Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell: 1530–ca. 1570,’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 11 and 15. Neil Ker, in his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, states in his entry for Harley 3271 that the items are copied by Lambarde into the Canterbury manuscript. Lambarde copied the manuscript headings and the concluding tally of the Tribal Hidage. However, the main texts are in Nowell’s writing. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), s.v. ‘Harley 3271.’ The charter is on slightly smaller paper and might have been placed with the other items later, even after Lambarde inherited Nowell’s books. Lutz, ‘Studium,’ 334.

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Somewhere in Time abundance. Perhaps this is because he had already mined the text so carefully in his original transcripts, the ones that were visually closer to their medieval exempla, that he did not need to redo the notes in his ‘modern’ edition. Lutz concludes that Nowell’s interests were also changing: ‘Möglicherweise waren Nowells topographische Interessen zum Zeitpunkt der Entstehung dieser späten Abschriften von seinen historischen Interessen in den Hintergrund gedrängt worden.’22 Lutz is probably right, as Nowell hardly needed to keep proliferating his Chronicle copies if his sole interest was onomastics. The first two transcriptions filled that need adequately, especially when combined with his other sources such as Leland, Bede, and Anglo-Norman writers such as Henry of Huntingdon or John of Worcester. Even though he did not mark up his later Chronicle copies with regard to place names, however, his interest in onomastics and chorography remained steady, as the Abcedarium’s place-name index demonstrates. Nowell’s Abcedarium place-name entries from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are usually written in Old English, suggesting that, for this text at least, he tended to use the language of his source when compiling his notes. It would have been almost natural for him to translate into Latin since many of his other sources were in that language, and compile a more consistent index. We cannot know whether his final version would have been bilingual or ultimately translated into Latin to allow a broader readership. Nowell’s Old English Chronicle entries are often slightly altered from the original in order to formulate a more concise explanation of the events that most interested him. This sort of distilling of the most pertinent information from a source was a consistent part of his process of compiling—rarely does Nowell quote in full from any text. Wording was not entirely unimportant to him, however, particularly in the Old English entries. For example, at ‘Ippinesflete’ he writes ‘Ippinesflete. Hengist 7 horsa gefohton bretene on þam stade þe is gecwenemne yppinesfleot. Chron. Sax.’ (Ippinesflete. Hengist and Horsa fought the Britons at that place which is calle name[d] yppinesfleot. Chron. Sax). Nowell began to write ‘gecweden’ but corrected himself and instead wrote what should be ‘genemned.’ The words are nearly synonymous, and it is surprising that he altered his text. Whether he was copying from a list of entries, composing in Old English, or trying to excerpt from the Chronicle on the fly, the exact wording seems to be of unusual importance to him in this entry. Nowell’s interest in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle spans the years that he

22

Ibid., 338.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England devoted to Anglo-Saxon studies before his death on the Continent. From start to finish, he worked on transcribing, editing, and annotating this source of history. Given that Nowell’s concern for this text led him to correct even the wording in his Chronicle entries, and considering the tireless efforts he had made over the years in working with this text, it is startling to realize that fewer than two dozen of the 470 place-name index entries come from this source—not even 5% of the total, from a text that he worked with for years and had copied all or in part at least four times. This is only a fragment of the treasury of early names and place histories that the Chronicle contained. It would be less surprising if Nowell had included nothing from the Anglo-Saxon Chroncle, for then one could assume that he had created a separate index for it, to be combined later with the information on his Abcedarium interleaves. Nowell’s inclusion of such a paltry number of the abundant Old English names he had in front of him shows that, in contrast to his usual methods, here he does not value the oldest sources most. Such treatment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, particularly when contrasted to his heavy use of later texts such as the Historia Anglorum and Leland’s printed works, flies in the face of what his other notebooks would lead one to expect. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Nowell’s use of Bede for his place-name index is not as straightforward as his use of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, since Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica survived in two languages, and Nowell used both versions. Bede’s Latin Historia Ecclesiastica was written in the eighth century and soon achieved a wide dissemination both in Britain and on the Continent; it remains the chief written source for much of what we know about early Britain and the Germanic migrations. In the ninth century the Latin Historia was translated into Old English, producing a condensed, vernacular version.23 It has been assumed that the translation of Bede’s Historia took place as part of King Alfred the Great’s program for education in the closing years of the ninth century, but some scholars have noticed what appears to be evidence of Mercian origin for the Old English Bede; Dorothy Whitelock sums up 23

For general background on Bede’s methods and sources for his history, see D.P. Kirby, ‘Bede’s Native Sources for the Historia Ecclesiastica,’ in Anglo-Saxon History: Basic Readings, ed. David Pelteret (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 55–81; see also Joseph P. McGowan, ‘An Introduction to the Corpus of Anglo-Latin Literature,’ in Pulsiano and Treharne, eds., Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, especially 24–28. The most recent broad study of Bede is George Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009).

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Somewhere in Time the case both for and against an Alfredian origin and concludes that we cannot with certainty claim that the text was produced by scholars at Alfred’s court.24 Whether or not the Old English Bede stemmed directly from the translation projects of King Alfred the Great, it took its place among those ninth-century texts that imparted ‘learning’ even to those readers who did not know Latin. Nowell knew both the Old English and Latin versions of the Historia. Although no copy of the Latin Historia, either manuscript or print, has been found with Nowell’s ownership inscription, he must have had access to it.25 In the margins of the Old English Bede transcribed from Cotton Otho B.xi in British Library Additional 43703 he makes notes such as ‘Meuanias habet latinus codex’ (the Latin book has ‘Meuanias’) which show that he compared the two thoroughly.26 In fact, Robin Flower suggested that some marginal and interlinear sections of the Old English Bede in Additional 43703 were actually composed by Nowell, translating from the Latin text with the aid of the glossaries in Cotton Cleopatra A.iii.27 Nowell also consulted the Latin version if the Old English version was obviously deficient. At folio 60v, in Book III chapter 3, the Old English reads ‘Ond of þæm mynstre þi is nemened’ (And of that minster which is named), but no name is given. Nowell put a caret after the punctus and noted in the margin, ‘Hydestinatus habet latinum’ (the Latin has ‘Hydestinatus’). Some other marginal notes are in his hand and the ink color of these matches the ink of the main text; they might well have been copied out as Nowell worked on his transcription. These are not, for the most part, proper nouns, which suggests that Nowell used the Old English Bede chiefly for lexicographical study, comparing it with the Latin to increase his vocabulary. Certainly it is not annotated to highlight onomastics as the Add. 43703 copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is, but Nowell could hardly have missed its rich store of antique names. The Bede entries in the Abcedarium index mainly cluster after the entries from ‘gen’ (Huntingdon Library HM 26341) and before the ones 24

25 26 27

Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The Old English Bede,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1963): 57–90. Reprinted in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 227–260. All citations are to the 1990 edition. For a brief discussion of early modern printings of Bede’s works, see Brown, Companion to Bede, 125–126. Fol. 35r; Book II cap. 5. Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England,’ 26–27 n. 16; Carl Berkhout, however, doubts that these are actually Nowell’s own compositions; see the abstract of his Medieval Association of the Pacific paper on this topic, posted on his website, . I look forward to his planned article on the subject.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, at times Nowell nests notes from Bede at the end of an entry taken from HM 26341, as he does on the folio after D ANTE E recto: ‘Dinsestant. pugnauit Ethelfridus Northumber cum Scotis vicitque regem eorum Aedan. anno. gen. fol. 5o. inter. Bedæ habet Dægsastan’ (Dinsestant. Ethelfrid of Northumbria fought with the Scots and defeated their king Aedan in year. gen folio 5. the translation of Bede has Dægsastan). Nowell did not mind compiling information from two different sources under the same headword if he had room. Nowell’s notes in the Abcedarium index combine entries from the Latin and the Old English versions of Bede in the same block, so Nowell did not sit down with the Latin first, then the Old English (or vice versa). The series of entries from Bede on the folio after A ANTE V recto demonstrates how Nowell combined languages: Bernicia. Beornica mægþ. in ea fuerunt regiæ villæ ætgebrin uel ætgefrin et melmin ad Glene amnem vbi paulinus Baptizauit tempore Edwini regis. Vide Northumbriam. Bardeney. Beardanea monasterium Lindesseiæ prouinciæ de quo Beda. Barowe Monasterium Lindessiæ. wulfear wulfhere cynning seald ceadda bisceop fiftig hida landes in lindesse him mynster on to timbrianne in þæm stow þe Ber æt Bearwe is genemned. interp. Bedæ. Bar Barking. Ethelburga soror Erkenwaldi episcopi Londoniensis circa annum 670 construxit monasterium in eastseaxna mægþe si is nemned in Bercingum. Beda. [Bernicia. Beornica province; in it there were the royal villas Ætgebrin, or Ætgefrin, and Melmin by the Glene river where Paulinus baptized in the time of King Edwin. See Northumbria. Bardeney. Bardenea monastery in the province of Lindsey, about which Bede [wrote]. Barowe. Monastery in Lindsey. King Wulfhere gave to Bishop Ceadda fifty hides of land in Lindsey to build himself a minster in the place which is named at Bearwe. translation of Bede. Barking. Ethelburg, sister of Bishop Erkenwald of London, built a minster around the year 670 in the east saxon country which is named in Bercingum. Bede.]

Nowell’s first entry, ‘Bernicia,’ contains an Old English phrase, but the rest is in Latin. ‘Bardeney’ is an entirely Latin entry. ‘Barowe’ has a Latin phrase but is mostly in Old English. ‘Barking’ begins in Latin but ends in Old English, switching languages in mid-sentence, indeed in mid-phrase. Other entries from Bede show the same code-switching. This macaronic series of notes shows that Nowell did not work entirely through one text,

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Somewhere in Time then turn to the other, but rather was working from a list comparing them or else compared them as he wrote the index. Any such suggestion must be modified by the possibility that Nowell translated as he took notes. As the Chronicle entries show, Nowell was certainly capable of paraphrase. Nowell could have not only paraphrased but translated at other places in his index, reading in Latin and trying out his hand at composing in Old English—as he had perhaps done in his transcript of Otho B.xi. Furthermore, if he were looking at an Old English version, for him to paraphrase it in Latin would be almost natural. So the presence of either language in an entry cannot de facto identify his source as either the Latin or Old English version. As Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries are almost all in Old English, however, we can cautiously argue from analogy that if a Bede entry contains Old English it is probably drawn at least in part from the Old English Bede; if it is in Latin it probably draws on the Latin Historia. Approximately fifty of the Abcedarium’s entries draw on the Old English or Latin Bede. The Bede entries in both languages also fall short of what we might expect given the length of the Historia and importance of Bede’s text in Nowell’s work. Clearly Rosier’s assertion that the place-name index was mostly taken from Bede and the Chronicle does not hold up to examination, in sharp contrast to what one would expect from Nowell’s preoccupation with these texts (especially the Chronicle) in his other notebooks.28 The two sources combined provide fewer than seventy-five of the 470 entries in Nowell’s notebook. To understand why this is so requires an examination of the texts on which he drew most heavily, and a consideration of what those texts offered him that the Anglo-Saxon ones did not. Nowell’s Notebooks Some of the immediate sources of the Abcedarium place-name index were Nowell’s own notebooks on English history, compiled from Latin texts. Two of these he lists in his index as ‘gen’ and ‘gol.’ ‘Gol’ denotes the notebook now London, British Library, Additional 43708 and ‘gen’ is San Marino, Huntington Library HM 26341; the exact meaning of these abbreviations remains mysterious. Additional 43708 began as a compilation of French words and phrases; notes providing a structure for this lexicographic enterprise run in the top margins of the pages. However, Nowell

28

Rosier, ‘New Old English Glossary,’ 190.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England soon decided to use the book as a repository for his historical notes instead. The date ‘1562’ on folio 1v could have been the year when he began to use the book for his abortive French dictionary, or when he began to write his historical notes in it (or, perhaps, both). The Latin texts are arranged annalistically, and the British Library’s catalogue states that they are mostly drawn from the discussions of English history in Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, with additions from Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, the Gesta Siwardi, William of Malmesbury, and ‘John of Brompton’s’ Chronicle.29 The text in the notebook is written rapidly, but comparatively neatly, and it mostly fills the pages. Although Nowell occasionally jots a word or two in the margins, he does not have large amounts of inserted or altered text, nor does he leave blank spaces. It appears that the compilation and collation he made from his various sources took place originally in another notebook or series of notes, which were then copied into the Additional 43708 notebook. The book clearly served as the source of the notes labeled ‘gol’; the folio numbers, annal numbers, spellings, and often whole phrases of text match exactly. For instance, Nowell’s information about Whitby: ‘Streneshealh … Monasterium de Streneshalk id est Whitby ab Hilda constructum. gol. fol. 3. 30 millibus ab Eboraco’ (Streneshealh … Monastery of Streneshalk, that is, Whitby built by Hild. gol. fol. 3. 30 miles from York) matches Add. 43708, which reads ‘Streneshalk. id est whitby ab Hilda constructum. Anno 650’ (Streneshalk. that is Whitby, built by Hild in the year 650) on folio 3r. The notebook Nowell refers to as ‘gen,’ San Marino, Huntington Library HM 26341, provided over eighty notes for the Abcedarium index, more than any other single source. Folios 1 through 72v contain an abridged version of Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, and the ‘gen’ entries in the place-name index all come from this portion of the manuscript. The notebook also contains a copy of William the Conqueror’s ‘Articles,’ a genealogy of the Norman Dukes, a Chronicle of St. Albans, and a Gesta Abbatum of the same monastery.30 Nowell heavily annotated the section of HM 26341 containing the Historia Anglorum with personal and place

29

30

The British Museum Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts 1931–1935 (London: British Museum, 1967), 199–200. The chronicle attributed to ‘John of Brompton’ is found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 96, where it contains portions of the twelfthcentury Quadripartitus along with the chronicle’s main text. Nowell consulted several versions of the Quadripartitus for his legal studies, so that text may have been what drew his attention to Brompton’s chronicle; a few notes in his hand appear in this manuscript. C.W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (San Marino: The Library Press, 1989), 657–658.

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Somewhere in Time names. He also sporadically wrote years in the margin, trying to correlate dates in the tradition of anno gratiae with the regnal years Henry more often uses. Nowell’s main text appears to have been a copy of Henry’s fourth version, concluding in 1146 (although Nowell’s marginal calculations have it anno 1145), and containing the explicit ‘reformidantes fuerit.’31 Diana Greenway lists nine manuscripts of the fourth version.32 Of these, only three were probably still in England in the sixteenth century: London, British Library, Egerton MS 3668 (Eg), Glasgow, University Library, Hunter MS 288 (G), and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 327 (Lc). Greenway does not show variants from all these manuscripts in her edition, however, making it difficult to evaluate which one could have been Nowell’s source— and Nowell’s practice of abridging or altering sentences and omitting text as he copied makes this a dicey proposition anyway. However, G was owned and annotated by William Cecil, which makes it a good candidate. A further clue suggests that G could have been the manuscript Nowell used—a sixteenth-century hand on folio 1r of the Glasgow manuscript notes, ‘hec historia continuata est ad annum Christi .1145. 12 Regis Stephani’ (this history is continued up to the year of Christ 1145, [year] 12 of King Stephen). The handwriting does not appear to me to be Nowell’s (although in some respects it is very like his script), but his calculations might have been influenced by this note as his transcript also records the last year in the Historia as 1145. Henry’s Historia Anglorum, written at the request of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, is based on several earlier sources, but is the only contemporary English history of the reign of Stephen.33 As Greenway points out, Henry’s purpose in writing was to show that invasions happen as a punishment from God upon a disobedient people, although they eventually lead to a stronger king ruling over larger and larger territories.34 Greenway concludes, ‘The HA is the story of the unification of the English monarchy.’35 John Gillingham has taken Greenway’s conclusions even farther, arguing that as Henry altered his text in the 1140s he began to concern himself with 31

32 33

34 35

Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), lxviii–lxix; see also Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 193–201. HM 26341 fol. 72v. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, lxviii. For Henry’s use and adaptation of his sources, see Diana Greenway, ‘Authority, Convention and Observation in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum,’ AngloNorman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 18 (1995): 105–121. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, lx. Ibid.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England an ‘English’ identity for those who were raised or based in Britain, even though many of them were bi-lingual.36 Particularly the victory of the Battle of the Standard ‘led [Henry] to feel that the English were once again a people’ and his third and later versions of the Historia reflect this.37 Such a narrative would appeal greatly to Nowell, invested as he was in showing a unified English identity in his own century. History, abstracted into the Abcedarium index, had to serve the multiple needs of Nowell’s present, and history in the Historia Anglorum was predisposed for exactly the sort of claims that Nowell and his contemporaries were trying to make. Henry’s Historia had goals with which Nowell could sympathize, and it is perhaps for this reason that his transcription of this text provides more entries for his place-name index than any other single source. The entries that Nowell takes from HM 26341 mention the place name as it is found in the text, give an abbreviated version of the information that ‘gen’ provides about the place, and often add a year. A typical example can be found at ‘Bamborogh’ on the folio following A ANTE V, recto: Bamborogh olim Bebbanborogh. condita circa annum 547 ab Ida primo rege Northumbriæ qui eam circumvallauit primum sepe deinde muro. gen. fol. 4o [Bamborogh Formerly Bebbanborogh. Built around the year 547 by Ida, first king of Northumbria, who surrounded it first with a hedge, later with a wall. gen. folio 4.]

The information on folio 4r of HM 26341 has similar wording: ‘construxit autem Bebbanburgh quam circumdedit primum sepe deinde muro’ (he built Bebbanburgh which he surrounded first with a hedge, then with a wall); in the margin Nowell notes ‘anno gratiae 547.’ Sometimes, however, he adds to a ‘gen’ entry a bit of etymology or onomastic information that seems to be his own, as on the same page in the Abcedarium index at ‘Bedanford id est Bedford. Sax. Bedicanforda. vbi Ceaulinus rex Westsaxonum vicit Brytannos anno 571’ (Bedanford, that is, Bedford, Saxon Bedicanforda. Where Ceaulinus, King of the West Saxons defeated the Britons in the year 571). Even though Nowell does not label this as an 36

37

John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), especially 122–144. Paul Dalton places Henry’s nationalist concerns in a broader context of twelfth-century historical writing, especially in relation to Geoffrey of Monmouth, in ‘The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century,’ Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 688–712; see also R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially pp. 31–53. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 130.

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Somewhere in Time entry from ‘gen,’ it must be from the Huntington notebook, on folio 4, as it falls between two other entries from that location. On folio 4r, we find ‘Ceaulinus et frater Cutha pugnarunt cum Brytannis apud Bedanforda id est Bedford’ (Ceaulinus and his brother Cutha fought with the Britons at Bedanforda, that is, Bedford). However, ‘Bedicanforda’ in this entry appears to be Nowell’s own conjecture, or perhaps a memory of another version of this name he had seen. A less certain, although probable, contributor to Nowell’s place-name index is his copy, now London, British Library Additional 43705, of the Marianus Scotus–John of Worcester Chronicle. Inscriptions at the beginning of the book note that it was copied from an exemplar in the hands of the executors of Nicholas Wotton, who was Dean of Canterbury and York and an acquaintance of William Cecil’s.38 Since Wotton died in 1567, the year Nowell left for the Continent, presumably the book was still in Wotton’s own possession when Nowell borrowed it.39 At one point the note also stated that the copy was made in 1566, but this information was crossed through, perhaps by Lambarde whose hand appears consistently throughout the book. Nowell copied this book rapidly, judging from his hand. The arrangement of the book is annalistic, with the year first (written in Arabic numerals) then the Latin excerpt. It contains the years 743 through 1101. Nowell does not leave any references, however cryptic, to this manuscript by folio number, as he does to HM 26341 or Add. 43708. However, several of the annal numbers in place-name entries match those in Add. 43705, and have similarly spelled names and corresponding information. Probably Nowell mined this transcript as well when he compiled his place-name index. Nowell presumably excerpted several other Latin chronicles, or his copies of them, for his place-name index, such as Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Given what we have seen of Nowell’s habit of condensing his sources in his transcripts, often adding additional information in the margins, and then condensing further when he made his entries, and given the tendency of early histories to repeat each other, finding the exact source for most of these is difficult, and beyond the scope of this brief exploration. As more of Nowell’s notebooks are brought to light, perhaps someday sources can be identified for these remaining entries.

38

39

Wotton and Cecil traveled together to Scotland and were the main architects of the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560. See Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (1955; repr., The Bedford Historical Series, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 173–193. Michael Zell, ‘Wotton, Nicholas (c.1497–1567),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, online , Oxford University Press, June 25, 2005.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England John Leland’s Genethliacon, Cygnea Cantio, and Assertio Arturii The most important sources for the Abcedarium index are the printed works of John Leland, especially the poems Genethliacon Illustrissimi Eaduerdi and the Cygnea Cantio, published in 1543 and 1545 respectively. A prose treatise by Leland, the Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii, also seems to have gathered a few glances from Nowell. These texts all use historical place names in the body of the work and contain an index explaining to the reader what the places are; Leland’s indices may have not only provided information but guided Nowell’s interests and suggested his glossary’s form. Cathy Shrank has observed that most modern studies of Leland’s antiquarianism have focused on his unfinished and fragmentary notes, his Itinerary and Collectanea, which were preliminaries to the mammoth work of chorography proposed in the ‘Newe years gyfte’ letter to King Henry VIII (an ironic reversal, since Leland himself was keen on the importance of print, as discussed in Chapter One). The failure to bring about these (probably impossible) plans has led to a distorted view of Leland as an over-ambitious and exasperatingly disorganized scholar, but the masses of information in the printed poems and their indices tell a different story. As Shrank concludes: It is Leland’s poetry, much of which was published during his lifetime, not his private notes or works in progress, which represents a ‘finished product,’ however, and it should be remembered that, for his contemporaries, Leland was a poet as well as an antiquarian, with the cause of his eventual insanity attributed as much to his ‘Poëtical Wit’ as to his inability to undertake the ambitious projects promised in the ‘Newe yeares gyfte.’40

Leland was Nowell’s most important predecessor in antiquarian enterprises, as already discussed, and Nowell clearly recognized the significance of Leland’s published works and his goals in restoring history to English places. The patriotic aims of Leland’s work—supporting English imperial claims by refuting doubts about the historicity of King Arthur, employing humanist methods in nationalist projects to demonstrate to doubters at home and abroad the level of learning and refinement that the English could achieve, and using history in support of nationalism—were similar to the ends Nowell probably had for his own studies.41 Once we recognize this it becomes less surprising that entries from

40 41

Shrank, Writing the Nation, 69. This notion of Leland’s particular aims is indebted to Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation, 65–103.

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Somewhere in Time Leland make up the largest portion of the Abcedarium’s index, and are often more extensive than the rather skeletal extractions from other sources. All the entries that contain a full paragraph’s worth of information are from Leland, although other Leland entries are quite brief. The place-name entries Nowell collects from Leland’s appendices share common features that can often distinguish them from the entries he takes from medieval texts. Only entries from Leland give information on Welsh etymology or names, and only Leland entries cite other sources. If the information Nowell writes about a place mentions Ptolemy (or gives a name in Greek without a citation), Asser, Tacitus, or Antoninus, the entry was drawn from Leland. The Leland entries are also last on any folio on which they appear. First in Nowell’s index come entries from Leland’s Genethliacon. As the title of the Genethliacon suggests, the poem was written in honor of the birth of Prince Edward (later Edward VI). Leland probably wrote this poem in 1537 when Edward was born, and reworked it for the prince’s sixth birthday in 1543, the year the poem was published. The poem proper of the Genethliacon, describing the celebrations honoring Edward’s birth, was ‘now enriched with the topography of Cornwall, Wales, and Cheshire, the three domains to which the young prince’s titles referred.’42 The index lists place names alphabetically by the antique versions used in the poem, then gives their etymology and historical facts about them (much as Nowell’s own Abcedarium index does). All of Leland’s printed indices would follow this pattern, and, given the similarity between them, Leland’s works may have inspired Nowell’s own index. Coming two years after the Genethliacon, Leland’s Cygnea Cantio was his poetic magnum opus. For him it ‘stood in some sense … as a crowning achievement in his career of topographical and historical investigation, an elegant glove to throw down before the vicious backbiters by whom he was surrounded.’43 It was also his crowning artistic achievement, the longest poem he wrote. However, his authorial attribution notes ‘avtore ioanne lelando antiqvario’ not ‘ioanne lelando poeta.’ Like the Genethliacon, the Cygnea Cantio’s origin lies in Leland’s antiquarianism, not just his poetic Muse and his desire to praise Henry VIII. However strange it may seem to modern scholars, whose sights are aimed at the prose monograph or article, Leland saw nothing odd about presenting the results of his research in the form of poems with appendices. As Trevor Ross comments: 42 43

John Chandler, ‘Introduction,’ in Leland, John Leland’s Itinerary, xiv. Carley, ‘John Leland’s Cygnea Cantio,’ 226.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Leland’s belief that the writings of the English past constitute enduring monuments of learning stems from his fervent patriotism but equally from a concern his own poetry [sic], which he wrote throughout his career. Leland’s love of antiquities carries with it a high emotional investment, as he must prove their lastingness to confirm the immortalizing power of his own verse.44

The idea that poetry could convey immortality to its subjects and authors is common in early modern literature, but in Leland’s use of antique names, the reverse is also true—the immortal places of England make his poetry timeless, reaching both into the past in its use of old names, the present as it celebrates his prince, and the future as he imagines his poetry being read by later generations.45 Like the Genethliacon, Cygnea Cantio is organized topographically; it describes at length the courses and principal towns of the Thames in the voice of a swan traveling its length. In this poem, dedicated to King Henry VIII, Leland again uses only historical names, calling the inhabitants of Berkshire ‘Atrebantes,’ and so forth. The Cygnea Cantio and the Genethliacon attempt to provide a timeless space for the reader, as England’s history and its present mesh. The poems for the current king claim the past for him as well, depicting not only the physical land but its accompanying history under his domination. After the poem proper, Leland closes the Cygnea Cantio with a sevenline ‘Augurium,’ or ‘Prophecy,’ which claims that England’s present is also the fulfillment of the classical past: Vergilius cecinit celeberrimus ille poeta. Aspice bis senos laetanteis agmine cygnos. Vos decet augurium uatis pernoscere magni Sortis et euentum felicem amplectier ulnis. Qui modo bisseni repetunt loca cognita Cygni Candida Musarum referunt insignia secum, Isidis inque uado statuent sua regna perennes.46 [Virgil, that most famous poet, sang: ‘Behold, the twelve swans in a jubilant line.’47 It is fitting for you to know well the prophecy of the great seer of fate [i.e., Virgil] and embrace the happy outcome. The twelve swans who now return to the place they know bring back with them the bright

44 45 46 47

Trevor Ross, ‘Dissolution and the Making of the English Literary Canon,’ Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 26 (1991): 65. Carley describes Leland’s ‘faith in the immortality of poetry’ as a recurring theme in his poetry. ‘John Leland in Paris,’ 8–9. Cygnea Cantio, sig. Eiiir. Aeneid, I.393.

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Somewhere in Time emblems of the Muses, and in the channels of the Isis they establish their perpetual kingdom.]

In the episode from the Aeneid from which Leland quotes, Venus tells Aeneas to look at twelve flying swans, scattered by a diving eagle but soon back in their flock, as a sign that his ships are safe. Leland alludes to this momentarily divisive event that ends with renewed harmony to reassure his readers that the upheaval in England’s political situation after the break with Rome would end in a similar fashion, with a new, stronger unity of the English people under their king. The reader should embrace the present, uncomfortable as it might seem, as it was prophesied by Virgil. The swans, classical tokens of good luck or fate, will continue in their power in the river running through the capital, as England fulfils the ‘prophecy’ of classical culture’s greatest poet.48 England’s history and its present merge in his text—for Leland, it should be remembered, sincerely believed that Britain was first founded by descendants of the Trojans. In Leland’s view, Virgil’s prophecy applied as much to contemporary England as to Aeneas. Pulling the past into the present, physically in its tie to locality and also by breaking down temporality through prophetic modes of writing, remains key to Leland’s poetry and his ideas about British origins. Admittedly, this all makes for a potentially incomprehensible poem. Once again, Leland supports his verse with a mass of appendices, explaining the ancient names and events referred to in the text. His appendices begin with a list of authors from whom he has gathered his facts on the various places and their role in English history. Then follows the index of names, which covers 108 pages and is printed in a more compact font than the poem or any of its prefatory materials. Even excluding the fifteenpage essay on ‘Britannia’ in which Leland marshals his evidence for the Trojan origin of the British people, Leland’s index contains a vast amount of information, and it is no surprise that Nowell consulted such an extensive resource for his own place-name index. The last of Leland’s works mentioned in Nowell’s index is the prose treatise Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii, published in 1544. The only one of Leland’s published works to be printed in modern times, it appears in the Early English Text Society volume 119 (1925) along with Richard Robinson’s 1582 English translation. The text defends the historicity of King Arthur, called into doubt by Polydore Vergil, an Italian historian 48

Carley also observes Leland’s frequent allusions to Virgil, and comments that they also align Leland in a tradition of praise poetry extending back to the imperial Roman past. ‘John Leland’s Cygnea Cantio,’ 229.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England working in England who published a history of England in 1534. The Assertio, like Leland’s poetic works, was printed with an index of ancient place names. Few scholars have regarded the Assertio except as a historical curiosity. Leland, after all, was on the wrong side in this debate. Mead’s comment in his introduction to the EETS volume gives a decent summary of the overall view: ‘the modern student … will doubtless not take too seriously the “proofs” there presented, many of which are only a proof of the author’s inability to weigh evidence.’49 However, F.J. Levy, in a more positive account of Leland’s work, notes that ‘an examination of their [Leland’s and Polydore Vergil’s] respective methods demonstrates that Leland’s was that of the humanist critics of sources … and was essentially the better of the two.’50 Levy concludes, ‘quite rightly, Leland sought the oldest evidence he could find; his error lay in refusing to believe that the men of the twelfth century might have forged that evidence.’51 Whether truth is the best rule by which to measure sixteenth-century historiography, or whether, as Levy suggests, Leland’s methods are admirable even though his conclusions are flawed, is a matter perhaps best left to the historians themselves. Between them, Nowell and Lambarde owned all of Leland’s printed works. Both of their hands appear in a volume of the Genethliacon which belonged to Lambarde (his ownership inscription is dated 1564).52 Nowell and Lambarde each owned the Cygnea Cantio; Nowell attached to his copy of the swan poem a full transcription of the Genethliacon’s index, so he may not have owned his own copy of the Genethliacon. Perhaps Nowell read through Lambarde’s Genethliacon, decided it was useful enough for him to want at least the appendix for himself, and then copied the appendix out and attached it to his copy of the Cygnea Cantio. This transcription, as discussed in Chapter One, has a watermark that matches the one on most of 49

50 51 52

John Leland, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England by Christopher Middleton, to Which is Added The Assertion of King Arthure, Translated by Richard Robinson from Leland’s Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii, Together with the Latin Original, ed. William Edward Mead (1925; repr. London: Early English Text Society, 1971), ix. F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; repr. Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts 15, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 131. Ibid. London, British Library Shelfmark c.95c.15. Lambarde’s name and the year 1564 appear on the title page, along with a Greek inscription. In a darker ink, the ex libris ‘weccaþ þine leohtfæt’ has been written, perhaps slightly later than the initial ownership inscription. Carl Berkhout believes this inscription, roughly translated ‘Look to the lamp,’ is based on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in the book of Matthew and observes that it ‘represents quite well the admirable but imperfect state of Lambarde’s early knowledge of Old English.’ Berkhout, ‘William Lambarde’s Old English Ex Libris,’ Notes and Queries 229 (1984): 297.

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Somewhere in Time the leaves of the Abcedarium index. The common stock of paper for both the copy of Leland’s index and Nowell’s own closely links Leland’s work with Nowell’s undertaking. Nowell read carefully through Lambarde’s copy of Genethliacon, writing out in the margins next to the poem the modern versions of the ancient place name that Leland uses. Thus, ‘Carleion’ is written next to ‘Legionis’ on folio 8r; ‘Chester’ alongside ‘Duana’ on folio 13v, and so on.53 Although Nowell and Lambarde also wrote modern place names in the index to the poem, here the great majority of notes are in Lambarde’s hand, perhaps because Nowell had already copied out the entire thing. Nowell similarly annotated the index in the Cygnea Cantio, although in the case of his copy of Cygnea Cantio he does not annotate the poem itself, only the commentary. As the Cygnea Cantio is the larger poem, it has a more detailed and inclusive index. Nowell’s notes in the margins again mostly write out the modern place names mentioned in the entries. Nowell’s copy of the Assertio, if he owned one, has not been identified. Lambarde’s copy remains, however, bound in vellum with the Genethliacon and Cygnea Cantio. The codex has been given folio numbers, presumably by Lambarde, and the Assertio proper begins on folio 124r. Lambarde annotates it in much the same way that he and Nowell annotated Leland’s poetic works. He jots place names in the margins of the text proper, as well as the names of a few chronicles or authors. In the index at the back of the book, he writes modern versions of the names next to Leland’s entries, which are as usual alphabetized under the antique names Leland has used in the text (although in the Assertio, Leland usually goes on to say what the modern name of the place is in the main part of the book, unlike his poetry which keeps sending the reader to the index). When Nowell began to compile his place-name index in the Abcedarium, he made certain that Leland’s exploration of onomastics did not go unrepresented. On the whole, Nowell’s notes from Leland’s works are a distillation of Leland’s, a practice consistent with his other entries in the index—although many of the notes drawn from Leland are still quite long. Nowell often takes whole phrases from Leland’s indices, but shortens the sentences and slightly changes the grammar. Leland’s lists supplied him with a great deal of information about ancient versions of the names, especially Welsh ones. Nowell, however, used modern versions of the place names as his headwords, while Leland used the ancient versions that his

53

Nowell wrote folio numbers in his copy of the Cygnea, and Lambarde’s copies of Leland’s work are also so numbered; I use these numbers, rather than the printer’s folio signatures, when referring to their marginalia.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England readers encountered in his poems. Nowell’s ‘Caerneruon. id est Caer in arvon id est contra monam sita. olim Caer Segent a Segontio flumine. Segontium anton. lel. gen.’ (Caerneruon, that is, Caer in arvon, that is, situated across from Mona. Formerly Caer Segent, from the river Segent. Segontium. anton. lel. gen.) has as its source Leland’s entry on ‘Aruona’ in the Genethliacon which gives the same ‘British’ name and etymology and cites the Antonine Itinerary (‘anton’), but Leland’s entry does not mention the contemporary name, ‘Caernervon.’ Conversely, the Abcedarium entries sometimes do not include the place name that served as Leland’s headword. For instance, Nowell’s ‘Flintshire. Bryt. Tegengle id est bellus angulus. leland. gen.’ (Flintshire. Welsh Tegengle, that is, charming nook. leland. gen) is taken from Leland’s note in the Genethliacon ‘Angulia Britannicè Teglengle, id est bellus angulus. Saxonicè Flinteshire’ (Angulia in Welsh Tegengle, that is charming nook. in Saxon, Flintshire.)54 Nowell does not mention ‘Angulia’ as a variant of ‘bellus angulus,’ although it is the headword in Leland’s index. Nor in this instance does he write ‘Flintshire’ in Anglo-Saxon characters and spelling (Flintscir), as he does in some other entries. As one would expect, much information in the Cygnea is replicated from the Genethliacon; at times, when Nowell only labels an Abcedarium entry ‘lel.’ one cannot tell which of his two sources he used for that note. Fortunately, he is often more specific. The Assertio is cited as ‘lel. ass.’ at ‘Aile’ and as ‘lel. as.’ at one of the ‘Glastonburie’ entries. ‘Lel. gen’ (not to be confused with a simple ‘gen’ designating Huntington 26341) or ‘lel. cig’ clarify the source of other entries. A typical example of one of Nowell’s Leland entries is ‘Lindesferne’ on the verso of the folio after L ANTE E: Lindesferne. Holi Iland a Brytanis dicta ynnis Medicante nomen recentius habuit a Lindi flumine quod in coniuncto littore in mare irrumpit. Dani vastant insulam Ealdulphus fugit cum cum steterat episcopatus 141 anno Christi 875. fugit Eal Eardulphus episcopus cum reliquiis diui Cuthberti. lel. cig. [Lindesfarne. Holy Iland. Called by the British ynnis Medicante. It took its more recent name from the Lind river that bursts into the sea at the adjoining shore. The Danes lay waste to the island Ealdulphus fled with when the bishopric had stood for 141 years. in the year of Christ 875. Bishop Eal Eardulphus fled with the relics of St. Cuthbert.]

Nowell took this information from Leland’s entry ‘Dunolmensis,’ which in the Cygnea Cantio’s index runs for some four pages. The deletion marks

54

Cygnea Cantio, sig. Ciir.

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Somewhere in Time show that, for the entries taken from Leland, Nowell was condensing them as he wrote. Since the information about Eardulph is on the next page after the note about the Danes and his eyes could not have skipped that far, this deletion reveals a change of mind instead of a mechanical copying error. Nowell was trying to decide as he wrote what information he wanted to cull, and in what order, from Leland’s discussion. Sometimes Nowell even borrows first person pronouns from Leland, leading to some confusion over the ultimate source of some of the speculation in Nowell’s index. Nowell’s entry on ‘Brytannia prima’ states, ‘Brytannia prima Anglia. Brytannia secunda Scotia vt ego coniicio de qua diuisione scribunt Sextus Ruffus et vibius sequester hinc Brytanniæ pluraliter dicitur lel. gen.’ (Brytannia the first, Anglia. Brytannia the second, Scotland, as I conjecture. Sextus Ruffus and Vibius Sequester wrote about this division, from which Brytanniæ is said in the plural). It sounds as if Nowell is doing the guesswork here, but the ‘ego’ in Nowell’s entry arises from his paraphrase of Leland’s statement, not Nowell’s own conjecture. In the entry for ‘Britannia prima’ in the glossary of the Genethliacon, Leland states ‘Britannia prima, ut ego coniecturam facio, ea fuit, quæ nunc Anglia. Britannia uero secunda quæ modo Scotia’ (Britannia the first, as I make a guess, was that which is now England. Truly Britannia the second was that which is presently Scotland). Nowell similarly adopts the first person from Leland in other entries. If Nowell means to distinguish his ideas from Leland, he mentions Leland’s argument, then his own: ‘Quinborow. Cuningsborowe dici debere ait Lelandus ego potius Cwenesburh. castrum instaurauit Edwardus Windesoramus. dein Henricus 8’ (Quinborow. Leland says it ought to be called Cuningsborowe, I prefer Cwensburh. Edward of Windsor restored the castle, then Henry the 8th). Here, ‘ego’ seems to be Nowell himself. However, any Leland entry in which he does not first specify in this way who ‘ego’ could be is probably taken directly from Leland. This authorial merger is interesting. Nowell’s adoption of the ‘I’ from Leland’s index suggests that, in some ways, he saw himself and his predecessor as continuous, if not identical. Even if the extensive notes from Leland did not already indicate that Nowell found him ideologically appealing as well as informative, the melding of Nowell’s opinions with those of Leland argues that, in his mind, they also had highly compatible goals and aims for their chorographic projects. All three of Leland’s printed works participate deliberately in Tudor propaganda, asserting the truth of the Trojan origins of Britain and King Arthur, Henry VIII’s (and Elizabeth I’s) mythic ancestor. He wanted to show that England and its monarchy had

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England a glorious history, about which English subjects could feel affection and loyalty, and he wanted that history woven into the very landscape of the island. Leland’s works, taken all together, comprise the majority of the Abcedarium’s place-name index. Nowell no doubt appreciated Leland’s linguistic gifts and his on-site research, but he cannot have been ignorant of Leland’s motives when he drew so heavily on his predecessor’s work. Yet Nowell’s interests did not match Leland’s perfectly. Leland sought to recover primarily the Romano-Celtic past of Britain, and claim that English history was British history. To do this, he had to co-opt British identity in such a way that Cornwall, Wales, and sometimes Scotland were folded into an ‘English’ identity. What was British and what was English merged into each other. Leland was neither unique nor pioneering in his deployment of what Alan MacColl calls ‘the protean and contingent nature of the terms “Britain” and “British.”’55 However, as Leland sought to establish an English identity extending back to Romano-Celtic Britain, the period after the Germanic migrations and before the Conquest gave him some anxiety, due to the Anglo-Saxons’ negative portrayal in writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Shrank describes his unsuccessful attempt to negotiate this by dividing the Germanic inhabitants of Britain into ‘good’ Angles and ‘bad’ Saxons.56 This separation attached ‘barbarity’ to the Saxons, ‘protecting the English and Angles (the “Angli”) from accusations of incivility and ignorance.’57 Leland fits well with Philip Schwyzer’s argument that ‘national consciousness in Tudor England was largely “British” rather than narrowly “English” in its content and character’ and that the Anglo-Saxons were not given much attention from those who sought to form a sense of Englishness in the sixteenth century.58 Nowell, on the other hand, does not fit this pattern. Although he draws heavily on Leland’s indices, his notes cover most thoroughly the period between the advent of Hengest and Horsa and the coming of the Normans, and he seems troubled by no perception of the Anglo-Saxons as rude and uncultured. His main goal seems to have been to make the time of their occu-

55

56 57 58

Alan MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England,’ Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 269. For a complementary analysis of how English identity built itself as a British identity see Robin Frame, ‘The Wider World,’ Journal of Literary History 38: A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (2006): 435–453. Shrank, Writing the Nation, 73. Ibid. Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3.

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Somewhere in Time pancy into the quintessentially ‘English’ period of history, a period that could be documented much more fully than Romano-Celtic Britain with its elusive figures such as King Arthur. Nowell notes Leland’s definition of ‘Britannia’ as encompassing all parts of the island, and he includes some of the places of Wales in his entries (almost all taken from Leland’s writing), but evinces no sign that studying later ‘English’ history after the departure of the Romans makes him uneasy. Nowell, unlike Leland, had no difficulty merging British identity with English identity even while he focused on the Anglo-Saxon period of history. ENGLAND IN THE ABCEDARIUM The evidence of Nowell’s sources shows that the place-name index was a relatively late endeavor in his studies, and for at least part of that time he and Lambarde worked in parallel on their chorographic texts. Nowell’s place-name index must have been begun after 1565, the year he acquired the Abcedarium; if Add. 43705 ought to be dated 1566, it was begun after that. The Abcedarium list can be placed in the last two or three years of Nowell’s time in England. The sequence of events probably ran thus: Nowell began reading and excerpting histories in the early to mid 1560s, as Additional 43703 and 43708 are dated 1562; in 1564, Lambarde bought a copy of Leland’s Genethliacon and loaned it to his friend; Nowell found the place-name index so useful that he transcribed it from Lambarde’s copy, appending it to the Cygnea Cantio which he had acquired for himself in 1561. Perhaps Leland’s indices gave him the inspiration to begin an alphabetical list of his own, compiling some of the information from his transcriptions; perhaps he had already had this idea but seeing Leland’s appendices spurred him to extra effort. Nowell employed a range of sources in compiling the ancient versions of English names and the events that had occurred in the places to which they referred. Although he focuses mainly on the Anglo-Saxon period, his place-name index does not draw as heavily on Anglo-Saxon sources as one might expect. Even though Nowell could read the Old English Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and was interested enough in the latter text to make three copies of it and produce a manuscript edition, he gives more space in this index to the works of Leland and Latin chronicles—particularly those that seem to have nationalist potential. He was guided not only by his humanist desire for multiple sources, but also by his aims for the final project towards which the placename index would have contributed, probably some kind of master list of

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England English places and their role in history, particularly pre-Conquest history. Henry of Huntingdon and, especially, Leland offered Nowell a vision of history that showed the progressive unification of England and the solidifying of national identity. F.J. Levy notes that the drive toward local research ‘went further than explaining a county to the world at large: it was intended to explain the area to the very residents of it.’59 While it does so, it creates, rather than simply reflects, a commonality among its readers. It pulls the readers into a status of ‘residents’ that it largely fashions, by detailing the area that, it claims, defines them. Localist tendencies could easily pull against nationalism, encouraging English subjects to view themselves as Kentishmen, say, or Yorkshiremen first, rather than Englishmen. However, the affective ties to one’s town could serve the cause of nationalism, too, if they were organized under the umbrella of ‘England’ rather than of more local categories. Nowell perhaps recognized this, for his index has no geographic organization. He alphabetized his place names and folded them into a dictionary, rather than organizing them by county and placing them with his maps. In his index, Leeds is closer to London than to York; London nearer Lindisfarne than Greenwich. Nor does he usually even mention the modern-day location of the place he discusses, its current county or its relationship to other cities. Nowell’s decision is worth pausing over. Judith Anderson’s observation that alphabetizing reifies words and undermines their relationship with the signified they represent applies, I think, to Nowell’s place-name index.60 Separating the names of places from their environment and making those words into things could undermine their ability to stimulate local, as opposed to national, affection. Although by this time alphabetizing was a common organizational scheme for dictionaries (such as the Abcedarium), later chorographical writers would not follow this method in the works they published. The full impact of Nowell’s structure shows up most plainly when his work is juxtaposed with that of these other chorographers, all of whom organized their published works around geographic principles. When Lambarde writes about Kent in his Perambulation, he treats the cities as one would arrive at them, rather than alphabetically. Camden’s Britannia discusses Britain county-by-county. Nowell, in contrast, alphabetizes the British (and mostly English) locations. This is especially odd given his interest in Anglo-Saxon history; for in most of the period that was his main 59 60

Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 140. Judith Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2.

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Somewhere in Time focus, the area of contemporary England consisted of several kingdoms and was not a single political unit. Here, once again, Nowell’s approach seems to echo a goal of Leland’s, whose published and unpublished works, even though they often follow a geographic organization, ‘[bind] England and its disparate territories into one unit, emphasizing connections between the regions through which he travels.’61 Nowell goes even farther in his place-name index, denying the territories their own identity as all their locations are placed together in the category of ‘Britain.’ Nowell’s nationalism out-Lelands Leland, letting his focus on national identity dictate not only the sources he employs most consistently but the form of his compilation. That compilation’s emphasis on events in the period of history after the Germanic migrations and before the Norman Conquest imposes a united ‘England’ on the past as well as the present, during the time period that Nowell wanted to show as foundational to his contemporary English identity. However, even though Nowell shared Leland’s practice of chorography in the service of nationalism, his avenues of study and its forms were not identical to those of Leland. Nor were they identical to those of Lambarde, with whom Nowell worked closely in the 1560s, sharing books for their chorographic projects. Lambarde, although he began by compiling an alphabetical list similar to Nowell’s, at some point abandoned that structure and instead organized his work geographically. By the time Lambarde began his Perambulation of Kent he had changed his entire organizational strategy. Examining Lambarde’s works as they evolved through the 1570s in the light of Nowell’s own project shows how Lambarde’s research, still serving the cause of English nationalism, became more overtly related to religious issues. It also shows how strikingly Nowell differs from Lambarde and all the later chorographers of the sixteenth century, and the next chapter will chart these changes in form in Lambarde’s chorographies.

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Shrank, Writing the Nation, 86.

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Chapter 5 PUTTING THE PAST IN PLACE: LAMBARDE’S ALPHABETICAL DESCRIPTION AND PERAMBULATION OF KENT

W

RITING ABOUT PLACES in early modern England was more than just a fad. Maps, perambulations, county and city histories, and poetic or prosaic depictions of various locales came steadily from the presses and circulated in manuscript; not everyone had the linguistic or cartographic training to produce these chorographic words, but they were consumed eagerly by wide numbers. Several early modern hands other than Nowell’s and Lambarde’s can be found in some of Nowell’s manuscripts, noting place names in the margins. This fascination with place had been recognized by scholars (if not by the editors of student anthologies, which almost never include chorographic works) even before Richard Helgerson pointed out that modern genre distinctions had partially hidden the interrelations between texts seen as similar in the Renaissance and showed that the chorographic phenomenon was even more widespread than had been realized.1 For instance, Lambarde had been known as ‘The Perambulator’ for years, and this moniker was sufficiently well circulated for Wilbur Dunkel to include it in a chapter title in his 1965 biography of Lambarde without explanation or attribution.2 Helgerson’s foundational study illuminates the relationships between genres that modern scholars had viewed as separate, but within this choro-

1 2

Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 131. Wilbur Dunkel, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Jurist 1536–1601 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965), Chapter 4: ‘“The Perambulator” and Archbishop Parker,’ 37–59.

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Putting the Past in Place graphic mode, individual works still functioned differently. Ultimately Nowell, Lambarde, and later authors such as Camden wrote chorography for different purposes, although some of the reasons that such studies stayed popular persisted throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth. Legal motivations of place-name studies remained steady, for instance—if one had to establish ownership of property one needed to understand names in wills or in charters. But the drive to reconstruct or research older versions of names, and to explain the etymology and development of extant names, went beyond legal research. Victor Watts has argued that the impulse generally stemmed from a desire to establish emotional ties with one’s home, ‘the need not just to name effectively, but affectively.’3 However, Watt’s observation raises the question of what this affection encompassed, in etymological works and in all of the chorographic mode of writing. Was it simply love of one’s town, or could it be for the county? Was it just the county, or the totality of England? Was it the monarch who ruled the land or the land itself? If chorography stemmed from a desire to discover ‘England,’ then the needs of individual writers dictated what, exactly, would be revealed about it. Helgerson has drawn our attention to the interplay of competing loyalties for producers and readers or viewers of maps and texts that described ‘Britain,’ ‘England,’ or individual locations within the larger categories.4 Helgerson primarily traces the rising tension between loyalty to the land itself and loyalty to the monarchy, explaining why in Jacobean England these undertakings were viewed with suspicion and eventually antagonism by the crown. This rift did not arise in earlier works, as ‘Britannia and the British monarch [were] so firmly identified with one another as to be virtually interchangeable through most of Elizabeth’s reign. …’5 Helgerson names Lambarde as a participant in this mentality, writing with a ‘national vision’ in support of his queen.6 However, even Lambarde has moments that work against nationalism and royalism, as ‘local particularity, individual autonomy, accustomed privilege, and resistance to royal encroachment—these, even in the mind of so ardent a supporter of the queen as Lambarde, belonged together.’7 3

4 5 6 7

Victor Watts, ‘English Place-Names in the Sixteenth Century: The Search for Identity’ in Sixteenth-Century Identities, ed. A.J. Piesse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 51. Helgerson, Forms, especially chapter 3, ‘The Land Speaks,’ 105–147. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 137.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Even though Elizabethan chorography lacked the strong antagonisms between crown and land that Helgerson traces in Jacobean works, these competing pressures between ‘national vision’ and ‘local particularity’ would be navigated differently by authors with varying aims for their projects. This chapter will examine how these forces played out in Lambarde’s works, as he moved from a structure that highlighted British identity to one that had more opportunity for localism—although Lambarde always tried to find some middle way between the two. The reason for Lambarde’s shift, which contrasts with the structural decisions Nowell made in his Abcedarium index, did not simply arise from a higher valuation of local identity over national loyalty. Instead, the shift in Lambarde’s chorographical works stems from his developing concern with fostering a Protestant identity and documenting the triumph of the monarchy over Catholicism. Lambarde embraces the particularity of place as evidence for this argument, which ties together monarchy, religion, and land. He reintegrates Nowell’s Anglo-Saxon studies with the work of men such as Matthew Parker, although Lambarde’s works are not, on the surface, about religion.8 Lambarde ultimately merged polemics and antiquarian chorography, and his interest in doing so governed the form of his later works. LAMBARDE’S ALPHABETICAL DESCRIPTION Lambarde’s Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum et Historicum, also titled the Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales, with an Account of the Most Memorable Events that have Distinguished Them, was underway in 1567 and Lambarde continued working on it until at least 1577; it was never finished.9 The Alphabetical Description presents serious textual problems. The manuscript of this work does not survive, but a version of it was sent to the press in the eighteenth century by one Fletcher Gyles. It is impossible to be certain how heavy his editorial hand might have been—for instance, of the Latin and the English titles, is either authentically Lambarde’s? When Lambarde referred to this text in his Perambulation of Kent, he called it the ‘Topographicall Dictionarie.’10 Nor

8 9 10

Dunkel explains the close relationship between Lambarde and Parker in the development of the Perambulation in William Lambarde, 40–50. William Lambarde, Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places of England and Wales, ed. Fletcher Gyles (London, 1730). Also available at . William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1826. London: Adams and Dart, 1970), vi. Original printing available at . All citations are from this edition, which was based on the 1596 text, unless otherwise noted.

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Putting the Past in Place is it possible to know whether the manuscript was a complete codex, copied and bound together into a semi-final form, or simply a collection of quires such as the partial one surviving at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. This quire, written in Lambarde’s secretary script, contains most of the text found printed in the Alphabetical Description for Windsor. The first and last pages are darker than the rest of the paper, indicating that the fascicle traveled on its own for much of its history and perhaps was never bound with any other quires, so Lambarde may have drafted his longer entries as individual essays in their own pamphlets such as this one. The work even has its own manuscript title: ‘Wyndsore Castle, and College, wth certen collections owt of diuers writers concerninge the same by Mr William Lambard. 1580.’ At the end, Lambarde signed it with one of his customary ‘Old English’ puns on his name: ‘wille ham lamwyrhte.’ Although these indicate that the work was not merely preliminary notes but was approaching completion, this work was probably still a draft, since Lambarde wrote it in secretary—his fair copy of the Perambulation of Kent, now London, British Library Additional 20033, is italic, and the comparison argues that this was not, in his mind, finished. The printed version of the Alphabetical Description did not directly use this artifact, as there are some small differences between the ‘Wynsore’ entry in the Alphabetical Dictionary and the text of the Folger manuscript (the first being the spelling of the place’s name, which is ‘Wyndsore’ in the manuscript, although this may simply be an error). The Alphabetical Dictionary gives an attribution for the Old English name ‘windlesora,’ ‘Chron. Sax. Petrob.’ that is absent in the manuscript version, as are additional versions of the name from Leland and Polydore Vergil. The printed version also has occasional gaps where presumably Gyles’s manuscript was damaged or illegible; the Folger manuscript fills these gaps. ‘Thus (as you see)’ in the Alphabetical Description clearly reads ‘Thus (as these men say you see)’ in the Folger manuscript.11 Gyles periodically uses ellipses to show these missing portions, as in the discussion of the chantries of Windsor: And therfore Kinge Edward IV. (enclined more to the Advauncement of vaine Pompe, to feede the Sense then to the Promotion of verie Vertue) …… took from those Foundations of his Competitor King Henry VI. (most noblie perfourmed at Eaton and Cambridge for the Increase of learning) so muche yearlie Revenue as amounted almost to a thousand Pounds.12 11 12

Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 418. Ibid., 421–422.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England The Folger manuscript can fill in the gap: ‘verie Vertue that nourisheth the soule.’ However, on the whole the text of the manuscript pamphlet and the printed version match closely. When Lambarde mentions the Alphabetical Description at the beginning of his Perambulation of Kent, he states that it was merely a preliminary step to his other chorographical plans: I had some while since gathered out of divers auncient and late Histories of this our Ilande, sundrie notes of such qualitie, as might serve for the description and Storie of the most famous places thorowe out this whole Realme: which collection (bicause it was digested into Titles by order of Alphabet, and concerned the description of places) I called a Topographicall Dictionarie: and out of which, I meant in time … to drawe (as from a certeine Store house) fit matter for each particular Shire and Countie. Now, after that it had pleased God to provide for me in Kent, I resolved (for sundrie iust respectes) to begin first with that Shire, and therein (before I would move any further) to make estimation and triall, both of the thing it selfe, of mine owne abilitie, and of other mens likings.13

Lambarde gives the impression that the Alphabetical Description was always intended to be merely the ‘Store house’ from which his planned county histories would come. Like Nowell’s Abcedarium index, this was draft material, only existing to serve other projects. Lambarde re-affirmed this on the manuscript of the Alphabetical Description after the Perambulation was written, as Gyles notes in the Preface: Mr. Lambarde has left the following Note in the MS. Title of this Dictionary. Of this Book you may read in the Preface to Mr. Wotton, in the Description of Kent, which I wrote in 1570 … For this is but a Breviate, for Store, and was meant to be enlarged, as the Perambulation of Kent is, which was (for the most Part) drawn out of this, after which Sort also, the rest of the Shires might be from hence described, etc.14

Lambarde suggests in both these comments that the Alphabetical Description was never meant to be anything other than preliminary notes for histories organized by county rather than by alphabet. Certainly the Alphabetical Description was unfinished when Lambarde laid it aside. At several places Lambarde leaves notes for himself, indicating he should insert information later. For instance, at the end of the entry for ‘Chipnam’ (modern Chippenham), Lambarde writes ‘The Perambulation

13 14

Lambarde, Perambulation, vi. Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, i.

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Putting the Past in Place of the Forrest I have readye to be inserted.’15 Similarly, at ‘Galtresse’ Lambarde comments, ‘A Forrest in Yorkshyre, the Perambulation wherof I have to be inserted.’16 Presumably, this is the text from which Nowell had also extracted information recorded in his notebook now London, British Library Cotton Vespasian A.v. Lacking the manuscript of the Alphabetical Description, it is impossible to know whether Lambarde left himself space to make his insertions in the text of the Alphabetical Description itself, or whether this was a reminder to himself to go back to the perambulation of forests later as he wrote his county chorographies and include the information in them. Lambarde likewise omits information about sources or paths of rivers. At ‘Noder, fl.’ Lambarde writes ‘A Water in Somersetshyre, not farre from the Ryver of Wynburn. It riseth, &c’ with no more information.17 The ‘&c’ indicates that he had (or intended to have) information about the course of the river, but did not have it at hand as he wrote (and the consistency with which river courses have these gaps indicate that these are in the original manuscript, and are not places where Gyles was faced with lost or illegible text). A note at ‘Wengham’ (modern Wingham) has to be purely a suggestion for him to follow up on: ‘Reade Mat. Paris, fol. 125. and conferre it with the printed Copie, &c.’18 Here it sounds as if Lambarde wants to double-check something in a manuscript copy of Matthew Paris; a broader reading audience certainly would not have access to his library to see the particular codex in question. However, other moments in the Alphabetical Description indicate that at one point, at least, he meant for it to stand as its own project. At times it appears he was writing for an imagined audience, not simply taking notes for himself. In his entry for Barmsey, he writes ‘many of the Nobilitie having taken the Cross upon theim, (for so they used to be signed that wold goe into Palestine to fight against the Sarracens). …’19 Certainly Lambarde does not have to include this aside for himself; the statement is meant for an imagined reader. Some of the stylistic elements that he so carefully includes in the Perambulation of Kent also appear in this work, such as the use of proverbs. The initial entry for many letters seems to be deliberately chosen as a place or term of particular importance—’Albion & Anglie’ for A, ‘Brytannia’ for B, ‘London’ for L, ‘Durham’ (Bede and Cuthbert’s resting place) for D, ‘Winchester’ (the capital of Wessex) for W, and so on. This 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 442. Ibid., 46.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England strategy supposed that readers would progress sequentially through the book, each new letter highlighting one of the more important places in England’s history (or, in the case of A, England itself). Lambarde’s habit of cross-referencing reinforces the impression that the book might be read sequentially. In the entry for ‘Egbrightston’ he refers to Alfred’s defeat of Halfdan ‘as appeareth before in Cymut’ and also to the baptism of Guðrun ‘as hearafter in Wedmore shal be at full disclosed.’20 Cross-reference to other entries would no doubt help Lambarde distill county histories from this text, but the words ‘before’ and ‘hereafter’ also suppose a reader who progresses sequentially through the text; they would hardly make sense in a volume that was only meant to be accessed randomly as if it were a reference work. The opening of the entry on London most clearly argues that, at least at some point in its compilation, Lambarde must have meant this text to be its own project: ‘Forasmuche as neyther my Power can extende itselfe, nor the Purpose of this myne Enterprise (ment for a Dictionarie, and no Hystorie) will suffer me to prosecute at full the manifolde and notorious Hystories, and other inumerable the Accidentes perteininge to this Place, I will passe theim over to other that have more Abilitie. …’21 Lambarde describes his work as ‘a Dictionary and no History.’ If this was meant only to be preliminary notes, why would he feel the need to make this apology? And if he made the London entry intending it to be inserted into a county history of Middlesex, why would he refer to his project there as a ‘Dictionary’ at all since presumably it would have been geographically organized as the Perambulation of Kent was? The London entry is also probably one of the earliest, as it refers to ‘this present Yeare 1567,’ so apparently Lambarde began the project thinking that it would be a work in its own right.22 Despite his later claims, then, for at least some of the time while Lambarde was working on the Alphabetical Description he conceived of it as its own project. This work, and indeed this format, might well have been inspired by Nowell’s similar undertaking in the Abcedarium. Nowell knew Lambarde was interested in chorography, for the Vocabularium Saxonicum, written for Lambarde, includes place names regularly. Certainly Lambarde used some of Nowell’s materials in compiling the Alphabetical Description. In the entry for Carr, Lambarde directly cites Nowell: Carre. In the Yeare 833. Egbert, alone Kinge of Inglande, foughte with 20 Shippes of Danes at some Place thus called, and was overcome; within seven 20 21 22

Ibid., 107. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 178.

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Putting the Past in Place Years after Etdelwulf his son, Kinge of West Saxons, fought withe the Danes that were nombred 35 Saile of Shippes at this Place, and he also was put to the worse. Thus farre I am led to thinke it some Place in the West Country by the Sea-Syde, but this that followeth removeth me cleane. In the tyme of Canute (sayeth the Chron. of Lindisf.) al the People of Northumberland from Tese to Twede, was overthrowen by the Scottes in a Battayl at Carre. Neyther doe I find it in the Northe Partes of Ingland; I thinke it therfore some Place in the Marches of Scotlande. Looke the Saxon Dictionarie of Laur. Noel.23

Nowell’s Vocabularium contains the following entry for ‘ætCarrum’: ‘A towne or place on the coast of Kent where King Egbert fought with the Danes anno 833 & King Ethelwulf likewise in his time & both were overthrowen.’24 Lambarde’s reference to Nowell is mostly to disagree with him about the location of Carr. The entry for Carr in the Abcedarium index has more information, but (typically for Abcedarium entries) does not mention exactly where Carr is: Carre. gefeaht Egbriht cyning wiþ 35 scip hlæsta æt carrum 7 þær wæs micel wæl geslegen 7 þa Daniscan ahton wælstow geweald. anno 833. Iterum Eþelwulf cyning gefeaht wiþ 35 scipum hlæsta æt carrum 7 þa Deniscan ahton wælstow geweald. [King Egbriht fought with 35 shiploads at Carr and there was great slaughter and the Danes took possession of the field. Anno 833. A second time King Ethelwulf fought with 35 shiploads at Carr and the Danes took possession of the field.]

Elsewhere, however, Lambarde seems to be drawing on the Abcedarium index instead of the Vocabularium: Runcorne. Runcofan, Saxon. in Lancastershyre. Elfled the Ladie and inheretrix of Mercia, in the Tyme of Kinge Edward the Son of Alfred, prevayled muche against the Danes, and takinge from theym whatsoever they held within her Dominion, buylded many stronge Holdes to resist theim: Amongest other she made the Towne and Castle of Runcorne, in what Shyre I finde not, onless it be Rounton in Warwickshyre. Laurence Nowel taketh it to be now called Runcorne, whome in the Title I follow.25

Lambarde’s entry shows that he had only looked at Nowell’s Abcedarium index where Nowell gives a similar history of the place and name: 23 24

25

Ibid., 61–62. Laurence Nowell, Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, ed. Albert H. Marckwardt, University of Michigan Studies in Language and Literature 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952), 44. Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 300.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England ‘Runcorn. castrum cum vrbe constructum est ab Elfleda regina Merciæ circa annum 24um Edwardi senioris antiquitus Runcofan appellata est’ (Runcorn. the castle with the city was built by Ethelfled queen of Mercia around the 24th year of Edward the Elder. It was formerly called Runcofan). However, the Vocabularium Saxonicum gives more precise information: ‘Runcofan. Runcorn, upon the river of Mersey bineath Warington.’26 The Vocabularium (written for Lambarde and probably with an eye to his interests) gives the location of the modern Runcorn, and would have eliminated the need for Lambarde’s speculation to the exact location, but Lambarde apparently forgot to consult it. Lambarde, therefore, drew on Nowell’s Abcedarium index for at least some of his information, although he was willing to disagree with his friend’s conclusions. He was also, from the evidence of his London entry, at first led to adopt Nowell’s structure—an alphabetical ‘dictionarie’ of British place names. A few features of the Alphabetical Description help explain the appeal for him. The alphabetical format gave him the opportunity to include ancient names as well as modern ones, for he does not always know where historical events happened. For instance, at the entry for ‘Cnobsborowe, Cnobheresburh i. Cnobheri oppidum’ he discusses what Bede says about the place, and observes that ‘[i]t should seme by his Description to be in Norfolke, but I find none suche at this Day standinge. Some take it to be Burgh neare Yarmouthe.’27 Nowell was no help here, as neither the Vocabularium nor the Abcedarium index discusses the place. Lambarde’s entry’s headword is based on a guess at how the Old English ‘Cnobheresburh’ would have developed into Modern English; there is no ‘Cnobsborowe’ in Norfolk or he would presumably know where the place was. The alphabetical format offers him, in addition to the national identity possibilities inherent in such a scheme, the opportunity to merge England’s past and its present, to make the ancient history of England and Wales coequal with its present unity. The inclusion, even highlighting, of speculative place names, in ‘modern’ versions that did not exist on the ground in the sixteenth century, underscores this aspect of the text even more sharply than in Nowell’s. The reconstructed ‘modern’ name of the Old English Cnobheresburh also, of course, showcases Lambarde’s linguistic skill and reading knowledge of Old English. Lambarde was proud of his ability to read AngloSaxon manuscripts, and scoffs at historians such as Polydore Vergil who made errors through lack of understanding. He even includes ‘Mersware,’ a 26 27

Nowell, Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium, 141. Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 60.

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Putting the Past in Place non-existent place, to point up the value of his linguistic knowledge and the insight it gives him into England’s past. After tracing the origin of the supposed ‘Mersware’ to Henry of Huntingdon, Lambarde writes: In which, through Ignorance of the Saxon Tongue, they have fowly erred; for the Saxon Bookes say that Herebert was slaine, ‘7 monige mid him on mearscwarum[’] i. and with him many of the Mercians, or Men of Mercia. So that the Hystorie denoteth of what Country they weare that weare slayne, but not in what Place the Slaughter was comitted. It weare to longe, and beside my Purpose, to recite how shamfully Polydore and a Nombre of our Hystoriographers have missed the Marke in beatinge out of the Etimologies of Places, and al for want of Judgement in the Bryttishe and Saxon Languages.28

There is no Mersware, and a purely geographic work could not have included this as an entry. Lambarde can use his format to denounce Polydore (his favorite target), by quoting Old English and pointing out how the error occurred. And after all, reading knowledge of Old English was exactly what distinguished Nowell and Lambarde from every previous chorographer and recent historian, even Leland whose Old English was rudimentary. Lambarde was savvy enough (or vain enough) to emphasize this about his work, and Retha Warnicke observes that the Alphabetical Description ‘reveals that the author was particularly interested in AngloSaxon history and name derivatives of the places he described.’29 However, this interest was not exclusive. If Lambarde is more ‘interested in Anglo-Saxon history’ and etymologies than later writers such as Camden or Drayton, he also discusses post-Conquest events much more consistently than Nowell. Lambarde’s entries have a greater chronological sweep than the Abcedarium index, going from the ancient and Anglo-Saxon past to the present far more consistently than Nowell did. Lambarde proudly displays his knowledge of the Germanic invasions and settlements, but his discussions rarely stop there. They include events from later history such as the Barons’ Wars and the Wars of the Roses, and detail post-Conquest religious foundations. Nor does Lambarde limit himself to places that were mentioned in the histories of England before the Conquest. For instance, in his discussion of Tutbury, he goes from the time of Henry III to the present: Tutbery: Althoughe theare be at Tutberie in Darbyshire a faire Castle at this Day, yet I finde it not to be the same that thear was in auncyent Tyme, but

28 29

Ibid., 213. Retha Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary (London: Phillimore, 1973), 26.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England rather bylded newly, or raised upon the olde Foundations; for not longe before the Batteil at Lewes in Sussex, wheare Kinge Hen. III was taken in the Field by Symon Mountford and the Nobilitie of his Faction, Prince Edwarde his Son toke the Castle of Notingham by Force, and departinge thence to Tutbery rased the Castle downe to the Ground, so that it is not likely that he left that Beauty which is now to be sene. At this present Marie the Quene of Scottes, which escapinge the Custodie at Lough Levyn, fledde into Ingland for Succour, is lodged theare.30

Tutbury was not mentioned by name in the material Lambarde had about the Anglo-Saxon period, but this does not disqualify it from inclusion (as it would have in Nowell’s Abecdarium compilation). Nor do all his discussions of contemporary events concern matters of great political importance such as the harboring of the Queen of Scots, either; sometimes he indulges in juicy tidbits of local gossip, as at Feversham where he notes, ‘in my Memory, one Ardern, a Gentleman, was slaine at this Towne by Procurement of his Wife.’31 Aside from its wider historical scope, Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description differs from Nowell’s Abcedarium index in its consistent efforts to include information about which modern-day shire included the places he discussed, and in his preface giving lists of towns by shire. Although he began it as an alphabetical index like Nowell’s, Lambarde already felt drawn to the geographic format that he would ultimately embrace in the Perambulation of Kent. When Lambarde knows which county a place is in, he names it near the beginning of the entry; Nowell’s index rarely mentions the modern counties in which cities are found. In fact, Lambarde’s Alphabetical Description opens with a list of counties, then another list of markets, schools, castles, hills, rivers, forests, stone bridges, religious houses and hospitals, liberties, and so forth found in each one. The entry for Northumberland serves as a typical example: Northumberland Hathe on the East, the Sea; on the Southe, Durham; on the West, Cumberland and Westmorland; on the North, Scotlande. Markets. Newcastle, Barwyke, Aunwyke, Morpythe, Hexam, Norham. Castles. Barwike, Norham, Warke, Aunwyke, Morpeth, Bambrough, Warkwyth, Harbotle, In Holy-Ile, In-Ferney-Ile, In-Coket-Ile, Twysel, Shoreswood, Felton, Fenton, Itall, Ford, Tynmouth, Haughton, Chypchess, Aiden, Frodhow, Horton, Newcastle, 30 31

Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 369. A marginal note dates this 1568; Mary was moved to Tutbury in January of 1569 but Lambarde often used old-style dates. Ibid., 116.

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Putting the Past in Place Walington, Botulphe, Otterborne, Dunstanburgh, Ogle, Dynleston, Cartington, Thurlwall, Blenkinsop, Wyllymounteswyc, Chyllingham. Hylles and Dales. Chevyot, Rydsdale, Tyndale South and North, Cukedale, Glendale, Alandale. Ryvers. Twede, Cameus, Tuppald, Tyll, Cocket, Low, Cam, Blythe, Warn, Galgath, Southtyne, Northtyne, Alne, Derwent, Dyness Water, East Allen, West Allen, Rede, Bowbent. Parkes and Forrests. Chevyot Hylles For. Rothbury For. Dotland Park, Aunwyc West, Callige, Wrintington, Hull, Diston, Warkwyth 2. Chaton dis. Ogle, Wytherington, Morpeth 2. Cokle, Botulphe. Scooles. Newcastle, Morpethe. Lyberties. Newcastle. Boroughes. Newcastle, Barwyke, Morpythe. Relligious Houses and Hospitalles. Tynemouth Pri. Hexam Monast. Ovingeham Cel. Newmynster Ab. Alnwyke Ab. Brinkborne Ab. Halystone Ab. Blanksland Ab.32

Although Gyles regarded this as prefatory matter and gave these pages small Roman numerals (the Arabic numerals, and the title of ‘Dictionarium Angliae,’ begin with the narrative descriptions), the spelling is sixteenthcentury and this material was, presumably, part of the manuscript of the Alphabetical Description. The list of notable features within each shire mimics the strategy of the entries themselves in merging past and present with no indication of any disparity. Not only are religious houses, dissolved decades since, listed but also monasteries, abbeys, friaries, priories, etc. are distinguished from each other even though none of them were still operational. At the same time, contemporary boroughs are listed. Human and geographical features also merge in Lambarde’s list: forests and hills combine seamlessly with schools and markets. The list runs for some fourteen pages as Lambarde organized information county by county. Before Lambarde’s description became ‘Alphabetical’ it was first geographic, relating towns to each other based on locale rather than first letter. However, the most significant difference between Nowell’s chorographic writing and Lambarde’s is the latter’s preoccupation with denigrating monasticism and the Catholic hierarchy. Lambarde denounces the actions of prelates and abbots and the cult of saints at every opportunity: Maydenhead. Suþealingtun, Saxon. Alaunus, Lat. Lelande. A through-fare Towne, five Miles West from Windsore, which (sayeth Leland) was called

32

Ibid., viii.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Southalington, til suche tyme as some Popishe Jugler wroughte Legier du main theare, under the Name of a Virgine’s Head, by meanes wherof the People flockinge thither chaunged the Name.33

‘Popishe jugglers’ have changed the English landscape and altered the original ‘Saxon’ name; Lambarde means to demonstrate the extent of such ‘Popish legerdemain’ and superstition, and the vice and vainglory of ecclesiasts and religious. Monastic foundations in particular come in for constant criticism, such as the one at Poleswoorth where Lambarde observes that in some sources the founder was ‘one Modwenna an Irishe Woman’ but in others the founder was ‘Editha the Sister of Kinge Athelstane’ and ironically suggests how this discrepancy might be explained: ‘But it may be that Editha with her Miracles (for Mathew West. sayeth she wrought great Stoare even to his Tyme) put Modwen cleane out of Memorie, the rather bycause Miracles brought Money, and the GoodFellowes of those Tymes used not the Pater Noster without Hope of the Peny.’34 This sharply contrasts to Nowell’s discussion of monastic houses and foundations, which usually lists such uncertainties without comment at the appropriate location. Lambarde not only depicts Catholic officials as beset with vice, he often suggests that they are tainted by the foreign influence of their relationship to Rome. He narrates a tale of how the Monks of Beverley went over the head of the Archbishop of York: In Tyme of Kinge Stephen, one Hugh, a younge Nobleman, was chosen Byshop of Durham, wherat Henry Murdoc the Archebyshop of Yorke taking just Offense, excommunicated the Monkes that made the Election … the Monkes notwithstandinge would not revoke their Election, but posted with Hugh to Rome, wheare they purchased of the Pope Allowance of the same.35

Lambarde not only demonstrates the simony of Hugh and his cohorts, but tacitly criticizes their going to the Pope; if Bishop Murdoch’s offense was ‘just’ then the interference of the foreign official simply compounds the injury. Lambarde narrates with undisguised glee all such instances of monastic and episcopal squabbling. He also frequently correlates some of the rituals of Roman Catholicism, such as bringing grain to be blessed to keep it free from disease, with pagan Roman rites, underscoring the rites’ deviant religion and their foreignness. 33 34 35

Ibid., 217 Ibid., 271. Ibid., 28.

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Putting the Past in Place He strikes this note with special emphasis when he describes the canonization of Cuthberg, founder of Wynburne (Wimborne): this Cuthburg had bene wedded before to Egfride the Kinge of Northumberland, but thorow some Monkishe Persuasion of Chastitie, she forsoke lauful Wedlocke, and toke upon her this unlauful Profession. And yet this was Cause inoughe to make her a Saincte, for the Religious of those Dayes weare as thankful to their Benefactors, as ever weare the Heathen Nations to their first Kinges and Founders; thone sorte in sanctifyinge so many as did eyther buyld theim Houses, or devise theim Orders; and thother sort dyifyinge al suche as had eyther made theim Cyties, or prescribed theim Government. What els I pray you made Saturne, Hercules, Romulus, and sundrie suche other to have (in comon Opinion) Place amongst the Starres? And what other Thinge (trow you) caused Dunstan, Ethelwold, Modwen, Mylburg, and infinite other to be shryned and sytt amongest the Sainctes?36

Their practice affiliates them not only with paganism and bad religion, but with foreign peoples and empires rather than with England and the English imperial identity. The foreign taint of Catholic monks and bishops (or would-be bishops) goes beyond pagan Rome, however. Lambarde relates in his entry for ‘Byshoptun’ near Durham the savagery of one of the contenders for high episcopal office: One Roger Conyers, a Nobleman of that Countrie, in Tyme of Kinge Stephen resistid one William Cumyn an ambitious Prelate, which fought by forcible and warlike Meanes to invade the Sea, and to have compelled the Monkes of Durham to have elected him after Gaufride … their Byshop, which bycause they refused to do, he beseiged, sacked, and spoiled, not only thabbey, but the Towne of Durham also, with suche Crueltie and exquisite Tormortes of Deathe against suche as resisted him, as scarsely is the like to be found eyther in the Scottes or Danes themselves, which have after a most barbarous sort often tymes heryed that quarter; howbeit, in thend, he bothe lost his Desyre, and was compelled by the Nobilitie of the Country (armed for that Purpose) to submitte himselfe to the lawfully elect. …37

Lambarde, with his usual anti-episcopal bias, calls the would-be bishop a ‘Prelate’ even though he did not achieve the office, blurring the division between him and the elected bishop of Durham. His actions against the town can only be compared to ‘barbarous’ invaders, Scots and Danes, and 36 37

Ibid., 412. Ibid., 27–28.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England he himself becomes by that comparison less than native. Indeed, the county nobility have to arm themselves in a muster similar to the one needed to hold off foreign raiders. The history of English Catholicism throughout the Alphabetical Description is the history of foreign influences, held off with more or less success by the monarchy and the nobility of the realm. However, it is significant that Lambarde does not include the Saxons themselves in the list of barbarian invaders, although he had certainly read sources that made clear their ferocity. If the Scots and the Danes are the barbarian invaders, then the people defending the land are ‘Saxons’ (as the Danish incursions ended just before the Conquest); the Anglo-Saxon period of history carries the identity of the ‘English’ with which the foreigners are contrasted to make Lambarde’s point about the savagery of the ‘prelate’ he wishes to condemn. Indeed, although Lambarde criticizes some figures from the AngloSaxon church, especially Archbishop Dunstan, primarily he records ‘abuses’ from after the Conquest, silently leaving the Saxon identity as the point of contrast for the later deterioration. This is, of course, the tactic that Archbishop Matthew Parker had taken in his own Anglo-Saxon studies. Parker drew upon the writings of Ælfric, selectively chosen and often creatively interpreted, to claim that Reformation practices such as marrying of clergy were not ‘innovations’ in the history of Christianity, but in fact were a return to the purer state of the Anglo-Saxon church before the innovations were introduced by the Norman Conquest.38 Parker, as both Dunkel and Warnicke describe, was instrumental in the later publication of Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, and the bridge between Nowell’s interests and Parker’s that Lambarde would ultimately build has its early supports in the text of the Alphabetical Description.39 However, even the Anglo-Saxon church had ties to Rome with 38

39

Discussions of Archbishop Parker’s use of Anglo-Saxon texts in his polemic include R.I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications: 1993); Theodore Leinbaugh, ‘Ælfric’s Sermo De Sacrificio in Die Pascae: Anglican Polemic in the Sixteenth and Seventeeenth Centuries,’ in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl Berkhout and Milton McCormick Gatch (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 51–68; Timothy Graham and Andrew Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1998); Aaron Kleist, ‘Monks, Marriage, and Manuscripts: Matthew Parker’s Manipulation (?) of Ælfric of Eynsham,’ JEGP 105 (2006): 312–327; and Aaron Kleist, ‘Matthew Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage’ in Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s ‘Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,’ ed. Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 106–133. Dunkel, William Lambarde, 40–50; Warnicke, William Lambarde, 32–33.

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Putting the Past in Place Augustine’s mission and the subsequent conversions, and condemning the Roman Catholic aspects of English history remains one of Lambarde’s chief concerns. The conclusion to Lambarde’s discussion of Windsor completes a merger of foundations and historical buildings with the religious convictions of their restorers, and is worth quoting at some length: But nowe at suche Tyme as it pleased our gratious God, to the immortall Glorie of his holie Name, and to the unspeakable Comforte of us al, to advaunce our Sovereigne Ladie Elizabethe to the Royal Throne of this Realme, she carefullie viewed (amongest others) the Estate bothe of this College and Castle at Wyndsore; and first finding the spiritual Building of the Churche theare more than halfe suncke (being at the first layed upon the false Foundation of sandie Stones of Superstition, and Rubbishe of Romish Religion) she foorthewith called cuning and learned Masons unto her, and renewing by theire Ministerie the grownde Woorkes thearof stayed the whole Frame, upon the true squared Doctrine of Jesus Christ, the onlie Corner Stonne of infalible Buildinge. Then afterwarde, aboute the 17. Yeare of her most happie Reigne, she begann with the Castle it selfe also, and not onlie restoared througheowt the ruinous Partes thearof to theire former Strengthe and Integritie, but also converted foure sundrie Bridges, and a Tarrace of decayed Tymbre into so many new Woorkes of bewtifull Stonne, adding besides a faire Stonne Gate. …40

The language here makes it hard to tell whether Lambarde is describing actual physical renovations or only spiritual ones. The church at Windsor was ‘restored’ spiritually; was it also physically rebuilt and augmented as the castle was in 1575? The discussion of Windsor shows how writing about the places of England and writing about the Reformation had merged for Lambarde; the two activities had become, by 1575, almost indistinguishable for him. The polemical aspect of his work probably explains why, even in his first chorographic work, Lambarde was pulled between two models, alphabetical and geographic. As time went on, he would move towards perambulation and locale as his organizational scheme, commenting that the Alphabetical Description was no more than the warehouse for such chorographic works (although he continued to add to it until 1577). Since he desired to imprint the history of the errors of Catholicism on the physical landscape of England, it ultimately made more sense to let the landscape itself structure how he organized and presented his material. Retha 40

Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 423–424.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Warnicke has suggested that Lambarde ‘finally forsook the [Alphabetical Description] after Camden sent him a manuscript copy of the Britannia to review and criticise. … He must have been convinced that his own manuscript was of little worth when compared to Camden’s great achievement.’41 However, independent of Camden’s plans, he may also have simply wanted to abandon the alphabetical form that Nowell had used for one that seemed, to Lambarde, more appropriate for his intentions. THE PERAMBULATION OF KENT Lambarde’s finished chorographical work, the Perambulation of Kent, has many of the same goals and strategies as the Alphabetical Description. In the Perambulation of Kent Lambarde settled on geographic organization, but it also wavers at times between local and national identity; the Perambulation is a local work with national aims. This is hardly surprising. As Neil Younger argues, Lambarde perhaps more than anyone understood that ‘the local and the national were intimately intertwined.’42 Lambarde begins the Perambulation with a visual image, not of Kent but of all of southern Britain—a map of the ‘the English Heptarchie.’43 The map shows the various historical Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as well as Wales, Cornwall, part of France, part of Scotland, and part of Ireland; all but Ireland and Scotland are labeled in both Latin and Old English. Divisions between the kingdoms are drawn with dotted lines. The two printed versions (1576 and 1596) contain the arms of Elizabeth I in the upper-right corner; Lambarde’s autograph drawing of this map does not but a space is clearly ruled out for her coat of arms to be inserted, so the crest was part of his original design.44 Less certain is whether or not Lambarde intended the additions of the crests of the kingdoms of England, France, Ireland, and Man, all of which appear surmounted by a crown in the printed versions. The claim being made is clear; a viewer would understand these to be kingdoms over which Elizabeth was sovereign.45 Lambarde’s ‘exposition of this Map,’ which follows it, first gives a rapid 41 42 43

44 45

Warnicke, William Lambarde, 26. Neil Younger, ‘William Lambarde on the Politics of Enforcement in Elizabethan England,’ Historical Research 83 (2010): 78. Lambarde, Perambulation, xii. The modern edition of the Perambulation does not reproduce the map itself, which is found on unnumbered or signed pages in the 1576 and 1596 versions. In the 1576 edition the map comes immediately before sig A1; in the 1596 edition it comes immediately before page 1. Lambarde’s drawing for this map is reproduced in Warnicke, William Lambarde, plate II. The omission of a Welsh dragon crest is puzzling, but perhaps Wales was considered represented by the dragon supporting Elizabeth’s shield.

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Putting the Past in Place history of the conquests of Britain, beginning with the Britons and ending with the Normans, then skips back chronologically and explains the location of each kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons in terms of contemporary counties. For instance, Wessex ‘comprehended the whole Shires of Southampton, Berk, Wilton, Dorset, and Somerset, besides some parts of Surrey, Gloucester, and Devonshire.’46 After this discussion of past kingdoms in terms of contemporary shires, Lambarde gives a brief legal-geographic history, describing the areas bound by the laws of Wessex, the Danelaw, and Mercia. Lambarde concludes by describing the unification of the legal system by the Normans: ‘All these laws, king William the Conquerour collected togither, and (after a discreete view had) by advise of his counsell allowed some, altered others, and quite abrogated a great many, in place of which he established the lawes of Normandie his owne countrey.’47 Lambarde’s long view of the persistence of William’s laws spurs a printed marginal comment: ‘The Laws of our time.’48 Only after all this does Lambarde turn to ‘The Description and Hystorie of the Shyre of Kent.’49 Lambarde’s opening map and discussion set his county history in a national framework (even as the county listings in the Alphabetical Description set his national work in a local framework). Before one can understand Kent, it argues, one must know the political and legal history of all England. The crest of Elizabeth I and of the contemporary kingdoms over which she (in name, at least) ruled, and which were also pictured on his map, also claims her hegemony over all the former kingdoms, and superimposes the present-day political entity of England onto the AngloSaxon past. Lambarde’s discussion of the laws likewise brings a description of previous fragmentation between various kingdoms’ legislation together into a present, unified ‘laws of our time.’ The 1596 edition followed this with a map that showed the beacons of Kent, the only county map, emphasizing Kent’s role in the defense of the English nation; the first edition had a textual description of the Kentish beacons but did not have the map. Even though the bulk of the book would focus on a single county, Lambarde wants the reader to be put in mind first of national identity, based on legal and racial grounds and set in opposition to would-be invaders. Lambarde’s movement between local and national history continues into the text of ‘The Estate of Kent,’ where Lambarde tells us he began his

46 47 48 49

Lambarde, Perambulation, xiv. Ibid., xvi. Ibid. Ibid., 1.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England series of county histories with Kent not only because it is his home but also because it is the gateway to Britain: And because not onley the Romanes and Saxones (that were conquerours of this realme) but also the disciples of the Apostle Philip, and the messengers of Pope Gregory (that were converters of the people) arrived first in Kent; and for that the same by commoditie of the River of Thamise (the chief key of this iland) first openenth itselfe, and to the end also that such guests and strangers as shall vouchsafe to visite this our Britaine, may at their first entry find such courtesie and intertainment, as from henceforth they ceasse, either with Horace to call us hospitibus feros, or with others, feroces in advenas, I wyll be their xenagogus, or guide, and first shew them our countrie of Kent. …50

A discussion of Kent leads ‘naturally’ to a discussion of Britain as a whole, as the start of new, transformative ideas and as the gateway to the island (with the ambiguity we have already seen between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’). As Kent goes, so goes Britain. As Lambarde indicates, Kent is not only an easy landing place for those visiting, it is the origin of transformations. Conquests, conversions, and visitors all begin in Kent. Lambarde’s statement, coming right at the beginning of the book, brings up the possibility that his work intends to be similarly transformative not only for the inhabitants of Kent but for all of ‘this our Britaine’; that is, it is a book with national as well as local implications. This opening invites us to consider Lambarde’s goals and arguments in his Perambulation of Kent as if it were indeed a perambulation of all England. What were these goals? William Keith Hall argues that Lambarde wants primarily to tie identity to law, as ‘the cultural integuments which hold a territory together, whether it is the shire of Kent, or the entirety of England.’51 Hall argues that Lambarde presents ancient artifacts, especially legal antiquities, in full, making his argument through the authority of these artifacts. John Adrian, in an important article, correlates the Perambulation to the practice of walking boundaries for the sake of establishing property limits. He argues that the Perambulation ‘engages in a similar establishment of boundaries and projection of order onto the surrounding landscape.’52 Adrian ties this emphasis on order to Lambarde’s 50 51

52

Ibid., 1–2. William Keith Hall, ‘From Chronicle to Chorography: Truth, Narrative, and the Antiquarian Enterprise in Renaissance England’ (PhD diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995), 82. John Adrian, ‘Tudor Centralization and Gentry Visions of Local Order in Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent,’ English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 308.

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Putting the Past in Place desired membership in the class of local gentry: ‘Chorographies were of interest to the gentry not only because they describe familiar topography and showcase local antiquities, but because they enact the very order that was the chief political function of the gentry.’53 Lambarde, in this work as in the Alphabetical Description, wants to emphasize one particular movement towards order—the triumph of the monarchy over Catholicism—and in structuring his text by geography he ties this transformation even more closely to the land. Lambarde in his discussion of Chatham in the Perambulation makes explicit that recording the errors of Catholicism is one of his main goals in writing: Although I have not hitherto at any time, read any memorable thing recorded in historie touching Chetham it selfe, yet, for so much as I have often heard (and that constantly) reported, a Popish illusion done at the place, and for that also it is profitable to the keeping under of fained and superstitious religion, to renew to mind the Priestly practices of olde time (which are now declining to oblivion) as it is pleasant to reteine in memorie the Monuments and Antiquities of whatsover other kinde, I thinke it not amisse to commit faithfully to writing, what I have received credibly by hearing, concerning the Idols, sometime knowen hy [sic] the names, of our Lady and the Roode, of Chetham, and Gillingham.54

Lambarde’s aims are pleasure (of recalling the past) and ‘profit’ of discrediting Catholicism. Some of the stresses of this appear in Lambarde’s assertion that these practices are ‘declining to oblivion,’ since his readers would have known as well as he did that there were many practicing English Catholics. Placing Catholic observances in a similar category to the antiquities he describes argues that they are as firmly in the past as the reign of the British and Anglo-Saxon kings. Although the antiquities are ‘pleasant’ and Catholicism ‘fained and superstitious’ both belong firmly to the realm of long ago, Lambarde wants to claim. His reader can ‘see’ this by going to Chatham, and witnessing the absence of the shrine, just as he could see the evidence of ancient buildings. Lambarde writes in the beginning of the Perambulation that he drew it out of the ‘Topographicall Dictionarie.’ Certainly the Alphabetical Description provided him with some source material, but the Perambulation is much expanded, as Warnicke observes, ‘In addition to 30 new scholarly sources, 29 more Kentish towns were discussed, and of those towns that were

53 54

Ibid., 310. Lambarde, Perambulation, 324.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England repeated, much more information was given.’55 Lambarde also expanded his argumentative points even when the basic information was the same. At ‘Sedingborne’ (modern Sittingbourne) in the Alphabetical Description Lambarde relates that the monks of Canterbury wished to chose ‘Raulfe Nouel’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the Pope forbade Ralph for fear he would do away with the tribute to Rome that King John had instituted, that the monks chose instead John, their Prior, and that on his departure to Rome the Archbishop of Rochester stated in a sermon that that day Richard I, Stephen Langton, and one of Langton’s chaplains were released from Purgatory.56 Lambarde’s entry for ‘Sedingbourne’ in the Perambulation contains the same basic narrative, but he intensifies the anti-Catholic rhetoric and adds a comparison of Purgatory to the underworld of the pagan classical past. Lambarde’s discussion of the Papal restriction on the first candidate in the Alphabetical Description indicates some disposition towards fair-mindedness on the part of the Papacy: the Pope fearinge that he would have laboured for Releas of the Tribute, which he had out of Ingland by Kinge Jhon’s Submission, (for the Storie sayeth, that Nouell was a good Man and true harted to his Countrye) told the Monkes that he was rashe of Speche, and presumptuouse in dede, and therfore farre unworthy suche a Callinge. Notwithstandinge, bycause he would have theim choose some other by faire meanes, he gave them Libertie to take whome they would beside him.57

This passage in the Perambulation has the same information, but some key changes in wording: but Gregorie the Pope, fearing that Ralfe would have travailed earnestly for release of the tribute, which his Innocent predeessour had gained by King Iohns submissions (for the storie saith, that Noville was a good man, and true harted to his Countrie) bare the Monks in hand, that hee was rashe in word, and presumptious in acte, and therefore much unwoorthie of such a dignitie: Neverthelesse, bicause he would not seeme utterly to infringe the libertie of their election, he gave them free licence to take any other man besides him.58

Both texts show the Pope’s opposition to the candidate who was ‘truehearted to his country,’ establishing the Pope as opposed to any good Englishman, and by extension to England itself. The Perambulation,

55 56 57 58

Warnicke, William Lambarde, 29. Lambarde, Alphabetical Description, 346–347. Ibid., 346–347. Lambarde, Perambulation, 217.

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Putting the Past in Place however, goes farther to argue for the Pope’s deceitfulness, for while the Pope in the Alphabetical Description ‘would have theim choose some other by faire meanes,’ the Pope in the Perambulation ‘would not seeme utterly to infringe the libertie of their election.’ The first version has a Pope that is at least partially interested in ‘faire meanes’ for elections; the second only wants to ‘seem’ that he won’t ‘utterly’ trample on the monks’ prerogative. That modification not only allows Lambarde to emphasize that the English monks have their ‘liberty’ suppressed, but also that the Pope (and by implication much of the Catholic hierarchy) is a master of appearances and deception. This leads in to the additions Lambarde makes to the discussion, comparing Purgatory to the pagan underworld. A marginal note in the Perambulation observes ‘Popish Purgatorie is derived out of Poetrie,’ as Lambarde comments: Beleeve me, if his Fatherhood [the Archbishop of Rochester] had not plainely confessed, that he came to the knowledge of this matter by revelation, I would easily have beleeved that he had been with Anchises in Hell, as Aeneas sometime was, where he learned, what soules should come next to life, and where he heard the liveliest description of the Poeticall, or Popish Purgatorie (for all is one) that is any where to be founde.59

He goes on to quote the Aeneid in Latin and then in Thomas Phaer’s English translation. Such expansions are common among the changes Lambarde makes to his original text. He intensifies his depiction of the perfidy of Catholicism, draws more parallels between Catholic doctrine and Roman classical paganism, and heightens his rhetorical style and argumentative force by scattering quotations and allusions through his entries. Almost all of these expansions highlight Lambarde’s anti-Catholic rhetoric and argumentative purpose. As the Catholic religious, bishops, and archbishops are particular targets, the entry for Canterbury affords him with lengthy scope for his aims. He begins by giving the ‘Saxon’ name from which the modern one is derived, Cantwarabyrig, and goes on to tell of the foundation of the archbishopric, skeptically reports a miracle from Bede about Archbishop Mellitus, and explains the decline of the city since the closing of the monastic houses and shrines:60 Considering the maine Seas of sinne and iniquitie, wherin the worlde (at those daies) was almost wholy drenched, I must needes take cause, highly to

59 60

Ibid., 218. Ibid., 262–266.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England praise God that hath thus mercifully in our age delivered us, disclosed Satan, unmasked these Idoles, dissolved their Synagogs, and raced to the grounde all monuments of building erected to superstition and ungodlynesse. And therefore, let every godly man ceasse with me from henceforth to marvaile, why Canterbury, Walsingham, and sundry such like, are now in these our daies becom in maner waste, since God in times past was in them blasphemed moste. … How then shoulde he forbeare these harborowes of the Devil and the Pope? which in horrible crimes contended with Sodome, in unbeliefe matched Ierusalem, and in folly of superstition exceeded all Gentilitie.61

Canterbury’s decline is itself evidence for the wickedness of its Catholic foundations and episcopacy. Chief in its list of crimes is the shrine to Thomas Becket, who emerges as the main villain of the Perambulation. In the Canterbury discussion, Lambarde explains the conflict between Becket and Henry II: Henry, driven by the fact that ‘the Clergie of the Realm had committed above a hundreth severall murthers upon his subiects,’ composed the Statutes of Clarendon making clergy subject to secular prosecution for felony.62 Becket, who had agreed to this at the time, later opposed the law, ‘both forgetfull of his dutie to God and Prince, and unmindefull of his owne oth.’ 63 Becket went to the Pope to intervene, who eventually ‘praieth, commaundeth, perswadeth, and threatneth’ Henry into a reconciliation.64 Henry, on learning that Becket had returned to England and was seeking vengeance on the bishops who had supported the king, ‘cast out some words, that gave occasion and hardinesse’ to his knights to slay Becket in the cathedral.65 Lambarde confesses that he cannot support murder, undertaken without the course of the law, but points out that Becket was nevertheless asking for it: Wherin, as I cannot on the one side allow this murther (executed, not by any publique Minister of Iustice, but by a private and injurious arm:) So on the other side, I report me to all indifferent and Godly Readers, whether such a life deserved not such a death, and whether these Popish Parasites that have painted foorth this mans praises, make not themselves thereby parteners of all his pride and wilfull rebellion.66

Murder is wrong, but if there were ever to be a justifiable homicide, this 61 62 63 64 65 66

Ibid., 267–268. Ibid., 274. Ibid. Ibid., 275. Ibid. Ibid., 275–276.

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Putting the Past in Place would be it. What is more, all who have venerated Becket are themselves rebels. The decay of Canterbury, in Lambarde’s view, gives clear physical evidence for his claim. The structure of the Perambulation regularly makes the land itself witness to the perfidy of the Catholic clergy, episcopacy, and religious by ‘taking’ the reader to these locations. Here is where these monks behaved shamefully. Here is where Becket contested with his lawful king. Here one can ‘see’ the decline of places associated with the cult of saints, especially the ‘Prototraitour’ Becket.67 A narrative structured by the order of the places on the ground instead of by chronology or (as in the case of Lambarde’s first compilation) alphabet emphasizes the physicality of the argument, its real, solid existence. Making the land witness to its own transformation is a strategy that would also have resonated with Lambarde’s legal training. Traditionally, conveyancing of property had involved a ritual called livery of seisin, in which the person transferring rights to the land went with the purchaser onto the property and physically passed a symbolic element of the property—a piece of earth, a twig, or a key—to the other.68 Similarly, the two could also come within sight of the land and the purchaser be given verbal permission to enter. Both of these operate on a principle, embedded in the form of the ritual, that transferring rights to the use of land requires either a physical interaction or a visual interaction with the land itself. To enact a change in possession of land, or to be a witness to such a change, required one to go to the land. Although conveyancing purely by deed (or by methods such as use) was also possible in the sixteenth century, the symbolic impact of livery of seisin was understood and remained powerful at least until the seventeenth century. A historical marker still stands in Delaware in the United States narrating how William Penn, upon first landing in the colonies, went to a nearby fort and performed livery of seisin to take possession of his land in America.69 So it would have seemed logical, perhaps even obvious, to Lambarde that his depiction of the passing of land from the ‘unlawful’ possession of Catholic prelates and monastic foundations to the true English owners required him and his readers to ‘go’ there, following along with his literary perambulation. The idea that land is a necessary witness to its own transformation (a notion that perhaps still survives in the drive to put up histor-

67 68 69

Ibid., 284. Black’s Law Dictionary, 4th ed., s.v. ‘Livery of Seisin’ (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1951). ‘Landing Place of William Penn,’ The Historical Marker Database, created Nov. 13, 2007, , viewed 17 July, 2010.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England ical markers such as the one in Delaware) structures the Perambulation of Kent. Although the Alphabetical Description similarly used the locations of England and Wales to deride the Catholic hierarchy and monasticism, the Perambulation even more closely ties the places and the ideas together as it extends the arguments of the alphabetical work. Lambarde’s authorial persona, and by extension his reader, makes the necessary trip to witness the transformation of Kent from its Catholic past to its Protestant Tudor present. This is probably why Lambarde, although at one point he intended the Alphabetical Description to be its own project, had abandoned that idea by the time of his prefatory letter in the Perambulation and regarded it as merely a storehouse for further projects. The geographic structure makes the arguments physical. Although Lesley Cormack’s assertion that the Perambulation ‘grew out of Lambarde’s interest in Old English law’ is probably too simplistic, some of the ideologies visible in legal rituals such as livery of seisin probably shaped his chorographic work.70 Lambarde, then, abandoned Nowell’s alphabetical format to better inscribe his anti-Catholic arguments on the land and make his reader witness to its transformation, a transformation that Lambarde claims is part of the past. Lambarde, as he eventually did in his later legal writings, reintegrated the secular national goals of his mentor in Anglo-Saxon studies with the polemical ones of Archbishop Parker (of whom Lambarde speaks warmly in the Perambulation). Although Lambarde’s goal of discrediting Catholic foundations—and, perhaps, his desire for thoroughness—causes him to have a much greater chronological sweep than Nowell, some commonalities remain in their works. In nearly every entry Lambarde gives Old English etymologies for the names of Kentish places: ‘Newendene, in Saxon, Niweldene, that is, The lowe, or deepe valley …’; ‘Crayforde (alias Earde) in Saxon Creccanford, that is, the Forde (or passage) over the water, then called Crecca, now Cray.’71 Sometimes he gives more than one possibility: ‘Folkstone, in Saxon folcestane, Id est, Populi Lapis, or else flostane, which signifieth a rocke, coast, or flaw of stone, which beginneth heere: for otherwise, the Cliffe from Dover till you come almost hither, is of Chalke.’72 Lambarde includes some early ‘British’ versions and sometimes ventures etymologies based on them (especially in the 1596 edition, where he has Camden’s Britannia for a resource), but the

70 71 72

Lesley Cormack, ‘“Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England,’ Isis 82 (1991): 659. Lambarde, Perambulation, 187 and 400. Ibid., 151.

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Putting the Past in Place origin of the names he gives are primarily from ‘Saxon’ and the early history of those places is, especially, ‘Saxon’ history. Brian Robinson in his study of Elizabethan onomastics observes that ‘old buildings and ancient stones became links between the present and the past. Existing towns and people were literally derivatives, and the reader is therefore constantly referred to the names and authorities who were in contact with the original condition that gave rise to the contemporary situation.’73 Names bridged past and present, perhaps more clearly than any institution: ‘Place names are the sum of physical meaning and mythical, as well as factual, history.’74 In Lambarde’s Perambulation, that meaning and that history was primarily a Saxon one. When his place-name discussions linked to the past, to Robinson’s ‘original condition,’ he overwhelmingly referenced the period of history after the Germanic migrations and before the Norman Conquest, whatever the rest of the entry on the place might discuss of later events. Lambarde’s linguistic relationship between Old English and Modern English names very nearly becomes a racial one at times. He writes about Tanet, ‘þænet, in the Saxon, or olde English tongue, soundeth as much as, moisted or watered.’75 When he includes Geþyncþu,76 an Old English legal text from the Textus Roffensis, he drops the modifier and refers to the text as ‘another English (or Saxon) antiquitie.’77 He also claims an English identity for the Anglo-Saxons when he describes how a particular vice came in with the foreign Danes: For, whereas before the arrivall of these Danes, the English men (or Saxons) used some temperaunce in drinking, not taking thereof largely but onley at certaine great feastes and cheerings, and that in one onely wassailing cup (or Bolle) which walked rounde about the boorde at the midst of the meale. … But nowe, after the comming in of the Danes, and after such time as King Edgar had permitted them to inhabite here, and to have conversation with his owne people, Quassing and Carowsing so increased, that . … King Edgar himselfe, seeing (in his own reigne) the great outrage whereunto it was growne, was compelled to make lawe therefore. …78

The ‘English men’ are equated directly with the ‘Saxons’ and are polluted by

73 74 75 76 77 78

Brian Robinson, ‘Elizabethan Society and Its Named Places,’ Geographical Review 63 (1973): 330. Ibid. Perambulation, 88. I follow Patrick Wormald in spelling this tract’s name Geþyncþu; it can also be spelled Geþyncþo. Perambulation, 450. Ibid., 318–320.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England too much contact with the foreign outsiders that King Edgar had allowed in his realm. Lambarde in the Perambulation as previously in the Alphabetical Description casts a solidly ‘English’ identity back to the pre-Conquest period of history, blurring the boundaries between ‘then’ and ‘now’: And I would to God, that in our time also wee had not iust cause to complaine of this vicious plant of unmeasurable Boalling: which whether it be sproong up out of the olde roote, or be newly transported by some Danish enimie to all godly temperaunce and sobrietie, let them consider that with pleasure use it. …79

‘Their’ bad habits (although introduced by the Danes) are ‘our’ bad habits, Lambarde implies, whether from continuity or re-pollution by later influences. The identification of the Anglo-Saxon period of history with what is essentially English (for good or ill), and the resulting construction of Anglo-Saxon ‘England,’ pervades the Perambulation even as the ‘Saxon’ language still pervades the place names of Kent and of all England. AngloSaxon history was the history of the English identity that Lambarde wanted to construct in opposition to Catholicism. This identification with the pre-Conquest period explains, among other things, why the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex are his touchstones for strong monarchs: King Henry the Eight (whose care, and coste, for the defensing of this Realme against forreine invasion, is rightly comparable with any thing that either Eadgar, or Alfred (Kings before the Conquest), bestowed, and meerely incomparable with all that ever any other his predecessours have attempted). …80

The only kings who can compare with Henry VIII are pre-Conquest. Lambarde does not give equal praise to all Anglo-Saxon kings, but whenever possible he shifts blame for any of their actions he finds embarrassing, such as the Danegeld: At the length, Siricius the Archbishop of Canterburie persuaded the King (who in that distresse was easily bowed any way) to stop the mouthes of these Danes with a morsell of £10,000. in ready money, and so to take their promise under oath to be quiet from thencefoorth. Which devise of his, how little pollicie it had in it selfe, any wise man may see, and how pernicious it prooved in sequele, the storie of their actes following doth evidently declare.81 79 80 81

Ibid., 320–321. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 186.

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Putting the Past in Place Danegeld, not one of the Wessex monarchy’s shining moments, was all the idea of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambarde claims, calling it ‘this devise of his’ and emphasizing the desperation that led King Æthelred to adopt it when ‘any wise man’ could foresee its disastrous results. Lambarde further goes out of his way to praise the English (or Saxon) laws when he discusses Geþyncþu and, by implication, the English-Saxon kings. Even though the Perambulation, like the Alphabetical Description, covers history after the Norman Conquest (and even to the present) the pre-Conquest monarchy, history, and language retain a special status. After Nowell left England for good in 1567, Lambarde’s work slowly developed away from Nowell’s nearly exclusive focus on secular nationalism, and drew nearer to the aims of Archbishop Parker. Lambarde’s decision in the geographic organization of the Perambulation can be explained by his reintegration of Anglo-Saxon identity with Protestant religious polemic, but this still leaves the question of what had caused Nowell to adopt his structure, strikingly different from what everyone else would do, in the first place. One answer to this can be found in his maps, and I will consider his immediate political contexts more fully in relationship to some of his cartographic projects in the next chapter. As we shall see, he makes many of the same choices in his maps as in his Abcedarium index, working to present a unified whole of ‘England’ rather than the smaller, political units of counties. Lambarde’s middle way was not, however, a rejection of Nowell’s work but instead demonstrates that chorographers, even ones as closely associated as Nowell and Lambarde, positioned their works with different goals in mind, even as they worked on the same task of discovering English history in its places.

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Chapter 6 IMAGES AND IMAGININGS OF ENGLAND

N

OWELL’S MAPS offer us a chance to see, quite literally, his idea of England and his associated desires for his Anglo-Saxon research. Even though some of his maps do not directly participate in his AngloSaxon studies, they were probably related, as F.J. Levy argues: Nowell, for all that he knew Parker and Joscelyn, was working along the lines laid down by Leland rather than those of the archbishop. The restoration of Old English was intended to aid in producing a historical topography of the country: Nowell’s activities in mapping England presumably supplied the necessary geographical information.1

Viewing Nowell’s maps as merely background for his place-name research, however, misses their own nationalistic agenda and claims, claims crucial to his very idea of what England was, what it wasn’t, and what he wanted his medieval studies to accomplish. Although considering his maps may seem a departure from studying the Abcedarium and his other Old English materials, such an examination reveals important, but overlooked, evidence of Nowell’s broader cultural context and aims. The maps not only show us how he saw England and Ireland, but also how he viewed the past and the present, and how those categories, seemingly separate, became reinforcing. This has repercussions for all aspects of his Anglo-Saxon research beyond just chorography, as it gives us a framework for his linguistic and legal studies as well. Nowell’s ‘General description of England & Ireland with þe costes adioyning’ is probably the best-known of his maps (Figure 3). It is now

1

F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; repr. Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts 15, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 136.

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Images and Imaginings of England London, British Library Additional 62540. More explicitly tied to his Old English research is the series of detailed maps of southern Britain in London, British Library Cotton Domitian xviii, which often supply reconstructed Old English place names in addition to or instead of the Early Modern English versions. These maps are preceded in the notebook by a series of other historical and cartographic items, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, chronicles dealing with Anglo-Irish relationships, and maps and textual descriptions of Ireland and Scotland. Nowell’s maps of England, then, are always juxtaposed with depictions of Ireland: the ‘General description’ maps the islands of the Atlantic archipelago in one image (with the exception of the north of Scotland which is cut off by the top of the map), while the Domitian maps of England follow a series of large-scale maps of Ireland. The Irish portions of his maps have not received much attention, but Nowell’s dual vision, taking in both England (the identity of which, in his mind, overlapped with the broader category of ‘Britain’) and Ireland, led him to draw England in a way that emphasized its national coherence against the western island. Even the maps in Domitian xviii with reconstructed ‘ancient’ place names make an argument about the solidity of the modern English identity, a solidity that the ‘Old English’ names locate in the past as well as in the present. Nowell’s ‘historical’ maps in Domitian xviii also resemble his Abcedarium place-name index in their desire to subordinate an individual town’s history and identity to that of England as a whole. We cannot fully understand the Abcedarium’s place-name index and its differences from Lambarde and other chorographers, or even perhaps Nowell’s whole course of Anglo-Saxon studies, without also examining the views of England and Ireland in his maps. This chapter will, accordingly, discuss how the depiction of landscape in the ‘General description’ combines with its marginal decoration to present to the reader a complex relationship between Britain and Ireland. The human and animal figures in the corners of the map shape and reinforce the claims about Irish wildness, backwardness, and savagery that the landmass itself displays. The ‘General description’ also illuminates some of the slippery claims about ‘English’ identity that Nowell and his predecessor in chorography, John Leland, attempt to put forth. With this image of the Atlantic archipelago in mind, the underlying logic behind the series of materials in Nowell’s notebook in Cotton Domitian xviii becomes clearer, as the interaction between the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Scottish and Irish maps and the text that accompanies them, and the maps of southern Britain with reconstructed ‘Old English’ place names reinforces and extends the claims of the ‘General description.’ Nowell’s depictions of

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Ireland also place his descriptions, textual and visual, in the context of Elizabethan argument over Anglo-Irish relationships, and the chapter will conclude by examining Nowell’s Domitian notebook together with Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and considering the possible circulation that Nowell’s manuscripts might have had among those thinking and writing about England and Ireland. ‘ENGLAND AND IRELAND WITH THE COSTES ADIOYNING’ The sixteenth century saw the beginning of modern cartography, in the sense that it was understood to accurately represent the physical landscape, and Nowell’s ‘General description’ is often discussed in that context.2 P.D.A. Harvey’s Maps in Tudor England uses Nowell’s ‘General description’ as the front cover illustration, with a comment on the back cover flap that it ‘is the first “modern” map of Britain.’3 Nowell’s ‘General description,’ however, representative as it claims to be, also makes an argument about the land it draws and about the crown’s political control over it. Theoretical study of such claims has often focused on later colonial maps, in which a conquering (or would-be conquering) European nation maps an unfamiliar territory as part of the process of gaining dominance over it and its inhabitants. As Geoff King argues, ‘to map a territory is to stake various kinds of claim to it, to make assertions of ownership, sovereignty and legitimacy of rule.’4 Like the later colonial maps that, by the very act of map-making, made claims about sovereignty, early maps of England such as Nowell’s staked out the territory of self-rule—and of rule over Ireland, which, despite its proximity, often figured in Elizabethan writing and thought in much the same way that the American colonies would do in later decades. Nowell’s historical moment was one in which the politically powerful in England felt that their claims to hegemony needed to be strengthened. The emphasis on English self-rule in the Elizabethan period can be tied in part to the break from Rome, but as Cathy Shrank reminds us, ‘the Reformation 2

3

4

Lesley Cormack, ‘“Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England,’ Isis 82 (1991): 639–661, traces the development of the fields of early modern geography and map-making. P.D.A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Peter Barber, however, although he acknowledges that Nowell’s map may be the first map that was not derived from a fourteenth-century model, believes that ‘the map’s “modernity” should not be overstated.’ Barber, ‘A Tudor Mystery: Laurence Nowell’s Map of England and Ireland,’ Map Collector 22 (1983): 19. Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (New York: St. Martins, 1996), 27.

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Images and Imaginings of England

Figure 3: Nowell’s ‘General description.’ London, British Library Additional 62540. Used with Permission of the British Library.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England in England is a process, not an event’ and so too was the consolidation of an English identity connected to the Tudor monarchs.5 Although it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to assume that Elizabeth and her court were secure in their power, which would last for decades, contemporaries had reason to feel uneasy. The English succession after the death of Mary Tudor had by no means been assured. The new ruler was a woman, a situation that John Knox had decried with relish during Mary’s reign. Foreign monarchs and papal authority were viewed as ever-present threats. Securing Elizabeth’s control was crucial, and no one was more involved in the effort than William Cecil, Nowell’s employer. While nineteenth-century English politicians felt secure in their control over Britain but needed to assert their dominion overseas, sixteenth-century English authorities first needed to define Britain itself as united under control of the Queen and her council. Particularly in the early Elizabethan period, national maps were a form of wishful thinking: ‘Rather than merely representing an abstract and homogeneous space, the map can be seen to assert it.’6 As one of the first national maps, Nowell’s ‘General description’ helped begin this process of asserting claims to territory through maps, as it presents a complex view of English identity and the relationship between England and Ireland as part of their natural landscapes. First, and probably most immediately obvious, is the very title Nowell gives his map in the cartouche in the upper-right corner: ‘A general description of England & Ireland with þe costes adioyning.’ This title implies that everything on the map that is not Ireland or the ‘adjoining’ coasts of France is England, collapsing British identity into English identity by making Wales and Scotland part of ‘England.’ The practice of sixteenth-century chorographers in claiming that ‘British’ identity is English identity (and vice versa), until the two concepts collapse into each other as they do on Nowell’s map, was widespread, as we have seen already. In Philip Schwyzer’s typically apt phrase, ‘ ‘‘England” in the Tudor era was a name to conjure with—but what it conjured was very often Britain.’7 This confluence of identities, also very apparent in Nowell’s predecessor John Leland’s treatment of Wales in his printed works, was crucial for Nowell, as he wished to establish Ireland as a space ripe for English conquest and needed to draw, as much as possible,

5 6 7

Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (2004; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10. King, Mapping Reality, 174, emphasis original. Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 5.

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Images and Imaginings of England two opposed entities north of the ‘costes adioyning.’ Areas on Nowell’s maps that are not even part of England make arguments about English identity. Or at least, Nowell wants them to do so; his depictions also demonstrate the difficulties with such claims, particularly with regard to Scotland. While the word ‘Wales’ does not appear on his map, showing Wales as completely continuous with the England of the title, Nowell does feel forced to acknowledge some distinction with Scotland, apparently, for he writes ‘part of Scotlande’ on the land just north of the Solway Firth, and also, as Bernhard Klein observes, colors Scotland differently from the rest of Britain.8 Scotland, which is not even drawn in its entirety, is differentiated from England (or ‘England’) to the south of it, but that admission is suppressed by the title Nowell gives his map in the cartouche in the upperright corner. Nowell wants the viewer to focus on ‘England and Ireland’ and does what he can to elide Scotland into the category of England. Nowell’s preoccupation with England and Ireland may have arisen from the concerns of his audience. He probably drew the ‘General description’ for William Cecil; certainly Cecil ended up with it, as his hand appears on the back of the map, where he jotted some itineraries. One subsequent owner, Lord Shelborne, noted on the map’s cover that Lord Burghley (Cecil) always carried the map with him.9 Cecil’s role as the map’s audience both explains Nowell’s interest in the national identity of England, for Cecil himself was concerned with founding a sense of ‘Englishness’ as a way to secure Elizabeth’s control of the country, and also demonstrates that Nowell’s map, even though it was never printed as were the maps of Christopher Saxton, had the opportunity to influence the ‘view’ of a key figure in Elizabeth’s government. The gaze that took in ‘England and Ireland’ as Nowell drew them was that of a man deeply concerned with English rule in Ireland, and who was in a position to influence if not determine England’s policy, including military policy, in the western island. Following the map of the Atlantic archipelago in the manuscript is a map of Sicily, which Peter Barber believes was ‘very closely modeled on one in a Lafreri atlas acquired by Cecil late in 1566.’10 This may be true, but Carl Berkhout has shown that Nowell had traveled through Italy; how far south 8 9

10

Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 99. Robin Flower identifies the hand as Shelborne’s in ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935); reprinted in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 15. All citations are to the 1990 reprint. Barber, ‘Tudor Mystery,’ 18.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England he ventured is unclear.11 Perhaps this could be another of Nowell’s own maps. No one has suggested why the maps were bound together. Perhaps Nowell included Sicily—Sicilia—as a pun on Cecil’s surname, a flattering suggestion that Cecil (who was not yet Baron of Burghley) had a ‘landed’ name. Cecil’s family name had been written ‘Cyssyll,’ and been ‘pronounced like “Sicily” without the y’; Willam Cecil himself spelled it ‘Cicyll’ until he was in his thirties.12 If the earlier pronunciation survived, then a map of ‘Sicilia’ could further indicate that the entire thing was not only given to Cecil but composed for him.13 Nowell’s ‘General description’ and its ideological claims about England and Ireland are easier to see in the context of the medieval tradition of cartography with which he and his contemporaries broke. As a comparison, I will consider one of the maps of Britain drawn by Matthew Paris, a thirteenthcentury chronicler and cartographer. Nowell was familiar with Paris’s work; Nowell’s notebook in the Huntington Library includes excerpts from the famous chronicler of St. Alban’s (San Marino, Huntington Library HM 26341). Matthew Paris’s most complete map of Britain can be found in London, British Library Cotton Claudius D.vi; another map of Britain appears in his hand in London, British Library Royal MS14.C.vii. In these maps, the southern portion of Britain squares itself solidly with the edges of the page.14 Wales makes a slight bulge in the west coastline, but does not jut out very far. Only Cornwall is allowed to trail a bit to the west, and then goes off the map’s edge, but this irregularity is down at the far left corner. The mass of England and Wales is unmistakably rectangular in conformity with Paris’s writing area; such ‘excessively simple geometrical shape[s]’ are a common feature for maps that predate mathematical surveying methods.15 This effect is furthered by the use of different colors for the internal waterways and the seas surrounding Britain. Although we must be careful with

11

12 13

14

15

Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell: 1530–ca. 1570,’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 6. Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. If true, and of course it is only conjecture, it also indicates a puckish sense of humor in Nowell, which can also perhaps be glimpsed at the entry ‘Felton’ in the Vocabularium (see Chapter Two). Facsimiles of Paris’s maps are found in Matthew Paris, Four Maps of Great Britain Designed by Matthew Paris about A.D. 1250, ed. J.P. Gilson et al. (London: British Museum, 1928). Images are also available at . J.H. Andrews, Shapes of Ireland: Maps and Their Makers 1564–1839 (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1997), 31.

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Images and Imaginings of England drawing conclusions based on color, as tints can and do fade, the fact that the seas have faded such that they appear green, while the rivers remain blue, argues that even when the map was new, they were not the same shade. The firths and estuaries created by the mouths of rivers become part of the landmass rather than part of the water surrounding it, adding to the overall rectilinear shape of southern Britain. Scotland, however, does not conform to the same pattern as England and Wales, but visually divides the island into discrete units. Once north of the ‘murus diuidens scots et pictos olim’ (wall formerly dividing the scots [i.e. the Celts] and the picts) the seas begin to make more notable incursions into the landmass. The Solway Firth is first to carve its way in, and north of it the western coast begins to curve in to the east. North of the River Clyde, a major firth, perhaps the Firth of Lorn, cuts in at the same latitude as another, which is probably meant to be the Firth of Forth. The result is that Scotland is nearly bisected, and the highlands remain attached to the rest of Britain by the narrowest of land-necks. At the top of Paris’s map, Scotland continues its sharp curve to the east, perhaps, as the editors of the modern facsimile note, influenced by the circular world maps then in vogue.16 As Alan MacColl observes, Paris’s depiction of Scotland’s near-complete separation from southern Britain probably drew on textual descriptions of the island such as that of Bede, who states that Scotland is ‘over the waters’ because two firths almost entirely separate it from the rest of Britain.17 MacColl speculates that Bede’s descriptions and Paris’s maps may have been ‘one of the factors that contributed to the restricted sense of “Britain” as the kingdom of England itself and indeed to the idea of “British” England as an island (or almost an island) physically separate from Scotland.’18 The echoes of this conception, dating from centuries before his own, are part of what allowed Nowell to claim that his map showed ‘England and Ireland,’ even though England’s truly ‘insular’ status had been debunked by the very idea of representational cartography that he helped to pioneer. The impression that Paris’s map leaves on the observer is of a regular, rectangular England and Wales, divided from a Scotland that curves and is encroached upon by the surrounding sea. Ireland does not appear on his map. Paris’s map, drawn for meditative and cognitive purposes instead of as an aid to travel or political control, looks strange to twenty-first-century

16 17 18

Matthew Paris, Four Maps of Great Britain, 4. Alan MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England,’ Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 259–260. Ibid., 260.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England viewers.19 Nowell’s ‘General description’ takes a shape more familiar to modern audiences, since it aims to be representative. Although it is in some ways more difficult to examine a map that looks more ‘right’ to modern eyes than the medieval map of Matthew Paris, we should not assume that Nowell’s map is merely mimetic and therefore that its information is conveyed in an ideological vacuum. Bernhard Klein has detailed some of the claims of Nowell’s ‘General description’ and his points are worth a quick summary here. Klein states that the strategies of an ‘imperial’ map ‘actively create, rather than passively reflect, the actuality of its immediate referent, the space of the land.’20 The Tudor coat of arms on the ‘General description’ qualifies it as an imperial map, he argues, as it claims that England and Ireland are governed by Elizabeth and nearly elides Scotland into this claim as well.21 The land itself makes the same argument. In contrast to the traditional depiction of Britain as straight north–south or even bending to the east towards the top, as in the Paris maps, Nowell’s curves to the west: as if to bend over and encircle its neighbouring isle. The political statement of the map—the description of a space that aspires to the collective vision of a fully anglicized terrain—is thus translated into an almost physical incorporation of those areas which, viewed from the English centre of power, constitute the … culturally diverse margins of the Tudor state.22

While perhaps it is tempting to dismiss Klein’s argument and write off the curve of Nowell’s map as simply mimetic—after all, Britain does tend to the west—Nowell’s map exaggerates both this tendency and the stretch of Cornwall into the ocean south of Ireland, as if Britain is about to embrace or capture the neighboring isle. The coloring of Ireland, however, separates it from England, as Klein observes: Yet the image of Ireland disputes this scenario [i.e., the absorption of Ireland by Britain] by visually resisting such geographical appropriation.

19

20 21 22

This is not to say that Paris’s maps must necessarily be devoid of any claims about Britain. See, for instance, Katharine Breen, ‘Returning Home From Jerusalem: Matthew Paris’s First Map of Britain in Its Manuscript Context,’ Representations 89 (2005): 59–93. For the contemplative aspect of Paris’s maps, see Daniel Connolly, ‘Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,’ Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 598–622. For the mnemonic purpose of maps generally, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, 80. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 116.

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Images and Imaginings of England Large clusters of green suggest the intractability of a wild and barbaric landscape, its rough texture spells out the absence of spatial order. Pulled westward by the dynamism of the cartographic shape the viewer’s gaze centres not on the dense toponymic surface of Britain but on the graphic irregularities and textual gaps of an ‘unfinished’ Ireland, acting as the constant reminder of the incomplete conquest.23

The result conflicts: ‘Nowell’s Ireland … oscillates between its status as alien other and as an integral part of the national landscape.’24 Klein’s excellent points about the relationship between the two islands should be extended, however. First, the ‘part of Scotlande’ that Nowell draws does not participate in the ‘dense toponymic surface of Britain,’ as it, like Ireland, is mostly devoid of place names. England and Wales, which are not differentiated from each other, are the areas of the maps where the place names cover the surface of the land. Also, Ireland is elongated, looming just off Britain’s western coast from central Cornwall in the south to the Isle of Skye in the north. If Britain’s extension toward its neighbor is grasping, Ireland’s long, thick mass hovering off the west coast could also strike a sixteenth-century Englishman as ominous. The total land area of Ireland is nearly the same as that of Britain in Nowell’s map, presenting a prospect of resources nearly equal to England’s. The size of Ireland reflects the crucial role that it held in defining England—it was an alternate space in the Atlantic archipelago, one that coexisted uneasily with ‘English’ Britain. Ireland’s scale in Nowell’s ‘General description’ represents its importance to him in depicting what was ‘England.’ Even more important to our understanding of Ireland in the ‘General description’ is the western island’s rectilinear aspect, with the curves of the south coast and the inlets of the west coast mostly erased, so that Ireland becomes the rectangle that southern Britain was in the medieval maps of Matthew Paris. Ireland is unreformed by contemporary cartographic principles. This does not strike me as accidental. Even as Nowell works to give a ‘modern’ representation of the shape and coasts of Britain, however informed by contemporary desires and demands, his depiction of the neighboring Isle recalls the unrealistic representations of the past. Even if the shape of Ireland was determined by his source, as J.H. Andrews suggests, Nowell’s omission of the Irish counties (in contrast to Britain, where counties are named in red ink) ‘gives the impression of deliberately emphasising the Gaelic

23 24

Ibid., 116–117. Ibid., 117.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England and Norman periods, perhaps to the extent of editing-out more recent information.’25 The English medieval past and the Irish present coincide. The two male figures drawn in the ‘General description’s’ lower two corners extend the ambiguity of Ireland’s relation to Britain, depicted as part of the Queen’s dominion yet resistant to English sovereignty. The lefthand figure rests on his side with his right elbow propped on a block, holding an empty purse with his other hand as a dog barks at him menacingly. A Greek inscription from Hesiod’s Works and Days appears on the block on which the figure leans, which, translated, reads ‘In that strong station Hope alone abode / Neath the jar’s rim, nor fluttered thence abroad.’26 The figure on the right sits erect on an hourglass, leaning slightly back as if resting against the map’s edge. His arms are crossed, one leg is stretched out, and objects that I take to be books are scattered under his legs. On the hourglass is another Greek inscription, which translates ‘Hope on and endure.’27 Scholars have assumed that the figure on the left represents Nowell, while that on the right represents Cecil, although Klein points out this is not a certain identification. Klein reads the two figures as commenting on their respective halves of the map: In so far as both figures assume classic postures of melancholy, they amplify the English–Irish duality into a double state of dejection; but it is the depressed stance of the cartographer, attacked by the bane of surveyors, a baying hound, which condenses into one image the English frustration with the canine Irish, perceived as savage and barbaric, over whose territory the seditious contents of Pandora’s box hold sway at will.28

Klein’s mention of Pandora’s box refers to the section of Hesiod in which the left inscription is found, and he goes on to correlate the empty pouch in the left figure’s hand to that myth. The empty purse demonstrates the ‘squandered resources of Ireland,’ foolishly unleashed with evil results.29 Klein’s reading of the text and the drawing together is astute and his interpretation of the left-hand figure is suggestive, but the right-hand figure does not seem to me to be particularly dejected. The crossing of the arms and stretching 25

26 27 28 29

Andrews, Shapes of Ireland, 45; Andrews also discusses the general use of cartography for administrative purposes in Ireland during Elizabeth’s reign in ‘Geography and Government in Elizabethan Ireland,’ in Irish Geographical Studies in Honour of E. Estyn Evans, ed. Nicholas Stephens and Robin Glasscock (Belfast: Queen’s University Press, 1970), 178–191. English translation by Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England,’ 15. English translation by Flower, ibid. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, 115–116. Ibid., 116.

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Images and Imaginings of England out of the leg could certainly mimic some of the classic stances of melancholia as Klein argues, but the figure’s spine is straight, the head erect rather than lolling back as in Isaac Oliver’s famous (and later) Portrait of a Melancholy Young Man (c. 1590–1595). Nowell’s figure has crossed arms, but they are crossed high, over the chest, rather than Oliver’s young man whose arms drape limply over his waist; Nowell’s figure sits stiffly upright, while Oliver’s slumps in dejection. Overall, the viewer’s impression of Nowell’s sketch is one of sternness and rigidity, not melancholy. While the left-hand scene has an empty purse and a barking dog, the right-hand figure is drawn with books—emblems of law, religion, and culture—scattered by his seat, which is itself an hourglass. Time has visibly progressed on the ‘English’ half of the map, represented by the hourglass, while the ‘Irish’ side remains static and backwards by comparison. The right-hand figure does not face the viewing audience as its counterpart does, but rather sits with his eyes facing west, gazing sternly at the left-hand figure. If this is a portrait of Cecil, then the figure’s gaze, taking in the view of his poor and threatened neighbor whose empty purse shows his need of aid, mimics the view of the real Cecil, whose eyes, it suggests, should also be turned to the west. Nowell’s other portraits and border sketches capture the ambiguities and problems of the English claim to Irish rule, and Nowell’s argument for the ‘bestial’ nature of the Irish people. Although Klein focuses chiefly on the human figures, the animals that Nowell draws around the borders of his map also function in its interpretation. The sea monster drawn next to the Tudor coat of arms in the upper left-hand corner, which Klein does not comment on, turns its back on the symbol of English rule and bares sharp teeth toward the east. However, it is visually linked to the coat of arms, as the arc of the crown and the tip of the creature’s tail nearly touch and form a continuous S curve. This monstrosity stands on the ‘Irish’ side of the map, and attempts to threaten the eastern half, but is visually subordinated to the coat of arms behind it. The barking dog, according to Klein, represents Irish ‘savagery,’ demonstrating the English contempt for the ‘wild Irish’ and their ferocious ways. The dog indeed takes an unmistakably combative stance; with its teeth showing, tail lowered, and the fur on its shoulders brindled, it is a realistic drawing of an aggressive dog—as we would expect, for Nowell had something of a gift for portraiture.30 However, the dog has also been drawn with a visible erection, a detail that works against the accuracy of the drawing. It would be an unrealistic—and biologically inappropriate— 30

Alford includes in his book a reproduction of a plan Cecil commissioned for a family tomb, which he believes may be Nowell’s work. Alford, Burghley, 150.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England response for a dog facing a potential fight to make itself vulnerable in this way. Yet, Nowell chose to add this detail, even though it impairs the accuracy of his sketch; it must have been necessary to represent the ideas he wanted to convey. The dog reflects both ferocity and sexual appetites which, as we shall see, Nowell’s notes in Domitian xviii also assigned to the Irish warriors. Although less startling than the erection on the dog, the left-hand male figure’s codpiece is also prominently displayed and is dotted with red ink. Elaborately decorated and visible codpieces are common in male portraiture of the sixteenth century, but the colored codpiece here reinforces the image of the dog’s erection. If the dog represents the wild (i.e. Gaelic) Irish, as Klein suggests, then the human perhaps figures the role of the AngloIrish settlers, those inhabitants of Ireland descended from Norman invaders.31 As Nicholas Canny has shown, the identity of the Anglo-Irish settlers posed a problem for Tudor nationalism; they were neither quite Irish nor English.32 The Anglo-Irish were often described as poor and ineffective against the depredations of the Gaelic chieftains, forced to pay extortion money or ‘black rent’ to keep their possessions from being plundered. They were also viewed as dangerously contaminated by the Gaelic Irish, speaking Gaelic fluently and sharing the Catholic faith with the other inhabitants of the western island. Nowell’s ‘General description’ makes visible such descriptions of Anglo-Irish. The human figure on the left is supine, rather than upright, poor, and is drawn with a highly visible codpiece, hinting at a rampant sexuality in common with his bestial antagonist. This man’s dejected posture shows his recognition of his dire need for aid; the right-hand figure gazing at him must be aware of it as well. Even if on the surface these two drawings are a plea for resources from Nowell to his patron, and this is not certain, that does not negate their relationship to west and east within the British Isles, nor the way that the western side seems to require intervention from the east. 31

32

The terms ‘Anglo-Irish’ and ‘Gaelic Irish’ themselves carry ideological problems. Their opposition suggests that language is a differentiating quality, but by the sixteenth century most of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ spoke Gaelic. They had inhabited the island for 400 years by then, so although originally descended from Normans, most of them certainly had Celtic ancestors as well. I will still use the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ in this chapter, however, even with all these caveats, to designate the group of people in Ireland who identified themselves, and were identified by English subjects and the other inhabitants of Ireland, as culturally distinct from both Gaelic Irish and the English living in England. Nicholas Canny, ‘Introduction: Spenser and Reform in Ireland,’ in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), 9–24.

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Images and Imaginings of England Ultimately, Nowell’s ‘General description’ locates England and the English in relation to a technologically backwards, inappropriately sexual, poor, and savage Ireland, in part by co-opting the category of ‘British’ unto itself. The two depictions depend on each other—the modern island, drawn with the aid of contemporary tools for cartography, against the one reminiscent of older maps; the controlled and civilized male portrait against the poor one, threatened by animalistic enemies and perhaps falling under the influence of his foes even as he slumps in dejection. As Patricia Palmer observes, ‘the 1541 Act which brought Ireland directly under the sovereignty of the king allowed Englishmen to view Ireland as an integral part of the Tudor kingdom. Their Ireland was a domestic rather than a foreign affair. … What was different was merely deviant and would be refused recognition on its own terms.’33 Deviance implies a normal state against which the deviant transgresses; the negative depiction of Ireland and the more positive depiction of England must be drawn together for Nowell’s map to make its points. Likewise, his series of large-scale maps of England and of Ireland coexist in the same manuscript, Cotton Domitian xviii. In that codex, which also contains items stemming from his interest in Anglo-Saxon England, Nowell’s views on Ireland and his attempts at establishing an Irish identity against which the English can define themselves are conveyed in both image and text, making his point even more clearly than in his ‘General description.’ OLD ENGLISH AND IRISH CONQUEST IN COTTON DOMITIAN XVIII British Library Cotton Domitian xviii is, like many of Robert Cotton’s former holdings, a composite; Nowell’s maps and writings appear on folios 37 through 125. The first eleven leaves of Nowell’s notebook contain the edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle discussed in Chapter Four. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is followed by Walter of Gisburn’s Chronicle on folios 49–57r, followed in turn on folio 57v by a Chronicle of Ireland which Robin Flower has shown was collected from Philip Flattisbury’s Annals, supplemented by the works of Giraldus Cambrensis and Henry de Marleburgh.34 A series of Irish genealogies begins on folio 91r, and on folio 33

34

Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46. For a discussion of these authors, see Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England,’ 20.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England 93r Nowell copies ‘An abbreviat of the getting of Ireland and the decay of the same,’ a condensed version of Patrick Finglas’s ‘Breviate of the getting of Ireland and the decay of the same.’ Joseph Planta’s catalogue lists the remainder of Nowell’s notebook as a single item, number 13: Variae mappae chorographicae Hibernae, Scotiae, Angliae et Walliae; quarum illae quae Angliam describunt, Saxonicis characteribus a laudato ut videtur Laur. Nowello exarantur: additis quibusdam observationibus historicis. [Various chorographic maps of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales; of which those that display England appear to have been drawn by the esteemed Laurence Nowell in Saxon characters; certain historical observations have been added.]35

The ‘historical observations,’ however, have not simply been added; rather, they form an integral part of the notebook. Interspersed with Nowell’s maps of Ireland and the Hebrides, the notes appear on the versos and rectos of leaves which contain maps on their other side; Nowell deliberately drew his maps so that he would have spaces to write these notes (or vice versa). Planta’s item 13 can be broken down into the following: 1. fol. 97r. A map of Ireland, monochrome. It is nearly identical to the depiction of Ireland in Nowell’s ‘General description’ and has a visible grid. The text at places is very small, and the map was perhaps scaled down from a larger one, as Peter Barber suggests.36 2. fol. 97v. Notes on Ireland, discussing how the four great saints had prophesied that the English should rule there ‘so long as they shuld keepe ther owne lawes but falling to Irishe order they shuld decaye.’ Other paragraphs discuss where a reformation might best be seeded in Ireland and what lands could be parceled out as gifts to English or Irish subjects who aided the English cause. 3. fol. 98v–99r. ‘The out yles called hebrides.’ Maps in ink and wash. Seacoasts are washed blue in the water and yellow on the land. Mountain ranges are colored in light brown. Earldoms are written in red ink. This map is also gridded and ruled, perhaps (again) scaled down from a larger map. 4. fol. 99v. A list of Archbishops and bishops in Ireland, followed by the names of the provinces (and the barony of Meath) in Gaelic and a list of the ‘Hauens of Ireland.’

35 36

Joseph Planta, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library Deposited in the British Museum (London: 1802), s.v. Domitian xviii. Also available on . Barber, ‘Tudor Mystery,’ 19. This larger map might be London, British Library Cotton Charter xiii.42, a map of Ireland which has been attributed to Nowell.

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Images and Imaginings of England 5. fol. 100r. ‘A description of the power of Irishmen.’ The text begins with the note: ‘None of this land obeye the kings lawes sauing a part of the 4 shires called Midth Uriell Dublin et Kildare wche of their owne power be scant hable to susteyne the warres of 3 Irishmen.’ Following is a list of each earldom or province followed by its number of ‘horse,’ ‘baytayle,’ and ‘kern’ (abbreviated h, b, and k after the first entry).37 6. fol. 100v–101r. A larger-scale map of Ireland, showing the southern half of the island. Mostly monochromatic, although earls, barons, lords, and clan names are in red ink. 7. fol. 101v–102r. Continuation and conclusion of the ‘Power of Irishmen.’ The text explains what a battalion of galloglass is (‘60 or 80 men harneysed on foot wth sparres’), as well as the usual armaments of horse and kern, then turns to a description of the ferocity of Irish soldiers. 8. fol. 102v–103r. Continuation of the large-scale map of Ireland, showing the northern portion. Like number 6, uncolored except for titles. 9. fol. 103v–104r. Continuation of the text from number 7, followed by a list of ‘Paces [i.e. roads] to be Cutte,’ and an explanation of the exacting of coyn and livery. The text lists ‘The reuenues of Ireland,’ explains the process of transmitting land to the strongest member of the extended family, and lists ‘Englisshe men becumme Irisshe.’ It further notes ‘All the countryes of Irland’ and ‘English countres paying yeerly tribute to wild Irishe’ (i.e. black rent) county by county. 10. fol.104v–105r. A map of the southern part of Scotland. Monochrome. f. 105v–106r are blank. 11. fol. 106v–107r. Map of northern Scotland, continuation of number 10 above. The verso of 107 is blank. 12. fol. 108r. A description of some of the Hebrides. Folios 108 verso and 109 recto are blank. 13. fol. 109v–110r. An excerpt describing Scotland from Book I of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. 14. fol.110v–123r. Maps of southern Britain with conjectured Anglo-Saxon place names. Mostly monochromatic, although earldoms or other aristocratic family names are noted in red with a red circle drawn around the town that is the seat of that family.

Nowell’s notes about Ireland are not, as this detailed list of contents makes clear, simply ‘historical observations’ but rather contain tactical information crucial to a military campaign—harbors, allies, munitions, and troops of the Irish and Anglo-Irish, the roads that would need to be cut, the spoils 37

This section of the text has been edited by L. Price, ‘Armed Forces of the Irish Chiefs in the Early 16th Century,’ Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 62 (1932): 201–207.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England that could be used as incentives—and, of course, the maps of Ireland and the Gaelic-speaking portions of Scotland. The maps themselves are part and parcel with the strategic information with which they are interlaced; as Klein observes, in Ireland especially map-making was seen as a ‘hostile intrusion.’38 The English colonizers likewise felt that maps of Ireland were not to be publicly displayed: ‘In Ireland, precise territorial knowledge was considered sensitive political information and one would not expect such data to be freely available.’39 Although Nowell probably drew the originals for the maps he copied into Domitian xviii, the interleaved text is not his own composition.40 L. Price, based on the information given about the various Irish leaders in the ‘Powers of Irishmen,’ dates that section to 1537–1540; certainly it must date before 1540, when McWilliam Burke (or de Burghe) submitted to Henry VIII.41 Perhaps the entire text dates from that time. Even before the Act of 1541 that proclaimed him king of Ireland, Henry had been consolidating his power in the western island. In 1534 he violently quelled the uprising of ‘Silken Thomas’ Fitzgerald, and in 1536 had been proclaimed head of the Church in Ireland.42 A treatise from the 1530s could make arguments that still seemed relevant in the 1560s, although the monarch of England was not yet the official sovereign of Ireland when the tract was written. Even if the tactical lists were out of date by Nowell’s time, the array of well-armed and bitterly hostile ‘enemies’ arranged against the English is still ominous, and Nowell thought them relevant enough to include with his maps. The text and the maps themselves all argue for a renewed conquest of Ireland, for they contain information that an army would need to launch an invasion. Some of the notes Nowell includes in these pages are not, technically speaking, tactically relevant, but are ideologically crucial to an argument for English dominion over Ireland. They attempt to portray the Irish in

38 39 40

41 42

Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, 112. Ibid., 113. Robin Flower suggests that the notes in Domitian xviii are related to the 1564 ‘Description of Ireland’ that Multon Lambarde mentions in his catalogue, but Flower does not suggest a possible source for either; perhaps he believed Nowell composed the text. Flower, ‘Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England,’ 15. Price, ‘Armed Forces,’ 201. For a brief overview of Tudor activity in Ireland in the 1530s, see G.A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘The Tudor Conquest (1534–1603),’ in The Course of Irish History, 2nd ed., ed. T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin (1984; Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1994), 174–188, and Nicholas Canny, ‘Early Modern Ireland c. 1500–1700,’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, ed. Roy Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 104–160.

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Images and Imaginings of England ways that allow them to be cast as alternate, and inferior, to the English. For the text in Domitian xviii, the yardstick of Irish deviance is the degree to which Gaelic- and Anglo-Irish accept or reject the laws of England, which the text refers to as ‘the kings laws.’ It also assigns to the Irish licentious sexual habits and irregular (from an English perspective) customs of leaving land, and notes the danger of having a Catholic nation on England’s doorstep. Such claims are interlaced with tactical information about the military and economic resources of the Irish in the earlier part of the century. The arrangement of materials presents a cohesive argument for Irish lawlessness and English intervention. The emphasis on law begins with the first sentence on folio 97v: ‘The 4 saintes in Ireland, id est S. Patricke, S. Colomb S. Braghan & S. Maling prophecied many hundreth yeares ago that Englishmen shuld conqueare Irelond & keepe it in prosperitie so long as they shuld keepe their owne lawes but falling to Irish order they shuld decaye.’ The rule of England over Ireland was itself ordained by the very saints Ireland revered, and the concept of ‘falling to Irish order,’ with the Biblical overtones of ‘falling,’ claims that ‘Irish order’ was inferior to English law. The following paragraph takes up specific tactical details, noting that ‘The beginning of reformation shuld be in Leinster situate in an Angle betwixt Waterford & Dublin.’ Reformation, which is probably not used here in the specifically religious sense, means dispossession for the inhabitants of Leinster, a re-formation of the Irish power structure in two senses, and that can only mean a military conflict. The ‘reformation’ would mean some lands would be available to offer as spoils to the victorious English: ‘To be gyuen Old Rosse with the Falagh of Beautrie. The castle of Caterlagh …’ and so on for a full paragraph. The description of the ‘power of Irishmen’ (i.e., how many horse, kern, and galloglass each major chieftain in each county can field) also claims the Irish disregard the laws of England: ‘None of this land obeye the kings lawes saving a part of the 4 shires called Midth Vriell Dublin & Kildare wich of their owne power be scant hable to susteyne the warres of 3 Irishmen.’43 The text stresses further the feebleness of the few who might wish to obey the laws in its discussion of Wexford: ‘Weixford … so environed with Irishmen that they cannot answere the kinges deputie neyther of power to keep themselues saue onely by paying yearly tribute to Irishmen.’44 The Anglo-Irish are either ineffective against their Gaelic enemies, or, worse, they have assimilated to their habits, as the Burke family of Connacht: 43 44

Fol. 100r. Ibid.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Both the sayd Lord Burgs called eyther of them McWilliam be mortall ennimies … & be of no better condition than Irishmen. Wearing Irish apparayle & so frended & allied with them that they take their part against the kinges subiects hating the kinges Lawes.45

The Anglo-Irish complicate the English conception of Ireland, as we have seen in our discussion of the ‘General description.’ One the one hand, their ancestors were Norman, and they occupied an area of the country that was under nominal control of the English crown, the Pale. On the other hand, they were co-religionists with the Gaelic Irish, for the most part, and English writers and reformers increasingly mistrusted their ability or desire to aid the cause of the English monarch in Ireland. In this text, Anglo-Irish animosity toward the laws is a marker of their hostility towards England; the case of the Burkes shows this clearly in the text’s final comment that they act ‘against the kinges subiects hating the kings Lawes.’ Perhaps the most ideologically telling section of Domitian xviii’s text comes between the conclusion of the discussion of the armaments of a kern, horse, and galloglas, and the list of ‘paces to be cut.’ Nowell copies a description of the habits of the Irish that bears repeating in full: They be for the most part good & hardie men of warre & can liue hardly & suffer great miserie. they will aduenture themselues greatly on their ennimies seing time to doo it. Good watchers in the night, as good souldiours by night as others by daye. These Irishmen hate the kinges lawes & subiectes mortally & not withstanding all giftes & other whan they see time they doo their best for their advantage. They use alway to make themselues strong & all the goodes of their subiects they take whan please them as their proper goodes. Whan a lord dieth the strongest & best is made lord after him & capitayne & seldom dooth any of the sonnes succedde his father. They gette many children besides their wiues wherof all be gentlemen & their fathers landes purchase & fermes is aequally deuided amongst them. Their sonnes learne to be men of warre from the age of 16. yeares & be continually practysed in fight thereof They prouide for them benefices from Rome though they can skarcely reade, the profites wherof they spend against vs But god prouides setting continuali dissention emonyst them & mortall warre.46

This text employs several strategies to depict the Irish as alien others, even

45 46

Fol. 102r. Fol. 102r and 103v.

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Images and Imaginings of England while it seems to praise their martial talents. When it notes that they are fierce warriors (perhaps as a way to shame English readers into military action), it also adds that they are excellent ‘souldours by night,’ linking the Irish warriors with darkness, and thus with treachery and devious practices. The Irish also dissemble, for they ‘hate the kinges lawes and subiects mortally’ and will take gifts from representatives of English government while plotting to harm them. The Irish are depicted as savage, absolutely and irrationally inimical to their neighbors and fellow subjects. The text not only states that the Irish hate English law, but the customs it describes show them acting in opposition to it. English law concerned itself greatly with property—protecting the rights of landowners, recognizing lawful heirs, and ensuring that land stayed in the hands of those who (under the law) were entitled to it. Irish custom, in this description, did none of these things. Land and goods were taken by force by those with enough power to do so; the inheritance of property involved division of large estates and the succession of a son to his father’s title was not observed. By avoiding the name for the hereditary title, ‘tanist,’ or any explanation of the process of selection, the description denies the Irish practice its own legitimate identity and only allows it to be read as deviant from English inheritance customs. Furthermore, the supposed promiscuity of the Irish eroded the difference between the social classes, further upsetting (from the point of view of a sixteenth-century Englishman) any chance of an orderly society and also disrupting hereditary property rights. A view of natives as sexualized ‘Others’ is hardly rare in colonial texts. However, as this tract presents it, Irish sexuality underscores their rejection of English law and its concerns. Not law, as an Englishman would recognize it, but force governs Irish inheritance—they are bestially antagonistic and sexually profligate, like the dog in the ‘General description.’ In addition to being depicted as overly sexual and inimical to English law, the Irish are described as receiving money from Rome, ‘the profites wherof they spend against vs.’ The text solidifies English identity against Irish hostility; the ‘us’ in this sentence can only be Protestant, English readers. The Anglo-Irish were usually Catholic, so the tract tries to erase the differences between them and the Gaelic Irish, situating both of them as linked to Rome in opposition to Protestant Englishness. The fear of attack from foreign Catholic powers was not as pronounced in the 1530s (or 1560s) as it would be in the 1580s, but such rhetoric emphasizes the active opposition of all the inhabitants of Ireland to the English in England, an opposition that the tract continually reiterates. The last page of notes further undermines the distinction between Gaelic Irish and the Anglo-

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Irish, with a list of ‘Englishe men becumme Irishe.’ The fear of the AngloIrish in this tract perhaps stems from the proximity between England and Ireland, and their long history. As Andrew Murphy explains, in Ireland ‘English writers find themselves confronted by an Other who is neither fully alien nor yet wholly identical with the self.’47 Groups occupying such a middle ground are often seen as more threatening, and are more violently subjugated, than those from whom the dominant culture believes it can easily distinguish itself—thus the outrage over the Irish rejection of English law, and thus, perhaps, the impulse to quell the Irish and Anglo-Irish by force of arms, and to start over with new English lords in Ireland. Nowell’s text and his maps must have been made after 1560, when he traveled to Ireland, and were finished by 1567, when he left for the Continent. England’s position in Ireland drew increasing attention from the government during those years. Shane O’Neill of Ulster had successfully raided the Pale, and had proven impossible for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Sussex, to overcome. In the early years of the decade, the government established a plantation in Leix and Offaly as a buffer against O’Neill, but this was only moderately successful.48 Two schools of thought argued about the best course of action for Elizabeth’s government: that of Sussex, who wanted to launch a military assault against Ulster that would crush O’Neill, and that of the Anglo-Irish Palesmen, who wanted power put back into their own hands so that they could ‘contain the Gaelic areas by a mixture of force and persuasion.’49 Elizabeth declined to decide, and the Irish situation grew worse for the English governors. Eventually, Henry Sidney was appointed, and proposed a military plan that called for dispossessing and replacing the Gaelic lords, which Canny notes he worked out with William Cecil.50 Sidney and Cecil felt that once they had magnates in place who would establish English common law, reforms in the government of Ireland could be made and fully implemented. Ciarán Brady, however, has cautioned against assuming that Cecil was consistently in favor of a strong military solution to the Irish problem: Under Elizabeth, the two great secretaries, Sir William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham, maintained an extensive correspondence with men

47 48 49 50

Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 16. Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–76 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976), 37. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 50–51.

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Images and Imaginings of England of influence in Ireland and compiled impressive files of records, reform treatises and genealogical information. Both have sometimes been credited with favouring one line of policy over another. But in reality both were quite eclectic, on some occasions urging firm action, on others counselling moderation.51

Cecil may have vacillated in his policy, but he was certainly open to the possibility of conquest, especially early in Sidney’s career in Ireland, and the issue of Anglo-Irish relations was of grave concern to him. Nowell’s maps and the text he copied spoke to an issue of the first importance to Elizabeth’s government, and to his patron William Cecil. The tract and maps, a tacit argument for a policy of invasion and force, supply not only tactical information but ideological justification for such a policy (and, perhaps, give Nowell’s travels in Ireland in 1560 more than a whiff of espionage). The rest of the Nowellian materials in the Domitian manuscript underscore the interpenetration of English and Irish history, especially the ‘Abbreviate of the getting of Ireland.’ The ‘Abbreviate’ was copied and perhaps abridged from a manuscript copy of Finglas’ ‘Breviate,’ in turn one of the first tracts to advocate a new conquest of Ireland, and ‘one of the most influential Anglo-Irish treatises of the 1530s.’52 Along with the ‘Abbreviate,’ Domitian xviii contains genealogies and a chronicle culled from Flattisbury and Giraldus. The latter, as Andrew Hadfield has pointed out, was not only a major source for the history of Anglo-Norman Ireland, but ‘defined the tradition of English writing on Ireland, being the most widely read authority on Irish customs as well as on Irish history.’53 Giraldus’ description of Ireland in his Topographia juxtaposes the wonders of the East with the wonders of Ireland, setting both of them apart from the main part of Europe in their monsters and, in the case of Ireland, in their ‘vindictive’ saints.54

51

52

53 54

Ciarán Brady, ‘Court, Castle and Country: The Framework of Government in Tudor Ireland,’ in Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society 1534–1641, ed. Ciarán Brady and Raymond Gillespie (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), 32. Ciarán Brady, ‘The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland,’ in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), 25. Brendan Bradshaw suggests that Finglas’s ‘Breviat’ was written as part of Cromwell’s movement for reform and as part of the maneuvering against the Fitzgeralds before the outright rebellion of Silken Thomas. Bradshaw, ‘Cromwellian Reform and the Origins of the Kildare Rebellion,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 27 (1977): 69–93. Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins,’ Irish Historical Studies 28 (1993): 393. Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us, 44.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Giraldus is the ideological forebear of Domitian xviii’s description of Irish habits, and his writings had remained potent in the sixteenth century. Further, Giraldus and Geoffrey of Monmouth together presented the English rationalization for Irish conquest—even though Protestant England could no longer acknowledge the force of Adrian II’s papal bull authorizing Henry II’s invasion, Geoffrey’s origin myths claimed that the Irish descended from Scythians who held their land by consent of the Britons in Britain, and narrated Arthur’s invasion of Ireland, both giving a rationalization for conquest that extended back in time well beyond Adrian II. Nowell’s manuscript arrangement also deals with another ‘unruly’ part of the Atlantic archipelago—Scotland. I have already examined the uneasiness with which Scotland is depicted in Nowell’s ‘General description,’ where it is partially omitted and elided into an ‘English’ identity (even as its lack of place names makes it resemble Ireland). In the Domitian xviii notebook, Nowell takes the opposite approach, and seems to attach an ‘Irish’ identity to Scotland, again trying to leave ‘Britain’ an English identity. Nowell’s idea of the connections between Scotland and Ireland were not the stuff of fantasy; certainly the Gaelic-speaking areas of the Hebrides and Highlands cultivated alliances and had familial ties with the Irish, particularly in Ulster.55 In Domitian xviii, Nowell maps Scotland in the same portion of the notebook with his Irish materials, with Scottish and Irish materials often appearing on the recto and verso of the same leaf, and not with his maps of England and Wales towards the end of the notebook. In fact, the last few leaves of the map of England leave an unsettling blank space stretching north from Northumberland rather than ‘fill in’ with Scottish toponyms.56 He does not include lengthy chronicles or commentaries on Scotland. However, he writes on folio 108r a brief description of the Hebrides which seems to take as a model some of Giraldus’ descriptions of Ireland, including descriptions of rich mines of ore ‘nowe … decaied by negligence,’ lack of ‘venemouse beastes,’ and wonders such as ‘the bones of litle John 14 foote in length.’ The last two pages of text before Nowell’s maps of England excerpt the description of Scotland from Book I of Higden’s Polychronicon, noting historical alliances between Scotland and Ireland. This text concludes on the recto of a leaf, and the maps of England with ‘Old English’ names begin on the verso and finish the rest of Nowell’s notebook within Domitian xviii. Bookending Nowell’s notes on Ireland and 55 56

For a discussion of the Gaidhealtachd, see Bruce P. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688 (New York: Longman, 2001), 50–51. Fol. 122v.

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Images and Imaginings of England the Gaelic areas of Britain, then, are two items that point back to the AngloSaxon past: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and these maps of England that give speculative Anglo-Saxon place names. As in the ‘General description,’ Ireland is framed in terms of England’s medieval past, and a map of Ireland is paired once again with one of England.57 For the sake of simplicity, I am assuming that Nowell himself was responsible for this arrangement, but Lambarde may have joined the works together. If he did so, it was probably because he felt there was logic to this sequence. Either Nowell or the person with whom he was most closely associated placed the maps of England at the end of the material dealing with Ireland and Scotland, juxtaposing Anglo-Saxon research with contemporary depictions of identity in the Atlantic archipelago. NOWELL’S ‘ANGLO-SAXON’ MAPS OF ENGLAND Understanding the ‘Irish’ portion of Domitian xviii is a necessary precursor to understanding some of Nowell’s maps of southern Britain in that manuscript. Nowell’s maps of England and Wales begin at Cornwall and work east across the island, then return to the west coast and work across again. Thus, the island is ‘read’ from left to right, bottom to top. The maps partition the land into units by means of a grid drawn throughout the pages. The individual leaves of the map do not conform to counties or other administrative units, but are consistent in scale—each page has eight units of the grid across, and twelve up. The numbering is continuous throughout the series, so that one can look at any of the leaves and have a sense of what part is represented west to east and south to north. Often a name that appears near the edge or gutter of a page will reappear on a page showing an adjacent section. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Domitian maps, however, is the place names; Nowell wrote many of these in reconstructed Old English versions, and used Anglo-Saxon letter forms (insular minuscule). The Domitian maps may have been drafts, for they show evidence of corrections, and some startling omissions. The word ‘Eaxenceaster’ (i.e. Exeter) and the accompanying symbol for a large town are crossed out and repositioned after Nowell realized that he had placed 57

The relationship of both Ireland and Britain to the rest of the world would also have been represented in the Domitian notebook, as Lambarde notes on folio 92v that four maps of the world were placed there, which Lambarde gave to Nowell’s friend Adrian Stockes. One could wish Lambarde less generous with his mentor’s materials, but, lacking evidence, it is pointless to conjecture how the Atlantic archipelago would have appeared on Nowell’s world map.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England them too far north along the River Exe.58 Penzance is either completely omitted, or it is represented by Nowell’s ‘Pensant,’ which is drawn on the northern coast of Cornwall, instead of on the southern coast.59 Nowell generally underestimated the width of the Cornwall–Devon peninsula, which caused some locations to be skewed. For instance, Bridestowe in Devon is drawn almost due west of Lydford (‘lideford’ on the map) instead of due north.60 The map that covers Wales has the same problem and is skewed in much the same way as the Cornwall–Devon peninsula. Manorbier, which Nowell labels ‘Mainorbi,’ is shown considerably west of Carew, instead of due south from it; Tenby (‘Tynbigh’) is drawn south of Carew, while in reality it is almost straight east and only slightly southward.61 Nowell uses familiar symbols on his maps—tiny buildings for larger towns and circles surmounted by a cross or buildings with spires for minsters and cathedrals. He draws the symbol for a church but does not label the cathedral town of Salisbury. More startling is the fact that Canterbury, one of the most historically important cities in England, is similarly drawn in but not labeled on the map.62 Nor is Bury St. Edmunds.63 He rarely notes natural features, although occasionally he adds curving lines, probably to represent hills. Larger natural phenomena are also sporadically labeled, such as New Forest in Hampshire.64 He does nothing to denote Dartmoor, however, and his representation of landscape is haphazard. As has been observed, if Nowell could recognize, or thought he could recognize, Anglo-Saxon elements in a place’s name, he tried to write a conjectured older version, for instance, ‘Falmuþ’ for Falmouth and ‘cofen treo’ for Coventry.65 Sometimes he postulates two different older forms for the same name, such as for Ashprington in Devon, which he labels both ‘Æscpringtun’ and ‘Asciptun.’66 The second name is a mixture of italic and imitation insular minuscule script. At other places, he writes in both Old English and Early Modern English, as at Wimborne Minster, where he labels the location ‘winburn’ in insular minuscule and again ‘winburn’ in

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Fol. 111v. All letters that Nowell wrote in his imitation insular minuscule script will be represented by bold type. See the transcription conventions spelled out in Chapter Four. Fol. 110v. Fol. 111v. Fol. 114v. Fol. 117r. Fol. 117r. Fol. 112v. Fol. 110v and fol. 116r. Fol. 111v.

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Images and Imaginings of England early modern italic.67 The Old English names on the map apparently originate in Nowell’s conjecture, as one can quickly surmise from glancing at it. He usually made his best deduction from their modern forms, instead of from research into historical documents or his reading of John Leland’s indices to his printed works. For instance, ‘Padstow’ on Nowell’s maps does not have an Old English version for its name, even though Leland writes in his Genethliacon s.v. ‘Padstow’ that the ancient version was ‘Adelstowe. id est Adelstani locus’ (Adelstow, that is, Athelstan’s place). ‘Adelstow’ cannot be easily deduced from ‘Padstow,’ however, so while the place is listed in Nowell’s Abcedarium index, the name is not reconstructed on his map.68 Although at times Nowell seems to write a recollected early version of names that he had read in manuscripts, such as ‘wireceaster’ for Worchester, or ‘medeshamstede’ for Peterborough, the overall impression is that he did not extensively consult textual sources to uncover attested Old English names in this map.69 This project plays out unevenly in the western peninsulas, where fewer names can be traced to Germanic roots. Cornwall did not present too much difficulty to Nowell, perhaps because it had been conquered in the ninth century by King Egbert of Wessex. Nowell easily fit his ‘Old English’ scheme of names into Cornwall, for instance ‘Roh’ for Roche or ‘Lowe’ for Looe.70 Although more names appear in italic (as opposed to insular minuscule) in Cornwall than they do in Devon, it is clearly a matter of degree rather than complete difference. Wales was a far greater challenge, however; few of its names could be reconstructed, however creatively, as Old English. Nowell tried, in a few places, to continue his project by writing in insular minuscule, for instance ‘Swansea,’ or attempting a reconstructed earlier version, as ‘Bearderea’ for Bardey.71 Despite these few attempts, the difference between the majority of names in Wales and those in England is visible even from a quick scan, especially on folio 118r where the two transition into each other. It could hardly be otherwise; Nowell’s need to define England as Britain, as so many of his predecessors and contemporaries had done, could not always sit easily with his competing desire to claim the Anglo-Saxon past as key to English identity. Still, he attempts it. The continuous grid of the map pulls Wales and England together as a single unit,

67 68 69 70 71

Fol. 112v. Fol. 111r. Fol. 115v and fol. 119r. Fol. 111r. Fol. 115r.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England as does the lack of any border depicted between the two or even the words ‘Wales’ or ‘England’ on the pages to show the distinction. On the whole, Nowell’s map tries to make the difference in the names between England and Wales a matter of regional variety rather than national difference. The organization and structure of the maps try to depict the area they show as a single entity, and the title in the ‘General description’ makes it fairly certain that Nowell thought of that entity as ‘England.’ Nowell’s maps and their linguistic exploration of Anglo-Saxon elements of contemporary place names in Domitian xviii need to be considered in two wider contexts—the later large-scale maps of southern Britain such as those of Christopher Saxton, and the historical maps made on the Continent. Cartography could promote regionalism at the expense of political nationalism in the county maps drawn by Christopher Saxton in his atlas of England and Wales. Saxton’s maps consistently give features of the landscape, not just the political/cultural units of towns and manors, allowing his viewers to feel that their ‘home’ county was a matter of its countryside as much as its cities and other political or cultural institutions. In fact, the viewer could be encouraged to ‘read’ all of England in terms of his or her own locale: ‘The image … mediated the features of the unknown country with the viewer’s own experience of the English landscape.’72 English readers could easily ‘see’ the other portions of England in terms of their own countryside, lending a familiarity with the whole country that they might not possess in actual experience. Ultimately, this presents a ‘land-based’ rather than a ‘king-based’ idea of English identity. Richard Helgerson, who discusses Saxton at some length, concludes, ‘the cartographic representation of England did have an ideological effect. It strengthened the sense of both local and national identity at the expense of an identity based on dynastic loyalty.’73 Nowell must navigate the same tensions between monarchy and land, nationalism and local identity as the later cartographers such as Saxton, but because Nowell conceives of his England (or, ‘England’) in opposition to outside entities, especially Ireland, his maps consequently promote nationalism and loyalty to the crown and minimize regional and/or land-based identity. Saxton’s Anglia ‘conceives of the area covered by the atlas, effectively England and Wales, as an entity unto itself,’ since it does not show

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J.B. Harley, ‘Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography,’ in English Map-Making 1500–1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: British Library, 1983), 25. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 114.

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Images and Imaginings of England Scotland or any of the surrounding coasts as Nowell’s ‘General description’ does.74 Even though the Domitian maps do not include the coasts, they appear in close manuscript context with maps and discussions of Scotland and Ireland. This is key to the differences between the two cartographers’ ideological thrusts. Although in Domitian xviii Nowell must draw separate sections of the island on different pages, in order to draw to the scale he wishes, he overcomes any inclination to think in terms of counties or other local units as he does not distinguish between the areas in any way. Indeed, the grid that runs continuously through his maps makes them function as one large map cut into smaller pieces (unlike Saxton’s, whose atlas does not even use a consistent scale for its different plates). Likewise, the occasional repetition of places on different leaves blends the maps together from their separation onto pages, and blurs the boundaries between the areas he draws. Like Saxton, Nowell makes use of conventional symbols, such as circles with crosses over them to represent churches. However, as noted above, he does not labor over natural phenomena. He will sometimes show natural features such as hills, but his drawing of them is never consistent. Nowell does include river systems, which are natural, but which were so bound to travel, shipping, and economics that they become major parts of the cultural landscape as well as the natural one. The focus of his map is on politically and culturally defined units such as towns, rather than landscape features such as moors or hills.75 Nowell’s decision to recreate historical place names in Old English letter forms makes another potential liability into a strength. As the other chapters in Part II have already described, place-name research could create affection for locality, often instead of national loyalty. The drive not only to know a place’s name, but to understand that name and to have some form of control over it powered much creative etymology; as Victor Watts comments, ‘the sixteenth century seems to have been a time when for complex historical and sociological reasons the need to shape nomenclature was particularly observable in parts of Britain.’76 Part of this came

74 75

76

Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, 100. The maps of Ireland are also gridded as if they are a single ideological unit; the identity of the Other must be solidified as well as English identity. The Irish maps, however, show many more natural landscape features, as well as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, which Nowell and his contemporaries would no doubt have viewed as an identification of landscape with superstition. Victor Watts, ‘English Place-Names in the Sixteenth Century: The Search for Identity,’ in Sixteenth-Century Identities, ed. A.J. Piesse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 53.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England from the legal need to understand what a place was called in old documents that might aid one’s cause in court. However, there is also an emotional appeal to onomastic study, as Watts also observes: It seems that once established a name alone is not quite enough to give full identity to a place. Long after practical needs are satisfied, something more seems to be required, especially about origins, to satisfy the need not just to name but to establish affective relationships with places by locating them in feelings about history, social context, or status.77

Nowell’s writing the names in reconstructed insular minuscule resists such a tendency. Most readers would have had trouble with these strange, alien letters; in fact Lambarde felt that they were difficult enough to merit the inclusion of a table of ‘Saxon characters and their values’ in his Perambulation of Kent. Such odd-looking names probably would not produce local or regional pride, nor, perhaps, would the strange forms of the names themselves. While some viewers might cherish their town’s ancient history and etymology, Nowell’s decision to use unfamiliar letterforms undermines that as much as possible. Like his structuring of the Abcedarium’s place-name index, Nowell’s attempt to minimize any regionalizing tendency in his map is not absolutely successful, but his map’s strange names do their best to reduce the potential for regional loyalty. The reconstructed ‘Old English’ also potentially puts Nowell’s Domitian maps in the category of historical maps, and such antiquarian maps held further pitfalls for forming English national identity.78 Historical maps share the competing tendencies between local and national identity of other largescale maps of modern England, but they faced a further set of complications. Klein argues that maps can ‘actively create, rather than passively reflect, the actuality of [their] immediate referent, the space of the land’;79 but how are we to understand maps that make such creation explicit by drawing a political space that no longer exists? National maps make a claim about the permanence and solidity of the notion of ‘England’; truly historical maps would show that such a concept is unstable. If we define a historical map as an attempt to depict visually a settlement pattern or political structure no longer visible in the present landscape, however, then Nowell’s Domitian maps do not exactly qualify, and I think this is deliberate. The representations of the classical or Biblical past which his contemporaries undertook 77 78 79

Ibid., 50–51. Nowell has been described as ‘a pioneer of historical cartography’ on the basis of these maps. Andrews, Shapes of Ireland, 45. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space, 80.

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Images and Imaginings of England fall much more readily into a recognizably ‘historical’ framework. Granted, these maps were not without anachronisms. Abraham Ortelius’s Parergon, his series of maps depicting the Biblical and classical past, drew the Low Countries in a map of the Roman Empire as the provinces they became under the Hapsburgs, ‘creating a sense of territorial coherence that was misplaced for the earlier age.’80 This anomaly does not disqualify the Parergon from being described as the first historical atlas.81 Nowell’s Domitian maps go beyond a single anomalous feature, however; any understanding of the southern part of Britain as a unit would be inappropriate for a truly historical map. Even if we set aside for the moment the issue of Wales, Anglo-Saxon ‘England,’ for most of the period between settlement and 1066, was no such thing, but a collection of separate kingdoms (as Lambarde shows them on his maps at the beginning of Archaionomia and the Perambulation). Nowell certainly knew this. He had read Bede thoroughly in Latin and Old English, and he had read and copied several versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Nowell’s decision to leave off the names of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is underscored even further by the addition to his maps of sixteenth-century earldoms, written in red ink. Rather than draw the ancient political divisions, or even acknowledge them, Nowell situates the map within the hierarchy of the powerful in his own day. Even the modern aristocracy on his map, however, is placed under the organizing principle of ‘England and Wales,’ which his continuous grid imposes on the drawings. And, although they use Anglo-Saxon letter forms and have Old English names, the names are mostly reconstructed from their modern counterparts, not drawn from research in medieval texts. Nowell’s starting point for this map was the England and Wales of his day, and the Domitian maps present an argument about contemporary English identity. Nowell tries to show southern Britain as an ideological unit, and by reconstructing the ancient names for his map, he tacitly claims that this unity has persisted through the island’s history. Names shift, but their variance is made implicitly to contrast with the national framework of the structure as a whole. The Protean forms of names and words can be contained when placed in the grip of ‘England,’ as his map tries to show them. Nowell’s maps resist the tendency toward localism that Saxton’s maps (and Speed’s, and other later atlases) convey. They show his eagerness for a 80 81

Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 10. Ibid., 2.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England concept of England as the overriding political and cultural category in the minds of the Queen’s subjects. His desire for nationalism stems, I argue, from his dual focus not only on the southern portion of Britain, but on Ireland. Nowell saw English identity against Irish identity, and this made him promote English nationalism. His nationalist agenda, in turn, inspired his ‘historical’ maps in Domitian xviii. English nationalism not only goaded Nowell’s Old English research, but, in the case of his maps and his place-name index, made him elide his findings into a pattern that better supported his concept of England as a political whole. DOMITIAN XVIII AND SPENSER’S VIEW Several readers have probably noticed parallels between the ideas about Ireland expressed in Domitian xviii and Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland. Spenser’s work, entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1598, never saw print in his lifetime; some scholars have suggested that it was suppressed.82 Although Nowell compiled his notebook in the mid 1560s, and the text with which his maps are interspersed dates from the late 1530s, Spenser’s treatise from the sixteenth century’s last few years shares its opinions about the feebleness of common law in Ireland, the irrational hatred of the Irish for the English, and the need for violent suppression of Irish and Anglo-Irish in order to achieve legal and religious reformation. Nowell’s notebook gives us a pre-history for Spenser’s work, a glimpse of rhetorical strategies similar to Spenser’s but from earlier in the sixteenth century. Both texts discuss the fearlessness of Irish warriors in a way which suggests that they are nevertheless inferior to English standards. I have already quoted Domitian xviii’s statement about the Irish: ‘They be for the most part good and hardie men of warre and can liue hardly and suffer great miserie, they will adventure them selues greatly on their ennimies seing time to doo it. …’ A similar sentiment appears in Spenser, and in the View the boldness of the Irish directly correlates to their barbarity: ‘they are theareby the bolder to enter into evill accions knowinge that if the worste befall them they shall lose nothinge but themselves wheareof they seme surelye verye Careles like as all barbarous people are, as Cesar in his Comentaries saith verye fearlesse of death.’83 Boldness, useful in military

82 83

See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland Censored? A Review of the Evidence,’ Notes and Queries 239 (1994): 459–463. Edmund Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, vol. 10, ed. Rudolf Gottfried, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1957), 72.

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Images and Imaginings of England encounters, also marks the barbaric alterity of the Irish warriors. This ‘savage’ capacity for martial exploits is threatening, as both texts present the inhabitants of Ireland as irrationally inimical to the laws of England—the common law in the View and the ‘king’s law’ in Domitian xviii. In Domitian xviii, the reasons are not explained; the perversely inimical Irish simply ‘hate the kinges lawes and subiectes mortally and not wthstanding all giftes and other whan they see time they doo their best for their advantage.’84 Their hatred is such that no ‘giftes and other’ will make a difference to Irish policy. Spenser discusses the law in several places in the View; it is crucial to his argument. Just to take one example: [Ireland] is a nacion ever Acquainted with warrs thoughe but Amongest themselves, and in theire owne kinde of milytare discipline trayned vp even from theire youthes which they haue neuer yeat bynne taught to laye aside nor made to learne obedience vnto the Lawe scarselye to knowe the name of Lawe but insteade theareof haue allwaies preserued and kepte theire owne lawe which is the Brehon Lawe.85

Irish warriors ‘scarcely know the name of law’; it is only in the last clause that a reader discerns that what sounds like anarchy is apparently Brehon law. Brehon law does not count as law in the View—the only valid legal system for this tract is the ‘king’s law’ (or at Spenser’s time, the queen’s law) of England. The two texts disagree, however, on why exactly the inhabitants are unsuitable to be reformed by the common law. As I have already pointed out, Domitian xviii’s text presents the inheritance practices of the Irish as especially incompatible with English concerns. The system, in the view of the author of this tract, leads to ‘almost allway rebellion against the lord’ and perpetual lawlessness.86 Tanistry not only marks the variance from common law, but causes constant dissent. Spenser’s difficulty with tanistry stems from his anxiety about the assemblies of the Irish and their potential for sedition, not any particular outrage over the practice itself. As Irenius, the experienced veteran of Irish affairs, explains to his interlocutor Eudoxus: It is a Custome amongest all the Irisherie that presentelye after the deathe of anie theire Chief Lordes or Captaines they doe presentlye asemble themselues to a place generallie appointed and knowne vnto them to Choose another in his steade, wheare they doe nominate and electe for the most 84 85 86

Fol. 103v. Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 47. Fol. 104r.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England parte not the eldest soonne nor anie of the Children of theire Lorde deceased but the next to him of bloode, that is the eldest and worthiest. …87

Eudoxus follows up with a question about the ceremonies that accompany this election, ‘ffor all barbarous nacions are Comonlye greate observours of Ceremonyes and Supersticious rites.’88 The ‘swearing in’ of the new tanist points to the barbarity of the Irish and their ‘Supersticious rites’—a phrase that would have brought to the original audience’s mind not only the investment of the tanists of the Gaelic Irish, but the Roman Catholic sacraments of the Gaelic- and Anglo-Irish. For Spenser, the rites associated with selection were as much of a concern as the lack of primogeniture, or even more so. The Catholicism of Ireland’s inhabitants was of course itself a sore spot for both authors. Catholicism marked cultural difference and potential sedition. Interestingly, neither author depicts the inhabitants of Ireland, either Gaelic- or Anglo-Irish, as devout Catholics. Perhaps this suggests irreligious atheism on the part of the Irish, but it could also be a strategy hinting that Reformation is possible—after all, a bad Catholic might be on the way to becoming a good Protestant. Domitian xviii sees their practice of Catholicism as only another outlet for their contentiousness, not related to any religious devotion at all: ‘They provide for them benefices from Rome though they can skarcely reade, the profites wherof they spend against vs But god prouides setting continuali dissention emonst them and mortall warre.’89 Spenser similarly claims that Catholicism is embraced not for any sincere profession of the faith but as a way for the Irish to work against the English: ‘for this I knowe that the moste of the Irishe are so far from vnderstandinge the Popishe Religion as they are of the Protestantes profession and yeat dothe hate it thoughe vnknowen even for the verye hatred which they haue of the Englishe and theire gouernement.’90 No doctrinal disputes or deeply held convictions about the sacraments or church government can explain Irish antipathy, according to the View. They understand neither Protestantism nor Catholicism—therefore, they can hardly be claimed to understand Christianity at all. Their dislike of all that is English remains irrational, not linked to any genuine religious conviction (however, from a Protestant point of view, misguided). The fluidity of identity between Irish and English concerns both authors as well. I have discussed this at length with regard to Domitian 87 88 89 90

Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 50. Ibid. Fol. 103v. Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 221

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Images and Imaginings of England xviii’s text (and to Nowell’s ‘General description’); the text worries about ‘Englishe men becumme Irishe.’91 Spenser similarly sees the Anglo-Irish as the largest obstacle to reform: The Chiefest abuses which are now in that realme are growen from the Englishe and the Englishe that weare are now muche more Lawles and Licentious then the verie wilde Irishe, so that as muche Care as was then by them had to reforme the Irishe so muche and more muste now be vsed to reforme them so muche time dothe alter the manners of men.92

This is a crux of Spenser’s claim that violence will be necessary, because the methods that worked on the Irish originally (to whatever extent they worked at all) will be insufficient to deal with the Anglo-Irish. The later settlers, ‘corrupted’ by intermarriage and cultural and linguistic exchange, pose a greater challenge than the initial inhabitants. Both texts, ultimately, argue that only by a military expedition and occupation can the Gaelicand Anglo-Irish be made to submit and law used to establish peace and control in Ireland. Domitian xviii makes its agenda clear by the inclusion of the ‘powers’ of Gaelic-Irish and Anglo-Irish lords and other strategic information. Some of its information is geographic in nature, such as the list of harbors. Spenser similarly lists the harbors of Ireland as an important consideration in his proposal, but for him they become ideological artifacts as well as tactically useful locations. He explains that the forests of Ireland lend themselves to ship-building: so comodiously as that if some princes in the worlde had them they they [sic] woulde sone hope to be Lordes of all the seas and ere longe of all the worlde Allsoe full of verye good portes and havens openinge vppon Englande and Skotlande as invitinge vs to Come vnto them to see what excellent Comodities that Countrye Cane afforde. …93

Ireland’s very landscape ‘invites’ English invasion and exploitation of its resources. The importance of naval power was, of course, obvious to Spenser’s contemporaries; in the wake of the defeat of the Armada the desire to ‘be lords of all the seas’ ran deep in most of the English government. The image of the resources to build a supreme navy, coupled with the ‘invitation’ of the land itself to come and plunder it, makes a claim that the invasion of Ireland was a matter of national security, in addition to the historical and political arguments Spenser details in the rest of the tract.

91 92 93

Fol. 104r. Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 113. Ibid., 62

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Both texts therefore move effortlessly from ideological rationalizations to discussion of tactical and geographic details. Domitian xviii lists the ‘Paces to be cut’ so English armies could move as they needed throughout the country, the ‘powers’ of opposition and allies, and accessible harbors; it also, of course, has maps of Ireland interspersed throughout its discussion of the need and justification for invasion. Domitian xviii displays propaganda inseparably from Nowell’s maps. Spenser, whose work is much longer, spends most of the latter half of the View discussing strategic specifics. This shift from a history of Ireland’s customs and inhabitants to a detailed, tactical explanation of how and why an invasion will work is heralded in the text by Eudoxus’s producing of a map, which Bruce Avery observes is the only action in the text. After it appears, Eudoxus’s questions shift from mostly disagreement to support of Irenius’s position.94 As Avery’s important article argues, once Irenius’s practical experience has been linked to Eudoxus’s tools of political power, the dialogue merges in agreement about the possibility of invasion. Avery suggests that this appearance of a map makes visible the use of maps in the centralization of power, something the government wished to remain transparent; this, perhaps, caused the View to remain only in manuscript rather than see print in Spenser’s lifetime.95 Both texts also share an association with antiquarianism. The Domitian notebook’s antiquarian pedigree comes from its deployment with the historical materials surrounding it. Bart Van Es has detailed how Spenser’s View mimics antiquarian discourse, with its focus on cultural and topographic detail, its explanation of historical events, and its dialogic structure.96 Many of the other similarities between them may stem from their shared forms—antiquarian exploration—and perhaps from shared participation in a strain of Irish political writing by ‘New English’ settlers. Ciarán Brady has traced ‘The Road to the View’ and argues that most reform writers in the 1530s were conservative in their idea that the common law could prevail, but even they acknowledged the need for violent reform in some areas.97 They distrusted military conquest as likely to give more power into the hands of Anglo-Irish lords who had already debased the legal system through coyne and livery, and they wished 94 95 96 97

Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,’ ELH 57 (1990): 263–279. Ibid., 275. Bart Van Es, ‘Discourses of Conquest: The Faerie Queene, the Society of Antiquaries, and A View of the Present State of Ireland,’ English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002): 118–151. Brady, ‘The Road to the View,’ 25–45.

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Images and Imaginings of England to revive the law so as not to play into their hands. Domitian xviii’s text, however, veers more towards advocating war, with less faith in the law than other early tracts Brady describes. However, in all such reform tracts, the notion of the law becomes central—law as an agent of reform and law as a marker of identity with which to determine self and Other. Spenser’s View, like many of its forerunners, centers on the issue of common law and its applicability in Ireland, so to some extent it is hardly surprising that the two texts are similar in this. The similarities, however, are deeper than a shared interest in law and in history, but center around a specific interest in the Anglo-Saxon period of England’s past. Andrew Hadfield argues that Spenser’s example for his claim that violent suppression of the natural state of the Irish must precede legal reform is William the Conqueror’s imposition of law on the conquered Anglo-Saxons.98 Alan Orr, however, questions whether Spenser did mean to equate the Anglo-Saxons to the Irish, since the Anglo-Saxons ‘were already in a civilized condition’ before the Conqueror, which is why the common law could be instituted in England without wide-scale slaughter of the sort Spenser proposes.99 Van Es suggests that rather than looking to the Conqueror for support, Spenser looks to King Alfred the Great, who unified the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under one law: ‘Ireland, according to Irenius’ logic, must revisit the England of the ninth century before it can progress so as to become similar to the England of the sixteenth’ (a notion reminiscent of Nowell’s visual depiction of Ireland in the ‘General description’).100 The View also mentions the lawgiving of King Edgar. Spenser’s notions of the use of law were linked to what he believed about its early practitioners; this, in turn, leads to the question of what he knew about the Anglo-Saxons. A full study of Spenser’s understanding of England after the Germanic migrations and before the Norman Conquest is beyond the scope of this book, but we can make a few suggestions here about what and how he might have learned about it. Robert Rouse has argued that later medieval romance often posited the Anglo-Saxon period as the origin of ‘good law’—even when the legal institutions within the

98

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Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser, Ireland, and Political Theory,’ Modern Language Review 89 (1994): 1–18; however, Brian Lockey argues that Spenser’s View vacillates between a belief in the power of common law to reform the Irish and pessimism that such a plan would not work. ‘Conquest and Legal Identity in Renaissance Ireland,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 543–558. D. Alan Orr, ‘From a View to a Discovery: Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and the Defects of Law in the Realm of Ireland,’ Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003): 399. Van Es, ‘Discourses of Conquest,’ 140.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England romance, such as the judicial duel or judgment by parliament, date from after the Conquest.101 Such romances were still popular throughout the sixteenth century, and many of them were printed.102 A tradition of King Alfred the Great as a lawgiving king dated back to William of Malmesbury and also ran through several later medieval texts such as the Proverbs of Alfred and the Mirror of Justices.103 Even aside from the romance tradition and legends of King Alfred, surely Spenser, who undertook a ‘continuation’ of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of the Faerie Queene, would have read the Man of Law’s Tale, which depicts even pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons as having a fair and equitable legal system. Although Chaucer’s work is hardly anthropologic in its approach to early Britain, we can see that the legendary nature of Anglo-Saxon laws had penetrated deep into popular consciousness. It remained there for much of the Renaissance.104 Even Spenser, often viewed as one of the chief figures in presenting Romano-Celtic Britain as the foundation of English identity, could regard the Anglo-Saxons as the touchstone of English law, which in turn was crucial to his thinking about Ireland.105 However, it is also not outside the realm of possibility that Spenser saw Domitian xviii itself. Nowell left this manuscript in Lambarde’s hands when he departed for the Continent. Rudolf Gottfried, in his notes to the Variorum volume containing Spenser’s prose works (including the View), cites Lambarde several times, speculating that ‘Spenser probably knew Lambarde’s works, and possibly the man.’106 If, as Van Es suggests, Raleigh

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Robert Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 93–133. For a discussion of romance in the Renaissance, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially 1–44; for Spenser’s knowledge of romance, see Andrew King, The ‘Faerie Queene’ and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). William of Malmesbury: Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 188–190; for a discussion of the Proverbs of Alfred, see Rouse, Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 11–51; for a recent overview of the Mirror see Stefan Jurasinski, ‘Andrew Horn, Alfredian Apocrypha, and the Anglo-Saxon Names of the Mirror of Justices,’ JEGP 105 (2006): 540–563. The role even of laws erroneously believed to come from the Anglo-Saxons in later constitutional debates has been traced in detail by Janelle Greenberg in The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For Spenser’s ‘British’ interests, see Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory, 13–48, and Alan MacColl, ‘The Construction of England as a Protestant “British” Nation in the Sixteenth Century,’ Renaissance Studies 18 (2004): 582–608. Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 411. Of course, if Spenser had had a copy of Archaionomia, this would have given him even more information about Anglo-Saxon law.

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Images and Imaginings of England introduced Spenser to the Society of Antiquaries, of which Lambarde was a member, the two could have met there. It is also possible that Spenser knew Thomas Egerton, a long-time friend of Lambarde’s; if so, they might have met through him.107 If they did meet, Lambarde might well have shown Nowell’s notebook to the writer from Ireland, particularly if Spenser expressed an interest in Irish chorography. This is, obviously, speculation and I do not want to overstate the probability that Spenser knew Nowell’s manuscript, but it is certainly not impossible either. If nothing else, the avenues through which Spenser and Lambarde might have met remind us how small was the world of Elizabethan writers and thinkers, and how even unprinted works could have been passed around these circles of intellectuals in ways that have left no trace. The View, ultimately, demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxon period of English history could be crucial to arguments about reform in sixteenthcentury Ireland; the arrangement of texts in Domitian xviii is less random and more deliberate than appears at first glance. Although the arrangement of quires makes it possible that all the sections were not originally designed to accompany each other, the final arrangement had internal coherence and was probably intentional. Nowell himself may have put these pages together, or Lambarde (who removed a page from the set) may have done so. Whoever was responsible, placing the notes on Ireland together with a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and, of course, with Nowell’s maps of England using reconstructed Old English place names, was probably a deliberate act. Both Spenser’s View and Domitian xviii argue that the present of Ireland and the Anglo-Saxon past of England needed to be understood together. As an understanding of Anglo-Saxon law shaped Spenser’s understanding of English–Irish relations, Ireland, I think, shaped Nowell’s structure for his chorographic enterprises—certainly his maps and perhaps also his place-name index. Nowell’s own ‘view’ required that English identity remain stable throughout its history in order to solidify it against the island that, in his maps and in his mind, sat huge and intractable just to the west of Britain.

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Gottfried, in his discussion of the manuscripts of the View, observes that the Ellesmere MS contains four pages of Egerton’s handwritten notes; he speculates that it might have been presented to Egerton by Spenser. Spenser, Spenser’s Prose Works, 506.

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PART III

OLD ENGLISH AND THE COMMON LAW

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Chapter 7 ‘THE SAXONS, OUR ANCESTORS’: ANCIENT LAW AND OLD ENGLISH LAWS

he study of law has always been, to some extent, the study of the past, as the philosophy of legal precedent makes clear: any case or decision can be ‘an example or authority for an identical or similar case afterwards arising for a similar question of law.’1 Any legal action could affect later actions, and early modern lawyers and judges needed to know the previous decisions to understand the legal processes of their own day. They also needed to know exactly what the law said; as John Considine observes in his study of dictionaries, legal needs drove much of early modern lexicography, for lawyers ‘needed to understand the wording of the laws and their cultural background.’2 Both linguistic and cultural history had to be excavated to understand the law, and Nowell and Lambarde worked extensively on both. The Abcedarium’s flyleaf contains a legal glossary of Old English words with Latin equivalents, probably copied from London, British Library Cotton Titus A.xxvii and drawn from the twelfth-century Quadripartitus, a Latin translation of Old English law codes.3 Nowell also transcribed and collated the Anglo-Saxon laws that he found in manuscripts such as London, British

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Black’s Law Dictionary: Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern, with Guide to Pronunciation, 4th ed. (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1951), s.v. ‘precedent.’ John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11. For more on Nowell’s use of the Quadripartitus, detailing which manuscripts were known to him, see Rebecca Brackmann, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Old English Legal Glossary and His Study of Quadripartitus,’ in English Law before Magna Carta: Felix Liebermann and ‘Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen,’ ed. Stefan Jurasinski, Lisi Oliver, and Andrew Rabin (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), 251–272.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Library Cotton Otho B.xi and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383.4 His work with the laws led to completed (or near-completed) products in the editions and facing-page translations of the Laws of Alfred and Ine.5 These codices, manuscript showpieces written on membrane, decorated with colored initials and written in Nowell’s best hands, both ‘insular minuscule’ and italic, are by far the most ‘finished’ products Nowell produced. This fact is worth pausing over. As far as can be determined by his surviving manuscripts, Nowell did not devote to any other text the labor and expense that he poured into these two editions of royal codes—not Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, not Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, not even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which he also dealt with extensively in a series of manuscript collations and editions. Even if we assume that the sumptuous editions were produced for a patron, and it seems probable that they were, this only defers the question of why the laws were more interesting and more worthy of this treatment in the patron’s view: why would the recipient value editions of Anglo-Saxon laws more than these other texts? The answer, I believe, lies in law’s role as a focal point for English national identity, a role that it played in the community at large and not just among those specialized practitioners who were trained in the Inns of Court. As D. Alan Orr observes: The common law was, after all, the fundamental law of the land, defining England as a distinct constitutional entity from other European states. The common law was, therefore, integral to the emergence of English national identity; it was a major part of what made England English.6

The previous chapter’s discussion of Nowell’s notebook in London, British Library Cotton Domitian xviii and Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland demonstrated the crucial role of English law in discussions and proposals for English intervention in Ireland. Not only was it felt that

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Patrick Wormald details Nowell’s interactions with Old English legal manuscripts in ‘The Lambarde Problem: Eighty Years On,’ in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 237–275. Nowell’s edition of the Laws of Alfred is now London, British Library Henry Davis 59; his edition of the Laws of Ine is in private hands. For a description of the edition and translation of the Laws of Alfred, see Chapter Three above and also Rebecca Brackmann, ‘Laurence Nowell’s Edition and Translation of the Laws of Alfred,’ Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 14 (2010), online, . D. Alan Orr, ‘A Prospectus for a “New” Constitutional History of Early Modern England,’ Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 36 (2004): 446, emphasis original.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ the thorough imposition of English common law in Ireland would decrease the continual unrest with English rule, adherence to English law was considered to be a distinguishing factor among the inhabitants of Ireland, a way for the English to determine who was ‘us’ and who was ‘them’ in a population where linguistic or geographic distinctions were becoming increasingly untenable. However, the role of law in determining English identity did not only apply to Ireland. The common law was part of the heritage of the English, in David Lowenthal’s sense of that word: ‘heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes.’7 Heritage is an example of how the demands of the present shape the exploration of the past, and legal studies in Elizabethan England were guided as much by the need to discover and thereby create this heritage as by a more specialized need for precedent and definition. Perhaps more than in any other arena, the study of law in the later sixteenth century increasingly posited the Anglo-Saxon period of history as the essential, foundational time for English identity. This process began with the work of Nowell and, especially, Lambarde, and the task of final compilation and publishing of Nowell’s research fell to Lambarde after Nowell left for the Continent in 1567. It makes sense that Nowell would delegate such specialized work to his friend; after all, Lambarde, studying at Lincoln’s Inn, had legal training and expertise in the contemporary practice of law. Nowell, as far as we know, did not. Lambarde was also far more interested in seeing his books through to a final state, whether in print or in manuscript, than Nowell, who rarely finished projects. Lambarde’s voice became one of the most authoritative and influential as legal-historical debates continued into the seventeenth century, and the chapter will conclude by briefly considering his reception, and that of his Anglo-Saxon studies, in the turbulent years that followed the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Lambarde wrote both antiquarian and procedural texts about the law, as well as speeches that were aimed at non-specialists. He provides an excellent resource to show the ways that legal study overlapped with other

7

David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1968; paperback edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x. Understanding this aspect of Tudor research as ‘heritage studies’ explains the distinction between such work and the ‘humanist understanding of history’ that Donald Kelley believes is lacking in the work of Lambarde and his contemporaries: it was not that they did not understand history, but that their main purpose was to recover heritage. Kelley, ‘History, English Law, and the Renaissance,’ Past & Present 65 (1974): 24–51.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England nationalist heritage discourses in the sixteenth century, including his own chorographic writings and the work of Archbishop Matthew Parker.8 Moreover, the English legal system mattered no less in early modern England than the Elizabethan religious settlement, as J.G.A. Pocock contends: Since the common law unified so much in English social behaviour, it unified Englishmen’s thoughts about the past, and gave them a set of beliefs about their national history more satisfying, because more relevant to their present social structure, than anything they derived from the chronicles of earlier kings, and more unquestioningly accepted even than the myths of the original independence of the Anglican church.9

The exploration of English legal history was a foundational aspect of national identity, and Lambarde provides an excellent case study for how this research coincided with the dawn of Anglo-Saxon studies. Lambarde believed law was crucial to the formation of English identity because it not only established differences between English and foreign, in its nonRoman origin, but policed them. English law’s supposed development from Anglo-Saxon law also meant that law and Protestantism could both be traced back to England’s past, and could support each other as focal points for English identity. Lambarde produced a steady stream of texts from the 1560s until the 1590s. He compiled his Alphabetical Description beginning in the mid1560s. His first printed work was the 1568 Archaionomia, an edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws that displays the Old English text with a facing-page Latin translation. Lambarde probably began his county chorographic work, A Perambulation of Kent, at the same time as the Archaionomia, although the Perambulation was not printed until 1576. His Eirenarcha, a handbook for justices of the peace, was first printed in 1581. It was an instant classic, going through several printings in his lifetime and in the seventeenth century, and was recognized as the essential handbook for the chief local officer charged with providing justice and security to citizens. In 1582 he

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Theodore Leinbaugh, ‘Ælfric’s Sermo De Sacrificio in Die Pascae: Anglican Polemic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carl Berkhout and Milton McCormick Gatch (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 51–68; Aaron Kleist, ‘Monks, Marriage, and Manuscripts: Matthew Parker’s Manipulation (?) of Ælfric of Eynsham,’ JEGP 105 (2006): 312–327. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Origins of Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (1962): 232. Patrick Wormald, in the section of his first chapter entitled ‘Before Maitland,’ quickly goes over the history of the history of English law starting with the sixteenth century. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century: Legislation and Its Limits (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4–15.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ published a brief manual on other local offices, The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tithingmen, and such other lowe Ministers of the Peace. He compiled in manuscript Archeion, a history of the courts of England, published in 1635 by Lambarde’s heirs after a corrupted ‘pirate’ edition appeared earlier that year. Lambarde also kept a notebook of his actions as a JP in Kent from 1580 to 1588, preserved many of his lectures to his juries at Quarter and Gaol Delivery Sessions, and compiled notes about the office of Alienations and the history of Chancery. Lambarde spent most of his professional life writing about the history and role of the English law. We must, however, be careful for, as legal theorists have shown, the meaning of ‘law’ can vary, and we should not assume that Lambarde meant what we mean by it—or even that he always meant the same thing. Sir John Baker has separated two potential meanings of ‘law’ in the Renaissance: law written in books (yearbooks, statutes, and other legal publications), and law as the collective understanding of legal practitioners.10 Lambarde’s idea of law seems to move between the two, as we might expect, for Baker points to the late sixteenth century as a time when the emphasis began to shift from defining the law as the collective understanding to defining it more textually as decisions made and recorded, and written statutes of legislative bodies.11 Lambarde faced several problems when writing about early English law, however defined. The texts that were his only means of access to it were alien and strange both in their language and in most of their (vaguely outlined) procedural details. Even to read the laws of the Anglo-Saxons was difficult, and Lambarde wanted to do more than simply read them. He meant to mine those texts for clues to the other ‘body’ of law—the common understanding of principles that co-existed with written law and could be revealed by it. That law, if he could show it to be somehow consonant with the understanding of his own day, would give an ancient authority and foundation to English law in the sixteenth century. No matter how different some of the surface aspects of the ancient laws seemed from modern practice, the underlying structure of common law needed to be the same and Lambarde believed that it was. Lambarde’s idea of English law drove his reading of Anglo-Saxon laws, and his understanding of the AngloSaxon laws influenced his claims about the history of law in England.

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J.H. Baker, The Law’s Two Bodies: Some Evidential Problems in English Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–31. Ibid., 81–84.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England ‘VETERES SACRATAEQUE LEGES’: ARCHAIONOMIA AND A PERAMBULATION OF KENT Perhaps we can best see the importance Lambarde assigned to English law by examining the only work Lambarde had printed in his lifetime that did not take an aspect of the English legal system for its chief subject: A Perambulation of Kent, first printed in 1576 with a second edition in 1596. Perambulation describes the places and history of Kent, as the name suggests, and participates in the chorographic explorations popular in early modern England. As Chapter Five has already detailed, Lambarde in this book misses no occasion to take aim at monastic foundations or prelates, even in the Anglo-Saxon period. He narrates how the Anglo-Saxon church introduced ‘the vain titles of Romane arrogancie’ into a church that had previously only had bishops, initiating disgraceful squabbles between the archbishops of York and Canterbury.12 He describes ‘Monkes, Friars, Priestes, Nonnes’ as ‘the whole rablement of [Satan’s] religious armie, for the holding of simple soules in wonted obedience, and the upholding of his usurped Empire. …’13 This sort of rhetoric, some of which could have come from the pen of John Bale, performs the sort of boundary-drawing that James Simpson has described as typical of the ‘revolutionary moment’ of the sixteenth century and the Reformation: ‘every revolutionary moment needs to repel the past, or … in some profound sense to create the past.’14 The Perambulation, however, clung to the legal history of England even as it ‘repelled’ its deeply Catholic past. As William Hall observes, Lambarde often ‘included full transcriptions of important documents rather than summaries of them. … As antiquities in themselves, [these documents] were valuable as artifacts and valued for that reason, if for no other. They were expected to speak directly to the reader. …’15 Hall mentions the inclusion of the full text of a legal decision from the early sixteenth century, and 12

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William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1826. London: Adams and Dart, 1970), 71. All citations are from this edition, which was based on the 1596 text, unless otherwise noted. Ibid., 170. James Simpson, ‘Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,’ Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21. William Keith Hall, ‘From Chronicle to Chorography: Truth, Narrative, and the Antiquarian Enterprise in Renaissance England’ (PhD diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995), 71–72; Stan Mendyk also sees the Perambulation as deriving from Lambarde’s legal interests. Mendyk, ‘Speculum Britanniae’: Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 47–49.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ indeed the overwhelming majority of the texts so transcribed are legal in nature. Lambarde does not give long passages from Bede, even the Old English Bede, but he provides some Old English legal texts such as wills or codes in full. These passages in Perambulation bear no trace of any tension between the need to use ancient sources and the rejection of their Catholic authors. Rather, Lambarde takes these documents as revered remnants of a cherished and still relevant legal heritage. Toward the end of the 1596 edition, Lambarde transcribes and translates an ‘English (or Saxon) antiquitie, which I have seene placed in divers old copies of the Saxon lawes …’16 Lambarde uses ‘English’ and ‘Saxon’ synonymously when he introduces his text, lending the Old English legal text more immediate authority—it is an ‘English’ document. Lambarde copied this tract, now titled Geþyncþu, from the important legal manuscript known as the Textus Roffensis in Rochester Cathedral library.17 It contains what Patrick Wormald observes are ‘among the best-known lines in Anglo-Saxon law’ explaining how ceorls, merchants, or scholars can gain the status of thegns and how thegns can become earls.18 Lambarde gives a ‘moral’ for this piece of legal writing: ‘[vertue] ought by all reason to be rewarded with due enseignes of honour, to the end that vertue may be the more desirously embraced.’19 The AngloSaxon law codes, described as ‘English,’ are immediately applicable and positive examples for his modern readers, whereas other aspects of medieval history, embedded in and transmitted by monastic culture, are not so unambiguously praised. As the Perambulation, not a legal text itself, shows us, Lambarde’s reverence for law distinguishes it in his writing from other aspects of English history. Lambarde’s discussion of Kentish history in the Perambulation showed law as the unifying force in establishing and maintaining an identity, as Hall has argued.20 Gavelkind, the county’s inheritance system, played a large role in what made Kent, Kent. One of the main points of the book is how the Kentishmen ‘obteyned with great honour, the continuation of their auncient usuages’ by imposing this on William the Conqueror as a condi16

17 18

19 20

Lambarde, Perambulation, 450. Lambarde exaggerates when he states that the text appears in ‘diverse’ copies of the laws, as it only survives in Old English in the Textus Roffensis, although several manuscripts of the Quadripartitus contain a Latin translation of it. I follow Patrick Wormald in spelling this tract Geþyncþu; it can also be spelled Geþyncþo. F. Liebermann edits the text in Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903), 456–458; Wormald, Making of English Law, 393. Lambarde also transcribed Geþyncþu into a notebook, now Oxford, Bodleian Lat. hist.d.2. Wormald discusses the Textus Roffensis in detail in Making of English Law, 244–253. Lambarde, Perambulation, 454. Hall, ‘From Chronicle to Chorography,’ 83.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England tion of their acceptance of his rule.21 This agreement, which allowed gavelkind to stand as primogeniture became the customary method of leaving land in the rest of England, meant that Kent had a system more directly similar to the original ‘English’ law. Lambarde left the door open, however, for the laws of other English places to still claim descent from the ‘Saxon’ laws. In his discussion of ‘The English Heptarchie’ he writes, ‘All these laws, king William the Conquerour collected togither, and (after a discreete view had) by advise of his counsell allowed some, altered others, and quite abrogated a great many, in place of which he established the lawes of Normandie his owne countrey.’22 This may sound like William’s actions caused a rupture with the past, but this description of William’s legislative activity strongly recalls the preface of King Alfred the Great’s royal code: ‘I Ælfrede king gathered together & commaunded to be writen of those thinges whiche our praedecessours obserued, so many as liked me & such as I liked not, I reiected by the aduise of my counseylours, & comaunded them to be otherwise obserued. …’23 William acted as Alfred had; he first collected all the laws, then chose (with advice from his council) which would remain, and made changes to the rest. This process need not put his legislation outside the overall system of English law, any more than Alfred’s had. Lambarde would later claim that William had not abrogated any of the laws, but the comparison to Alfred shows that this difference is a matter of degree, not a complete change of mind about William’s interactions with the existing laws of England. Kentish law may be closer to Anglo-Saxon law, but the rest of England has not had a complete break from their tradition. The Perambulation displays Lambarde’s interest in law as a definitional quality, whether for Kent or indeed for England, as the description of the ‘English (or Saxon) antiquity’ demonstrates. It was an interest that also played out in the work that he probably wrote simultaneously with the Perambulation—Archaionomia. Archaionomia, an edition of the Old English law codes printed with a facing-page Latin translation, was published the year after Lambarde was called to the bar and Nowell left England for the Continent. The compilation of the Old English codes was a collaboration between Nowell and Lambarde, as Lambarde acknowledges in his preface: 21 22

23

Lambarde, Perambulation, 19. Ibid., xvi. Janelle Greenberg finds Lambarde’s conclusion consonant with much later writing on the origins of English law. Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 112–113. Laurence Nowell’s translation in London, British Library Henry Davis 59.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ Obtulit mihi superiori anno Laurentius Noelus, diligentissimus inuestigator antiquitatis, mihique multa et iucunda consuetudine coniunctus, ac qui me (quicunque in hoc genere sim) effecit, priscas Anglorum leges, antiquissima Saxonum lingua, et literis conscriptas, atque a me (quoniam ei tum erat trans mare eundum) ut latinas facerem, ac peruulgarem vehementer flagitauit. [Last year, Laurence Nowell, the most diligent researcher of antiquity, who is bound to me through much sweet intimacy and who made me whoever I am in this field, presented to me the ancient laws of the English, written in the most ancient language of the Saxons and in their script, and (since he was then about to travel overseas), he vigorously urged me to turn them into Latin and publish them.]24

Nowell’s ‘urging’ that Lambarde translate the laws into Latin is either lost or is based on conversations between the two. He may have thought Lambarde more suited to edit and translate them for print, since Lambarde had legal training, or he may have just been dividing the labor with his friend as the two of them worked on understanding the Anglo-Saxon period—however, it is worth observing, again, that Nowell apparently did not urge Lambarde to print the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or any of the other texts they had worked on. It was once assumed that Lambarde simply gathered up Nowell’s notes and transcripts and sent them to the publisher, and for the laws of King Canute he seems to have done so, as Nowell’s manuscript of this survives, smudged with printer’s ink.25 However, Retha Warnicke is no doubt correct that Lambarde did the bulk of the preparation and translation for the press, even though Lambarde gratefully acknowledges Nowell’s role in the publication of the Archaionomia.26 Archaionomia contains a prefatory glossary ‘Rerum et verborum in hac translatione præcipue difficilium explicatio’ (an explanation of especially difficult things and words in this translation), in which Lambarde sets forth

24

25

26

Lambarde, Archaionomia, sig. Aiiir. My interpretation takes ‘peruulgarem’ as one word, ‘publish,’ even though the word is broken across lines and lacks the customary double dash indicating a broken word. For an attempt to translate this passage without emending, see Todd Preston, ‘King Alfred’s Domboc: The Life and Afterlife of Alfred’s Legislation’ (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 175. The manuscript is now Canterbury, Cathedral Library Lit E 2. For an analysis of Lambarde’s use of this manuscript, see Carl Berkhout, ‘Laurence Nowell (1530–ca. 1570),’ in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 12. Retha Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary 1536–1601 (London: Phillimore, 1973), 24.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England definitions of Latin and Old English legal terms and concepts.27 A typical example is ‘Compensatio mortis,’ which Lambarde uses to translate ‘manbote’: Compensatio mortis, Saxonicé Manbote, Man homo est, bote a bettan quod compensare significat ductum, compensationem sonat. Nonnulla quidem perempti corporis æstimationis pars, cæsi domino compensationis loco tributa est, eaque solutio Manbote dicebatur. Videas igitur quæ habentur in legibus Inæ, capit. 69. [Compensation for a death, in Saxon Manbote, Man is man; bote, deriving from bettan which means to compensate, means compensation. Indeed, some part of the assessment of damages of the slain body is given by way of compensation to the lord of the murdered man, and this payment is called Manbote. Therefore you may see what things are held in the laws of Ine, chapter 69.]

Lambarde explains to the reader the etymology of the term, what it meant in the codes, and refers to a specific passage in which it appears. By doing so, he sets forth an explanation of the whole concept of manbote. His work, even in his first published book, sought out not just lexical equivalents but the practices, and to some extent the philosophy, that lay under the textual laws. The Archaionomia, in addition to being the first edition of Old English laws, is Lambarde’s first articulation of the importance of law in society. The preface dedicating the book to William Cordell, Keeper of the Chancery Rolls, begins with a paraphrase of Heraclitus: ‘Praeclare mea quidem Sententia Heraclitus (vir praestantissime) leges ciuitatis murum atque vti moenia defendendas affirmauit’ (Most eminent man, in my opinion Heraclitus excellently declared that the laws are the wall of the city, and are to be defended as the fortifications).28 Lambarde’s source for this was probably Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Nowell owned a Latin translation of this text printed in London in 1546 which Lambarde inherited with the rest of Nowell’s materials (some notes in Lambarde’s hand appear in the book).29 Diogenes Laertius gives a brief, indirect quotation from Heraclitus, ‘plebemque pro lege non secus ac pro muro pugnare’ (and the people [are] to fight for the law not other than for the wall) but does not elaborate further.30 Lambarde, however, goes on to 27 28 29 30

Lambarde’s interest in modern English etymologies and lexicography in this glossary has already been discussed in Chapter Three. Lambarde, Archaionomia, sig. [Aiir]. Diogenes Laertius, De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum (London: Gryphium, 1546). Nowell’s copy is now in the University of Virginia Library. De Vita, 370

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ explain the philosopher’s spare dictum: if the walls are solid, society is safe from hostile forces, but if they are breached or trampled down, it spells disaster (‘maximam … calamitatem’) for the citizens.31 Like the walls, the laws must be avidly defended. Depicting laws as city walls emphasizes their roles as boundaries between insiders and outsiders; those outside the walls are foreigners, or outlaws. Laws become, in this figure, the defining factor by which one can easily tell those who are ‘inside’ the state and those who are ‘hostes exteri atque longinqui’ (foreign and distant enemies).32 Later in the dedicatory epistle, Lambarde refers to his subject matter as ‘veteres sacrataeque leges’ (ancient and sacred laws).33 His conception of the laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings was not just that they were historically interesting, or tangentially relevant, but things that were almost holy in their antiquity and in their defensive role. Archaionomia displays the two main focuses of Lambarde’s writings for the rest of his life: the ancient law, which revealed the common law’s most fundamental premises, and the role of the law in the social and political realm. Lambarde did not work with Old English law and produce Archaionomia simply because Nowell had asked him to do so. His interest in Anglo-Saxon laws persisted because he believed that Tudor common law had developed from Anglo-Saxon law, which resulted in his fascination with Old English laws remaining constant to the end of his life. Lambarde added items of legal vocabulary to the Vocabularium Saxonicum even after he printed the Archaionomia, as Marckwardt points out.34 Indeed, Nowell seems to have deliberately left some gaps for him to do so, as he does after ‘ordal.’ Lambarde wrote a lengthy note in the space provided, describing the process and concluding: ‘The ceremonie and circumstance of eyther [i.e. trial by water and fire] appeareth in my table to the translation of the Saxon laws,’ referring to the extensive discussion of ordeal on sigs. C2v through C4r of the explanatory glossary and dating this note after the Archaionomia’s printing.35 Lambarde later corrected his private copies of the Archaionomia against manuscripts he read after it was printed, including the Textus Roffensis.36 The publication of Archaionomia did not

31 32 33 34 35 36

Lambarde, Archaionomia, sig. [Aiir]. Ibid. Ibid., sig. Aiiiir. Albert H. Marckwardt, ‘The Sources of Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum,’ Studies in Philology 45 (1948): 32. Laurence Nowell, Laurence Nowell’s Vocabularium Saxonicum, ed. Albert H. Marckwardt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952), 134. For Lambarde’s use of the Textus Roffensis, see Wormald, ‘Lambarde Problem,’ 240–241.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England spell the end of Lambarde’s interest in Old English, although when Nowell did not return, Lambarde did not edit any other Old English texts or write any extended explications of Anglo-Saxon history. Even after his publishing interests mainly shifted to discussions of legal procedures in his own day, Lambarde remained interested in Old English because Old English texts were part of his research in those areas. Lambarde’s Archaionomia argues about the importance of law, specifically of ancient law, and it was not the last of his books to make such a claim. We can perhaps most easily see how his study of Anglo-Saxon law fit into sixteenth-century discourses when we look at his later writings, which were published to engage directly in those debates. Lambarde gave the highest importance to English law, since its supposed growth from AngloSaxon law and unbroken continuation allowed it to be a focus of English identity, as an institution peculiar to the inhabitants of the southern portion of Britain. The reverse is also true; he valued Anglo-Saxon laws because he believed they held the origins and designs of the law in pure form, unsullied by later accretions. THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF THE COMMON LAW Lambarde was early but hardly alone in his interest in older English law. J.G.A. Pocock, following Samuel Kliger, identifies two schools of thought that developed in the late sixteenth century—that of Edward Coke, who thought the laws were ‘immemorial,’ and the ‘Gothic,’ or ‘Teutonic,’ camp, which claimed that the law was Germanic in origin and stemmed from the Saxons.37 The early modern theorists themselves were not always consistent, as Pocock also points out.38 Where does this leave Lambarde? He does not claim that the common law is immemorial—the adjective he most often uses is ‘ancient,’ which could imply that he was a Gothicist or an immemorialist.39 His examination of Anglo-Saxon laws tries to uncover the understanding behind the law codes, which could mean that he felt the theories of Anglo-Saxon lawgivers were hints to the themes of ‘immemo37

38 39

For a discussion of Coke’s historical views, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 56–57. For a slightly different interpretation of Coke as a historian, see J.W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Ancient Constitution, 58. Greenberg argues that these need not be exclusive if by ‘immemorial’ or ‘time out of mind’ the writer meant pre-dating 1189, the start of legal record. Greenberg, Radical Face, 20–30.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ rial law’ or that the Germanic forebears of the Anglo-Saxons held the origin of the law. I suspect that he was more Gothicist than immemorialist—he had no need to claim the law was solely above the authority of any one king, as Coke would have, and at one point in his jury addresses he implies that the Germanic origins of the law and of the English people reinforce each other.40 The fashionable Greek title of his edition suggests this as well; he usually refers to the original English law as ‘the ancient law,’ and the Greek Archaionomia translates to ‘ancient laws.’ Anglo-Saxon laws were the earliest English laws he could find, and whether he thought they were the actual headwaters of the law, or just a point farther up the historical stream (a distinction he might have thought immaterial anyway), he still consistently used them as a touchstone for legal validity in his later writings. Lambarde never lost sight of the ancient origins of the law, even when he wrote technical treatises or instructions that would seem to have little to do with them. In the Eirenarcha, Lambarde’s manual for justices of the peace, he states that the duties of a JP are based upon tradition: ‘that auntient authoritie … uppon the which this latter power is (as it were upon a Stocke) set and engraffed.’41 The legal heritage, in Lambarde’s simile, gives the current practice both validity and life itself. Lambarde wanted not only the justices of the peace to appreciate the antiquity of their tradition, but also the juries of the Sessions of the Peace to understand their place in the history of English law. In an address to a Session of the Peace jury in 1591, he gave a mini-lesson in comparative legal history: The law or policy of this realm of England, as it is a peculiar government, not borrowed of the imperial or Roman law (as be the laws of the most part of other Christian nations) but standing upon the highest reason, selected even for itself; so doth it in one special thing above any other most apparently vary from the usage of other countries: I mean in the manner of proceeding that we have by jurors, which our law calleth the judgment by peers or equals, and that as well in civil questions that do arise privately between man and man as also in criminal causes that lift up the head against the commonwealth, in the latter of which we are not, as other nations, to be accused or indicted at the pleasure or for the gain or malice of any one or a few men but by the oaths and consciences of the twelve at the least, and in either of which we enjoy this singular freedom and prerogative that we are not to be peremptorily sentenced by the mouth of the judge, as other people are, but by the oath and verdict of jurors that be our equals, and the same 40 41

Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, ed. Conyers Read (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 177. Lambarde, Eirenarcha (1581; repr. New York: Da Capo, 1970), 11.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England not strangers born but our own countrymen, not far dwelling but of the nearest neighborhood that we have.42

For Lambarde the history and non-Roman origin of English law give it particular nationalistic force and set it apart from that of ‘other Christian nations.’ The repeated first person plural possessive (‘our law,’ ‘our own countrymen’) contrasts with ‘other nations’ and ‘other people’ and stresses that juries are an especially English institution. The jury system ‘stand[s] upon the highest reason,’ as opposed to the ‘Roman law’ which he implies is less reasonable and more prone to abuse; the English system is not only different but superior to the codes and practices of the Continent. It is worth a brief digression to examine how Lambarde and his contemporaries viewed Roman law, and what he knew of it. Civil law (the legal system based on the Roman codes, particularly the Institutes of Justinian) was the basis for some of the episcopal courts and for legal proceedings in the Court of the Admiralty.43 Lambarde owned and annotated Conrad Lagus’s 1556 Methodica iuris vtriusque traditio, a book detailing the textual basis and procedures for civil law; Nowell had a printed copy of Justinian’s Institvtiones ivris civilis, and Lambarde also indexed and annotated this book, so he was certainly not ignorant of civil law.44 However, civil law was based on the laws of ancient Rome, and Rome, of course, was in contemporary times the seat of the Catholic Church. As F.J. Levy observes, ‘the Reformation put a premium on the independence of England from Rome—not, to be sure, the Rome of Cicero but that of the popes. Still, it was clear that the two visions of Rome were connected. …’45 Chapter Five has already described how Lambarde’s own Perambulation gleefully equates Roman Catholic rituals with those of ancient Roman paganism. All this argues that when the word ‘Roman’ appears in an unflattering context, as in Lambarde’s statement to the jury, it implicates Catholicism also. The non-Roman origin of English law positions it in opposition to Catholicism—an opposition present throughout its history. In Lambarde’s jury address, then, the ‘English’ as opposed to Roman origin of the common law represents not simply a quirk of history in which 42 43

44 45

Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 104–105. J.H. Baker discusses the use of civil law in the ecclesiastical courts after the Reformation in An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd ed. (London: Butterworths, 1990), 150–152; in the Courts of Admiralty, ibid., 141–143. Lambarde’s copy of Lagus is in the Folger Shakespeare Library; his annotated copy of Justinian is in the University of Virginia Library. F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (1967; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 65.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ the English can take pride, but a special mark of the constancy of English Protestantism and its independence from ‘Roman’ traditions. Matthew Parker’s Testimonie of Antiquitie attempted to show that the Anglo-Saxon homilist Ælfric held a position on the eucharist similar to that of the Elizabethan Church of England. Lambarde, anticipating and perhaps facilitating a preoccupation of the Stuart common lawyers, tries to show a similar unbroken history for the law. Like Protestantism, English law had to be shown to extend continuously throughout its history. The collective understanding of legal practitioners needed to center on the same key ideas throughout its history, however the law’s other ‘body’—the legal texts—displayed them. In the Archeion especially, Lambarde foregrounds the ancient origins of England’s law. Lambarde’s manuscript, dating from 1591, contained a prefatory letter to Robert Cecil; it is possible Lambarde thought to eventually print it. Certainly he continued to work on the text until at least 1596.46 However, it has already been argued in Chapter One that texts need not be printed in order to be influential, and manuscript copies of the Archeion show that the work had some circulation among legal practitioners even before it went to the press in 1635.47 This work traces the history of the high courts—including not only common-law courts such as the King’s Bench and Common Pleas but also courts of equity and prerogative courts such as Chancery, Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests. Lambarde maintains that since all monarchs take an oath to provide their people with justice, they must have an apparatus with which to do it. Should the law prove inadequate for any particular situation the king must work to ensure that justice is not impeded. For that reason, equity and prerogative courts must exist, and the premise for their existence, according to Lambarde, goes back to the dawn of English legal history. Lambarde traces the right and duty of the king to administer justice to his subjects, at times separately from the common-law courts, back to the Anglo-Saxons: And that this [the establishing of extraordinary courts] was no new-made Law, or first brought in by the Norman Conquest, I must put you in mind of that which I have vouched before, out of the Saxon Lawes of King Edgar, 46

47

For Lambarde’s continual revision of the Archeion, see Paul Ward, ‘Appendix: The Problem of the Author’s Text’ in Lambarde, Archeion, or, a Discourse upon the High Courts of Justice in England by William Lambarde, ed. Charles H. McIlwain and Paul Ward (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press: 1957), 146–176. Wilbur Dunkel, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Jurist 1536–1601 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 133; Ward also discusses variant manuscripts of the text in his Appendix to Archeion, 145–176.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England where you did reade it thus: Nemo in lite Regem appellato, nisi quando domi jus consequi non poterit, sin juris summi onere domi prematur, ad Regem ut is id oneris allevet, provocato: Let no man in Suit appeale to the King, unlesse he may not get right at home; but if that right be too heavie for him, goe to the King to have it eased. By which it may evidently appeare, that even so many yeeres agoe there might Appellation be made to the Kings Person, whensoever the Cause should enforce it.48

Lambarde refers here to the Norman Laws and traditions, some of which he has been discussing at length, as ‘new-made.’ The real law, the authentic bit of evidence, comes from the Anglo-Saxon codes—or rather, from Lambarde’s translation of them, for the Latin in this passage is a condensed form of his translation in Archaionomia. Even though later Norman rulers modified the system (producing the several courts, rather than having the king himself hear all cases), the ultimate principle can be found in the Anglo-Saxon laws. Lambarde recognizes that these courts have changed quite a bit, but since Old English law allows them to exist in some form, Chancery and conciliar courts are legally valid. The Anglo-Saxon laws are his final arbiter for the courts’ legitimacy. Lambarde, however, does admit to some brief periods of interruption in the practice of the ancient laws. After the Conquest, particularly, things were unsettled: And after this order, and in those two sorts of Courts [i.e., local and the king’s] was all Iustice administred, untill the time of King William the Conquerour: During whose Reigne (as also under the Government of King Rufus his Sonne) it is to be thought, that the ordinarie course of Iustice was greatly disturbed, as well by reason of the intestine and forraine Warres, as also because that these two Princes governed by a meere and absolute power, as in a Realme obtained by Conquest.49

Lambarde takes a line similar to one Archbishop Parker used with respect to religion: the Anglo-Saxons had excellent laws until the Conqueror interfered with them. Unlike the English church, however, the ‘course of Iustice’ is only disrupted—the execution of the law stops, but the foundation is not destroyed: ‘But yet it was so farre off, that any of them did utterly abolish these Courts that the same did not only remaine during all their times (howsoever put to silence for a season;) but also had continuance afterwards, and doe yet (as they may) beare life amongst us.’50 Lambarde admits 48 49 50

Lambarde, Archeion, 58. Ibid., 17. Ibid.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ that the courts were not used for a time, but this neglect does not render them subsequently invalid.51 The basic principle behind the high courts had stood throughout history. The extraordinary courts, like the commonlaw courts, go back to ancient history, are referred to in the Anglo-Saxon laws, were too impressive for the Normans to abolish (although they might not at first have made best use of them), and should be maintained as part of the English legal system. In 1595, four years after he sent his Archeion manuscript to Robert Cecil (although while he was still revising his own copy), Lambarde suggested to a jury that such legal continuities coincided with racial continuity: the right of tenure is of equal antiquity in this land with any law that we have, not only since the Conquest but long before, even with the first government of the Germans here, from whom both we and the Norman conquerors are descended and who be the first authors of the laws de feodis, or of tenures, altogether unknown to the ancient Romans or civil lawyers.52

This is Lambarde’s most Gothicizing moment, as he claims that ‘the right of tenure’ came from Germanic ancestors of both the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans (although even then he does not quite say the entire common law came from them), and contrasts the English system, again, to Romanbased civil law. Even the Norman Conquest, he claims, did not disrupt the English common law, since the Normans were of the same stock and therefore shared a common legal understanding with the Anglo-Saxons— although the Anglo-Saxons, not the Normans, are the ancestors of the English in this speech. The common Germanic ancestry of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons means that the legal system could lay an even stronger claim to constancy, unsullied by Roman (and Roman Catholic) influences. The Normans, however, did not perfectly execute the laws they found in place when they arrived in England, Lambarde argues. Magna Carta came about because the later Norman rulers abused the royal courts and extended their authority into areas where the local courts were competent to render judgment. It was a back-to-the-origins treatise, which Lambarde in his Archeion calls ‘that Great Charter of the Liberties of England (which I may

51

52

Lambarde’s philosophy that lack of use does not invalidate an aspect of law persists in the Anglo-American legal system to this day. A decisive victory for this view came in 1818, in the King’s Bench case of Ashford v. Thornton, in which it was judged that lack of use did not abrogate the defendant’s right to demand a trial by combat. The wager of battle was, however, removed by statute from future judicial proceedings in the next year. Baker, Introduction, 87 n. 10. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 177.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England call the first Letters of Manumission of the people of this Realme out of the Norman servitude).’53 To leave Norman servitude, he makes clear, was to return to the ‘original’ law, the one expressed in the Anglo-Saxon codes: By pretence of which Grant, the common Subject thought himselfe free from that irregular Power which the former Kings and their Councell of Estate had exercised upon him; and phantasied, that he ought not thenceforth to be drawne to answer in any Case, except it were by way of Indictment, or by tryall of good and lawfull men (being his Peeres) onely after the course of the Common Law: Whereas indeed, these words of the Statute ought to be understood of the restitution then made of the ordinarie Iurisdiction in common Controversies. …54

The phrases ‘thought himself ’ and ‘phantasied’ imply that Magna Carta did not quite fulfill its promises and did not always effect the changes it supposedly mandated.55 However, these changes themselves were to free subjects from ‘irregular power’ and to effect a ‘restitution,’ not a revolution. The Normans had veered from the proper course of law and thus placed their subjects in ‘servitude,’ but Magna Carta (in theory at least) restored the true common law. Lambarde’s discussion of Magna Carta shows that, however enthusiastic he may have been about the ancient history of English law, he knew that at times its continuance had been precarious. The common law, despite its antiquity and rationality, required its subjects’ active participation and was at risk if they failed in this, as Lambarde tells a jury in 1591: But even as there is no thing so good and sound in the first institution of it which by evil usage and unclean handling may not in time be corrupt and depraved, so by the careless and dissolute service of jurors and inquests it is now brought to pass, we see, that where by this excellent policy no offense could escape or lie undiscovered, there little or nothing at all is now brought to light and presented. …56

53 54 55

56

Lambarde, Archeion, 62. Ibid. It is worth noting, though, that Lambarde’s word ‘fantasied’ had none of the derogatory implications of willful or irrational belief now associated with that word. For him, ‘fantasy’ had a more neutral meaning of ‘belief ’; c.f. Archeion, 37: ‘I speak of his Court of Equitie; which, in my fantasie, is not altogether so ancient as the other. …’ This meaning was not uncommon in the Renaissance. Similarly, ‘pretense’ most often meant simply a legal claim; the now more common sense of a false excuse did not predominate until later. In the sixteenth century, the notion of falsity was usually conveyed by use of the preposition ‘under’ rather than ‘by’ to introduce ‘pretense.’ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. pretense | prentence. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 105–106.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ Lambarde, who had been a justice of the peace for years, was no idealist when it came to the actual execution of laws in England. In this quotation, however, Lambarde insists that any fault in the courts lies not with the system itself, but with its current practitioners. These problems with the execution of the common law, Lambarde feels, might threaten some of the rights which are most fundamental to it, particularly the juries, as he continues: And this is the only true cause for which both the Parliament of the realm and the council of estate, seeing that this way by jury is not prosperous, have and do daily bethink them of other courses and have thereby worthily deprived us already of no small part of that liberty and freedom which the ages before us have enjoyed. For why did one statute erect the Court of Star Chamber and without any use of juries endow it with an ordinary jurisdiction over riots, retainers, maintenance, embraceries, and some other misdem[ean]ors but only upon this reason and pretense: that jurors in their countries either durst not or would not deal faithfully with the discovery of them?57

This quotation is from 1591, the same year that Lambarde wrote Archeion. It might seem that he criticizes Star Chamber in this passage, but in fact what bothers him are the specific issues over which Star Chamber now has jurisdiction. As his Eirenarcha explains, such violations as riots were areas over which justices of the peace had specific jurisdiction, with a highly detailed set of instructions for handling them.58 The very areas that the common law specified should be handled by local juries and officers of the peace were being placed under centralized control, threatening the continuation of the system whose antiquity was so important to Lambarde. The extraordinary jurisdictions were being used to answer ordinary issues, jeopardizing the whole notion of the dual system. Lambarde, while he vehemently supported the royal courts’ existence, felt that their jurisdiction should be checked by the ancient understanding that relegated only special cases to them. However, he was too much of a realist not to see that the legal system had problems and to realize the possible result of its flaws, as he tells his jury: Thus you see how by the only default of jurors and inquests the native liberty and ancient preëminence of the English policy is already by little and little exceedingly shred off and diminished, very like also in short time to be utterly lost and taken from us if you lay not better hands and hold upon it. Which thing if it should happen in our days (as God forbid that it ever happen at all) we shall be condemned by all posterity to have been the most 57 58

Ibid., 106, insertion original. Lambarde, Eirenarcha, 172ff.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England ungracious and base-minded age of men that have lived here since the general conquest of our nation and country.59

If Lambarde’s dire prediction seems like a rhetorical exaggeration, mere scare-tactics to get his jury to cooperate with him, consider that the legal historian Frederick Maitland concluded that ‘in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the continuity of English legal history was seriously threatened’ by interest in civil law, which made the English system look clumsy and awkward with its bastard ‘law French’ and accretions of writs and courts.60 If Maitland could examine the evidence from the first half of the century and conclude that the common law was in peril, we can hardly blame Lambarde in the second half for not realizing that the common law and its jury system would continue for centuries. Maitland’s theories are no longer accepted, but it does not seem too far-fetched to assume that Lambarde’s concern for the survival of the common law system might stem from real anxiety on his part, based on what he saw as a continuing shift of power from juries to the higher courts.61 Although all courts stemmed from the same tradition, there was meant to be a division between them that Lambarde feared was being disrupted by the juries’ failures. He expected his juries to report their neighbor’s infractions to him, because the system and the legal tradition required it of them. If they did not present offenses, if they allowed the system to be replaced by a centralized judiciary, they would be rejecting the ancient rights and procedures that had survived for centuries. Perhaps the most revealing moment of Lambarde’s historical discussions comes toward the beginning of the Archeion, as he describes the origins of the courts. He explains the system of the ‘Gauls (our Neighbours, that bee now called Frenchmen),’ who according to him: did hold their Assemblies for Iustice only at Carnute or Chartres, a place so situate in the middest of their Countrie, that all the people might have indifferent resort thereunto: After which order also the Britans of this Iland did make their like meetings as it might be well gathered out of Caesars Commentaries, where he plainly writeth, that those Druydes (which were the Iudges amongst the Gauls) had fetched that their manner of Discipline out of Britaine, where wee now dwell: Yet nevertheless, the Saxons, our 59 60 61

Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 108. F.W. Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 17. Also available at . For an alternate view on Maitland’s questions, see J.H. Baker, ‘English Law and the Renaissance’ in The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1986), 461–476.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ Ancestors (which succeeded them in this Countrie) they (I say) retained the manner of the old Germans, their owne Elders, who (as Tacitus writeth) Iura per pagos vicosque reddebant; and they made distribution of Iustice, not only in one Towne, or in the Princes Palace, but also at sundry other speciall places within the Countrie. And truly, the Normans (that invaded the posterity of the same Saxons here) did not so much alter the substance, as the name of the Saxons order, which they found at their comming hither. … For (in effect) they did but change the word Gemot, which in the Saxon tongue signified an Assembly (or Meeting) into the French word Court, or Cour; (for so it is also found written) being a terme of the selfe-same force and signification.62

Lambarde describes the ‘Saxons’ as ‘our Ancestors’ (a designation he does not give to the Celts or Normans who had also lived in Britain), making their practices and traditions also ‘ours.’ He is careful to argue that the Germanic practices that the Saxons had retained were at variance with the Gauls (‘now called Frenchmen’) and Druids of Romano-Celtic Britain, and although not stated, it is implied that having additional courts to make ‘distribution of Iustice’ is a fairer system than one which requires that litigants have the means to travel to a location that, however central, might still be some distance from their homes. The Normans apparently thought so also, since post-Conquest courts were only a matter of linguistic variance and not any substantial change. The unbroken link to the practice of ‘our Ancestors,’ a link that is obscured by language but not by practice, makes law a crucial part of English heritage in Lambarde’s own day. LAW AND SOCIETY Lambarde’s sense of what the law was affected what he thought it did, and vice versa. Lambarde’s understanding of the legal system and its importance therefore reflects his idea of its antiquity and its non-Roman origin. These roots of the law are always in the background when Lambarde discusses law in the contemporary world of Tudor England. What, in his mind, was the law’s task in the social body of the English nation under Elizabeth I? Lambarde at no point wrote a theoretical treatise on the social ramifications of English law. His views on the law’s function, like its origin, must be inferred from moments in his texts that hint at larger patterns of thought. It should also be noted that such an analysis (like the foregoing discussion) is a literary, not a legal-historical, one—it looks at his histories, 62

Lambarde, Archeion, 11–12.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England handbooks, and addresses to juries as texts, and makes no claims about how accurate Lambarde’s descriptions were, or how relevant to the practice of the courts in his day. Lambarde’s writings throughout his career articulate his related conceptions of English law’s social function: a determiner of the true English subjects, a medicine for the body politic of the English nation, and ultimately the sine qua non for English society. In Lambarde’s writings, the idea that ‘English people have a specially English legal system’ transforms into ‘the English legal system protects the truly English people.’ As we have seen in the metaphor Lambarde borrowed of the laws as city walls, the exclusionary/inclusive aspect of the law has the ability to define who is and is not truly an English subject. This intensifies when Lambarde discusses resident aliens in Eirenarcha in 1581. They may not ask for surety, in Lambarde’s opinion, since the law makes no provision for it, unless they are specifically under the Queen’s protection—’the Commission it self seemeth to authorize the Justice of Peace, no further than to prouide for the Queenes people, of whiche number no Alien seemeth to be.’63 However, ‘why any Alein [sic] may not be bound to the Peace, I do not see.’64 Aliens must obey the law, but they cannot seek protection under it. The law discriminates between true English citizens (‘the Queenes People’) and other people who live in the island. A short step from refusing to extend the protection of the law to aliens is the recasting of offenders as ‘aliens’ themselves. Good English subjects obey the law; offenders are therefore not good English subjects and their nationality becomes questionable. Lambarde more than once suggests that breaking the law is somehow ‘foreign,’ as he does in a jury address in 1588: ‘And have not our countrymen, think you, by their continual travel abroad transported unto us the evils of those nations with whom they have been conversant? Have not our most obstinate recusants and unnatural conspirators fetched their popish treason from beyond the seas?’65 Lawlessness is external to the body of the English people and law-abiding behavior distinguishes English from Other. Laws, therefore, both chasten and define the ‘foreign’ elements. In the same address, Lambarde even assigns specific social ills to specific European countries—Catholicism and sedition to Italy and France, drunkenness and pilfering to the Low Countries.66

63 64 65 66

Lambarde, Eirenarcha, 89. Ibid. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 95. Ibid., 95–96.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ Lambarde again equates illegal behavior with foreign status in an address to a Quarter Session in 1596: For since the time that our nation hath conversed with foreign people in the wars abroad, what Frenchman so garish and light in apparel, what Dutchman so daily drunken and given to the pot, what Irish more idle and thievishly disposed, what Scot more cowardly, sudden, and ready to stab, what Spaniard more insolent, fleshly, or blasphemous than be a many of our own English, who have not only learned and transported hither all these vices of those other men, but are grown so perniciously cunning therein that they excel their teachers and teach it to others at home!67

Vices such as these originate abroad, Lambarde suggests; the practitioners, though English, have been polluted by international experience.68 Even though the English offenders ‘excel their teachers’ (perhaps a perverted expression of national pride itself), the root of their vices lies in their contact with the non-English nations. A pure Englishman would not be a drunkard, thief, coward, murderer, adulterer, or blasphemer. Obviously these offenses were committed in England before the most recent wars, but Lambarde still claims that they are not ‘English’ in origin. The problem with claiming that legal offenders were not really English returns us to the metaphor that Lambarde used in the preface to Archaionomia—the laws as city walls in need of defense. Lambarde made use of similar images twice in his charges to juries. In 1598, in his usual exhortation that the jurors must report equally all misdeeds of which they know, Lambarde tells them they are guards: placed for the present in the watchtower of the commonwealth and that you be, as it were, so many scouts and espies, drawn together for intelligence out of diverse and dispersed dwellings, and then, if you shall not ring the alarm nor make sign when offenders (the enemies of the commonwealth) do approach to invade, what do you less than betray your country, which you profess to defend and maintain?69

Lambarde makes the upholding of the law the defense of the nation; its 67 68

69

Ibid., 129–30. Lists of ‘national’ traits, including vices, had of course been in circulation since the Middle Ages, such as the one Nowell copied onto fol. 18v of a notebook now Canterbury, Cathedral Library Lit. E.1: ‘Victoria Aegyptiorum. Invidia Iudaeorum. Sapientia Graecorum. Crudelitas pictorum. Calliditas uel fortitudo Romanorum. Largitas Longobardorum. Gula Gallorum. Superbia vel faerocitas Francorum. Ira Brytannorum. Stultitia Saxonum uel Anglorum. libido Hibernorum’ (the text was copied from London, British Library Harley 3271). Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 134.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England violators are ‘invaders,’ an external threat. However, in reality these offenders are local—they are residents of Kent. In 1600, when Lambarde tries this image again, the inconsistency surfaces quickly: Assured we are that if laws be duly administered they be the very walls of our country and commonwealth. But what walls, though of brass itself, be not expugnable if there be not men to defend them? Understand ye also that offenses (the intestine, and therefore also the most dangerous enemies) cannot without discovery and presentment be heard and tried. …70

Lambarde’s metaphor seems to be slipping here, as he admits that the worst enemies are ‘intestine,’ within the walls, so to speak, or even within the ‘body’ of the nation. Lambarde separates himself from this confusing image by making clear that it comes from another source: ‘Assured we are.’ But by whom? The walls fail to keep the ‘enemy’ out, it would seem, or at least are not a perfect method for exclusion and inclusion. The law’s use as a focal point for English identity also came from the ease with which it could rhetorically be tied to other such nationalist discourses about Protestantism and the monarchy. We have already seen how the ancient and non-Roman origins of the common law could move into a discussion of how the present English law (and thereby the identity of the English themselves) was not tainted by Roman Catholicism. The linking of religion and law was a matter of course for sixteenth-century England. Lambarde himself had approvingly pointed out in his first recorded jury address in 1582 the partnership the law had with the Anglican Church for stamping out sin. Lambarde comments that, although sin and crime are rampant, ‘If the cause be searched for it shall never be found in the want of laws, for (God be thanked for it) sin in this age and light of the Gospels is not only detected by the mouth of the preacher but also prohibited by the authority of the prince.’71 Since religion had become a crucial facet of national identity, the mutually supporting nature of the Protestant religion and the English common law, a relationship that Lambarde believed extended back to the Anglo-Saxon period, shored up the formation of a sense of ‘Englishness’ by locating its origin in the past. English law also supported, and was supported by, the English monarchy. The idea that the laws stem from the prince runs throughout Lambarde’s writings, and indeed through almost all legal writings of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Such a view might contradict the later claims of Stuart common lawyers that the law was above any one king or 70 71

Ibid., 142. Ibid., 68.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ queen, but in Lambarde’s day there was no such conflict. Lambarde frequently tells his juries that they are the Queen’s ‘hands’ for working her laws.72 The importance of the Queen in Lambarde’s discussion of the laws, stock as most of his tropes may be, should not be underestimated. During a charge to a 1586 session of the peace, Lambarde explains that the Queen had undertaken war with Spain ‘most necessarily in regard of her own estate (which is the safety of us all).’73 The Queen’s safety is the safety of all the English, however odd this may sound to twenty-first-century logic. It makes sense if one considers the Queen the embodiment of English identity, as William Cecil wished every Englishman to do. As Benedict Anderson observes, ‘Kingship organizes everything around a high centre.’74 The very word ‘subject’ makes this apparent; the subject is ‘subject to’ a particular monarch. One cannot very well be an English subject if one’s Queen has been imprisoned or murdered by a foreign power (Spain in this instance) and there remains no English sovereign to whom one ‘subjects’ oneself. Lambarde may be overstating the actual threat to the Queen, but does not overstate her importance—the safety of a monarch who had no heirs could be the safety of the English people as a people. Lambarde’s descriptions of the justices and juries as ‘hands’ recalls the somatic metaphors often used for the Elizabethan state in his discussion of laws. Such tropes, of the nation as a body, did not originate with Lambarde, or in the Renaissance, but we should not overlook their role in forming his conception of law in English society.75 By far his favorite figure was the depiction of law as the medicine for the national body. He was not alone in this; as Jonathan Harris has demonstrated, ‘throughout the Tudor and Stuart period, an unprecedented and sustained series of exchanges took place between medical and political institutions and their discourses.’76 Lambarde found this interchange particularly fruitful, and one cannot go far in his writings without finding a place where he compares law to medicine. To pick just one example, in Archeion he describes local courts and extraordinary courts as herbal remedies: 72 73 74 75

76

For instance, ‘A Charge Uttered at the Quarter Sessions of the Peace At Michaelmas 1585,’ Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 76. Ibid., 83. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 19. The classic exposition of the somatic concept of the state is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England And therefore even as two Herbes being in extremitie of heat, or cold, bee by themselves so many poysons, and if they bee skilfully contempered, will make a wholesome Medicine: So also would it come to passe, if either this Arithmeticall Government (as they call it) by rigour of Law onely, or this Geometricall Iudgement at the pleasure of the Chancellour or Prætor onely should bee admitted; and yet if they bee well compounded together, a most sweete and harmonicall Iustice will follow of them.77

Lambarde at times combines the ideas that laws are the medicine of the body politic and that the Queen is the source of the laws. In a charge to a Session of the Peace in 1582, the first such address for which his notes remain, Lambarde exhorts his jury to remember: Our good Queen is the supreme executioner of all her laws. Between her Highness and you, in this part of the law, stand we that are justices of her peace. Between us and the offenders are you set chiefly that be sworn to inquire of offenses. Her Majesty, as a good physician of the disease of her country and people, doth continually for her part offer remedy and medicine for the same: sometimes in her leets, lawdays, and turns; sometimes in her commissions of oyer and determiner and gaol delivery; and many times by us in this her commission of the peace.78

The commission of the peace is one small part of the staying of the ‘disease of her country and people.’ In this example, however, the Queen is external to the diseased body—she is the physician, not (in this quotation) the head, of the body politic. To place her in her usual role as the head would be to implicate her in the illness of the commonwealth, which is unthinkable since her safety and physical integrity are crucial for English identity. Usually when Lambarde discusses law as a form of medicine, it is specifically a cure for a disease. The somatic representation of the nation is, as I have mentioned, so widespread that it might seem easy to write this off, or to imagine that law healing the body politic is entirely benevolent. However, the process by which early modern physicians imagined remedies to work can also apply to this representation of law, as Lambarde explains in a 1588 address: For if a man would, on the one side, call to remembrance how many most godly, politic, and wholesome laws be at every session published, with earnest exhortation and desire to have the same embraced and put in execution, and should also, on the other side, consider and behold how transgressions against those statutes do daily grow from evil to worse and are now 77 78

Lambarde, Archeion, 44. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 69.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ mounted to an heaped and overflowing measure, so as, like evil humors, they threaten at the least some extreme sickness if not the utter decay and death of the body of this commonwealth, he shall be forced to think and confess that howsoever there be some at the bench that proclaim good laws, yet there come none to the bar that do give ear and willingly mark them.79

The nation’s disease is described as ‘evil humors.’ Renaissance medical theory held that illness stemmed from an imbalance in the bodily humors, and treatment often involved attempting to purge any superfluity.80 Laxatives, emetics, and bleeding were common treatments in sixteenthcentury medicine.81 By implication, the role of criminal law in Lambarde’s address is also to remove the ‘evil humors.’ The evil humors that must be purged or nullified must logically be those who break the laws; the laws again define what does and doesn’t belong ‘within’ English society. Although law as medicine would seem a far cry from the laws as city walls, in both tropes the laws serve an exclusionary purpose—to determine who should and should not be within the body/city. Medical professionals in the sixteenth century had begun to develop theories in which the origins of disease were exterior to the body, but they still often described the diseases’ manifestations as a humoral imbalance.82 Both discourses have the same ambiguity about what is foreign and what endogenous—several writers swerve between describing disease as something that originates within the body and something that penetrates it from the outside.83 In any case, once the humors had grown imbalanced, the job of the physician, according to Lambarde and many of his contemporaries, was to redress the problem by purging the excess. Lambarde makes this point even more expressly in a 1595 charge to a jury: That it is the very drift, mark, and end of all good laws and policies to cherish virtue and to chastise vice it doth well appear, not only to the mind by discourse of inward reason and conceit, but also to all outward show and

79 80

81 82 83

Ibid., 94–5. In this as in so many other areas, the sixteenth century serves as a transitional period. Although it saw the first serious challenges to Galenic medicine, especially from Paracelsus, the theory of the humors remained a foundation of medical thinking until William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood became widely accepted in the seventeenth century. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 187–193. Ibid., 136–152. For a thorough discussion of how this debate interacted with the body politic metaphor, see Harris, Foreign Bodies, especially 1–47. Harris, Foreign Bodies, 19–47.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England proof indeed by continual practice and experience. For even as within the natural body of man medicine doth both sensibly purge and cast out the evil humors that they be no longer noisome, and doth therewithal confirm the vital parts that they may be enabled to do their best offices; so likewise in the politic body of the commonwealth laws have their apparent worth and effect, not only as curative medicines against wicked doers that either by their act or example or both do breed the dishonor of God and distemper of the country, but also as preservatives from all those and the like evils, as well by emboldening such as have charge of authority as by comforting the honest labors of all such as be working bees in the hive of the commonwealth.84

Lambarde directly correlates laws as medicine to the body politic with their purging powers. In some ways, the law could literally remove bad elements from society, by imprisoning or executing them. The law-as-medicine trope foregrounds the exclusion, often violent, of those who did not fit within the social body. Certainly, English law was not the only point around which national identity was constructed. Nevertheless, Lambarde realized that it provided not only a source of identity in its non-Roman origin, but also a means of enforcing the integrity of the perceived English realm. By 1596, he began to allow to law an even higher status in the body politic than simply its medicine: It is an ancient truth, confirmed as well by the judgment of the learned that have written concerning the government of countries and commonwealths as also by the continual practice of all societies and nations, that even as no man can live comfortably without the fellowship of men, so no fellowship can stand without law and discipline; and that even as the body of man and all the parts and members thereof derive their life, sense, and moving from the soul or spirit of man, so the laws of each country and kingdom be the very soul and life thereof, by whose continuance they do joy, grow, and flourish, and by the neglect and want wherof they fall to jar, poverty, ruin, and desolation in the end.85

Lambarde raises the stakes; law is no longer just the medicine by which the bad humors are purged, but the soul of human society. Law is the sine qua non for any commonwealth; it not only regulates but animates the nation. This is particularly true for Lambarde since English laws are unique in Europe for their basis in ancient custom; his historical research heightens

84 85

Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 116–117. Ibid., 128.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ his sense of the laws’ importance. Lambarde cedes to law a place that the locus classicus of the body-politic metaphor, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, assigns to religion.86 Given the crucial role of Protestantism in Elizabethan identity politics, we might expect Lambarde to follow this traditional assignment, but he does not. As Lambarde continues: Such and so great is the use and necessity of law as that without it neither any private family nor town nor city nor nation nor the universality of mankind nor the nature of things created nor this mighty mass of the world itself is able to stand and continue, and that to take from men the exercise of law were to draw the benefit of the sun from the world, whereof palpable darkness, confusion, and horror of all things would immediately follow and fall upon it.87

Lambarde’s depiction of law as the key element to human existence stems in part from a fear of anarchy, but it is also, as I have argued, based on his recognition of its ability to define society. Without law there can be no society because without law society cannot police its defined boundaries. Lambarde was not the first to see the law as the soul of the body politic— Thomas Starkey had done so in 1535—but that should not obscure the importance that he decides to give to law here.88 The history of English law as well as its contemporary function led Lambarde to assign it the highest place in English identity. Lambarde’s awareness of Anglo-Saxon laws led to his frequent emphasis on the English legal system’s non-Roman nature. Even when he discusses law’s function rather than its history, or when his main concern is to provoke his jury into cooperating with him and not to make a historical argument, he never loses sight of the qualities of English law that set it apart from the laws of other nations: its Germanic roots and special tradition of common learning from the distant past. English legal history hovers always in the background of his discussions, and his Anglo-Saxon studies cannot be separated from his legal theories. The subtitles of the two modern biographies of Lambarde, ‘Elizabethan Jurist’ and ‘Elizabethan Antiquary,’ are, ultimately, not separable categories but mutually influencing and reinforcing. 86

87 88

‘By all means, that which institutes and moulds the practice of religion in us and which transmits the worship of God … acquires the position of the soul in the body of the republic.’ John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 66–67. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 128. Harris discusses Starkey’s use of the body politic metaphor at some length. Foreign Bodies, 19–47.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION AND THE ANGLO-SAXON LAWS If Lambarde feared the loss of traditional liberties due to the negligence of the local juries, his colleagues a few decades later shared this fear, but saw royal power and abuse of the prerogative courts as their main threat. In the years leading up to Civil War, a ‘revolution’ in legal thinking took place among the more liberal members of Parliament.89 The antiquarian bent of many of the major figures of this party, such as John Selden and Edward Coke, has been well documented: Coke’s Second Institute was an extended commentary on the Magna Carta, interpreting it in a way that argued against some of the practices of the prerogative courts.90 Often these men and their confederates would meet before Parliamentary sessions at the house of Robert Cotton, the famous antiquary and collector of medieval manuscripts.91 So dangerous did King Charles view Cotton’s collection to his royal prerogative that in 1629 he forcibly barred Cotton from access to his books. Charles’s act paralleled, in a more extreme form, a decision his father had made when he had effectively dissolved the Society of Antiquaries in 1607—the practice of examining ancient customs struck the first two Stuart kings as potentially dangerous to their royal prerogative and absolute authority. From this, we might assume that antiquarian studies led one to become something of a constitutional radical. How does Lambarde fit into this description? And what can we tell of how his later contemporaries viewed him? Although a full discussion of Lambarde’s impact on the next generation of common lawyers is beyond the scope of this book, it seems fitting to close with a brief foray into the early seventeenth century in order to expand our sense of Lambarde’s possible influence. First, the question of Lambarde’s radicalism or conservatism. Compared with his younger contemporaries such as Coke, Lambarde might easily seem conservative indeed. After all, his Archeion defended the existence of prerogative and equity courts, especially those of Chancery and Star Chamber. These courts would become an ideological battleground as Parliament would object to the way the royal courts seemed to ignore the 89

90

91

This revolution and its consequences during the Civil War are described in Alan Cromartie, ‘The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,’ Past & Present 163 (1999): 76–120. For a brief discussion of Coke’s Second Institute, see Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956), 516–518; and Pocock, Ancient Constitution, especially 44–45. For Cotton’s life and library, see C.E. Wright, ‘The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library,’ in The English Library before 1700, ed. Francis Wormald and C.E. Wright (London: Athlone Press, 1958), 176–212.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ law in order to allow the king whatever he desired. The phrase ‘Star Chamber’ remains to this day a synonym for an arbitrary and out-ofcontrol court used to persecute citizens. Lambarde’s Archeion alone might seem to justify assuming that he was a conservative. Alan Cromartie seems to read him this way, observing that in the later struggles between Edward Coke and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, ‘it was only too easy to argue, with William Lambarde (1536–1601), that the chancellor was acting for the king, a monarch who was sworn to administer justice’; Cromartie notes the Archeion for this argument.92 However, as biographers of Edward Coke have argued, one could be a conservative under Elizabeth and still be moved toward radicalism by the Stuart form of absolute monarchy.93 Coke served as Elizabeth’s Attorney General, and in that capacity defended the royal prerogative tirelessly. Under James, he became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and at that point his job was to uphold and defend the common law. More than just the change in his job description, though, and his desire for his own office to be the key to power, the style of the two monarchs made it more difficult for the common lawyers to work for James. Elizabeth, while she never ceased insisting that such a thing as royal prerogative existed, was careful not to bring it in direct conflict with the legal tradition. She demanded that her subjects acknowledge her ultimate authority, but did not try to make full use of it.94 James and Charles felt they had to establish an authority above the law. People such as Coke who had fully supported Elizabeth’s rule found themselves at odds with James, and even more so with his son. Taking Lambarde’s texts, all of them written while Elizabeth reigned, and assuming that he would have held the same opinions twenty years later is therefore dubious. Moreover, Lambarde’s writings themselves are perhaps not the hard-line royalist doctrine that they could appear to be. Wilfred Prest has studied a tract Lambarde wrote about corrupt judges, and notes that Lambarde was willing to harshly criticize the English courts and the corruption in the system.95 The Archeion itself, which might appear to be evidence that Lambarde was a bit of a reactionary on constitutional issues, can also be read as a critique of the system. Lambarde’s description of the extraordinary and common-law courts as two sorts of herbs that are poisonous unless mixed shows that he was 92 93 94 95

Cromartie, ‘Constitutionalist Revolution,’ 92–93. Bowen, Lion and the Throne, 292. Graham Seel and David Smith, Crown and Parliaments: 1558–1689 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21. Wilfrid Prest, ‘William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics,’ Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 474–475.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England equally aware of the problems and risks in both. He nowhere suggested that the Chancery or prerogative courts should have jurisdiction except in the most special cases. Lambarde argued that these courts were necessary because he knew—and after all his years as a justice of the peace, who better?—that local courts could not always provide justice, especially for the poor. Prerogative courts and courts of equity existed as a safety net for local common-law courts, in Lambarde’s view, and had done so since antiquity. Nothing in the Archeion indicates that Lambarde would have unilaterally approved of the uses to which James and especially Charles put the prerogative courts, and indeed Prest argues that his writings could have ‘furnished ammunition to the crown’s opponents.’96 In Lambarde’s writings, especially those which touch on the relationship of the Queen to the laws, there is an uneasy sense that the English have not always been this lucky, and perhaps will not always remain so. A 1586 discussion of Elizabeth’s willing submission to the laws begins with an ominous note: Much less shall [the laws] avail anything at all if the prince and nobility should run (as in former times it hath been seen) a quite contrary course against them. But now, whilst (God be therefore thanked) we have such a prince as is well pleased not only to rule others but also to suffer herself to be ruled by the laws of her land. …97

The English monarchy has not always obeyed its own law. Lambarde’s comment shows a nervousness about this, as does almost all his praise of Elizabeth. This ruler obeys the laws, dispenses justice without tyranny, and has chosen wise ministers to run her royal courts, he proclaims, but always beneath his praise lies the fact that this cannot be said about all her predecessors—and her successors might not be so benevolent. Lambarde, far from being a reactionary conservative, was an observant man with a sense of history and a vast amount of experience with the day-to-day workings of the law. While he praises Elizabeth effusively, one has the sense that he does so with as much relief as admiration. Indeed, one of Lambarde’s 1585 speeches to a jury hints that, had he been alive in the 1630s and 1640s, he might have been a radical reformer: Lastly, the times hath been when the nobility and commons of this realm have (with all humility and heart’s desire) begged at the hands of their princes the continuation of their country laws and customs; and not prevailing so, they have armed themselves and have sought by force and with 96 97

Ibid., 480. Lambarde, William Lambarde and Local Government, 83.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ the adventure of their honors, goods, and lives to extort it from them. But we (God’s name be blessed for it) do live in such a time and under such a prince as we need not to make suit, much less move to war, for our country laws and liberties.98

Lambarde seems to support the act of rebellion in order to maintain hereditary rights. Rather than condemning the rebels as traitors, he draws his listeners’ attention to the great risk their ancestors ran, although he quickly states that under Elizabeth such drastic measures are not necessary. He said this to a few men in Maidstone, let it be added, and certainly did not print it; it is hard to say whether he would ever have sent anything like this off to a press. He did, however, keep the written notes in his possession for over fifteen years until his death in 1601, which indicates that he did not consider them dangerous. At any rate, for Lambarde, the common-law traditions seem to take precedence over any individual monarch’s denial of them. Even though they have not always been in effect, and the English people had to take up arms to win them back, they remain valid and are worth struggling to retain. Later common lawyers such as Edward Coke valued Lambarde and his writings for his emphasis on ancient authority and the need to maintain it, as well as for his meticulous research.99 His Eirenarcha was an instant classic—Coke used it in his instruction of students at the Inns of Court— and it remained a standard ‘how-to’ manual for justices of the peace for almost a century.100 The constitutionalists also used his historical studies as fuel for their arguments. Lambarde’s Archaionomia with its Latin translation was the only book that gave lawyers direct access to the Old English laws in a language they could easily understand, and common lawyers needed to read the oldest examples of the law to discover what the legal traditions were; indeed Pocock describes Archaionomia as ‘one of the key books of the common-law interpretation.’101 Coke, especially, seems to have held Lambarde in the highest esteem. Coke’s catalogue of his library lists copies of the Perambulation, Archaionomia, and Eirenarcha.102 At one time, there were more. In 1621, Coke was imprisoned for seven months and several books in his study were removed. As he later told Parliament in 98 99 100 101 102

Ibid., 79. Richard Helgerson discusses Coke’s aims in his own legal writing in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 65–104. Bowen observes that Coke used Eirenarcha for his law courses, Lion and the Throne, 17. Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 43. Edward Coke, A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, ed. W.O. Hassall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), items 377, 415, and 610.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England a speech, three items, two by Lambarde, were not returned: ‘Lambard’s abreviat of the Tower Records [the Pandecta Rotulorum?], his abreviat of the ancient orders of Chancery, and a treatise on the government and laws of Ireland.’103 Coke wistfully remarked that he would ‘give three hundred pounds’ for the return of the missing books.104 No doubt the historical subject matter explains why Coke so keenly felt the loss of these books (and Coke was not a man to miss an opportunity for rhetorical effect), but he would hardly so lament their absence if he had small regard for Lambarde as a scholar. Coke’s importance in the subsequent legal tradition can hardly be overstated, as he was key in ‘interpreting’ the medieval tradition for later generations of common lawyers. As David Seipp has noted, ‘Such was the authority, the personality, and the historical importance of Lord Coke that his Reports, his Institutes, and his other writings formed the core of what the later legal profession “remembered” about medieval common law.’105 Coke’s learning and research in medieval law were legendary; however, as Seipp continues, ‘The unfortunate part was that Coke made things up.’106 In Samuel Thorne’s memorable phrase, ‘As a rule of thumb, it is well to remember that sentences beginning “For it is an ancient maxim of the common law”, followed by one of Coke’s spurious Latin maxims … are apt to provide a new departure.’107 Coke’s ‘forgeries’ of common law, however dubious historically, were foundational in the Anglo-American legal system of the last few hundred years, and would not have been possible had he not had the researches of historians with a higher regard for veracity such as Lambarde to draw upon.108 Lambarde, far less grasping or ambitious than Coke, helped draw the outlines of medieval legal history that Coke so brilliantly colored in his own writing. History, for both Coke and Lambarde, had immediate force in the present. The same can be said for Lambarde’s queen; Elizabeth I certainly saw historical discussions in terms of her own state. She reportedly said to Lambarde in his interview with her in 1601, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not 103 104 105 106 107 108

Quoted in Bowen, Lion and the Throne, 491. Ibid. David J. Seipp, ‘The Law’s Many Bodies, and the Manuscript Tradition in English Legal History,’ Journal of Legal History 25 (2004): 74. Ibid. Samuel E. Thorne, ‘Sir Edward Coke: 1552–1952,’ in The Selden Society Lectures 1952–2001 (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 2003), 7. A recent biography of Coke argues that Coke’s legal research tried to find an ancient foundation for the law in parallel to Archbishop Parker’s research on the English Church, a claim that is probably more accurate for Lambarde than Coke. Allen Boyer, Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 135–155.

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‘The Saxons, our Ancestors’ that?’109 The Queen’s remark, equating herself with her predecessor and descriptions of his overthrow (particularly Shakespeare’s play) with the unrest of her own subjects (particularly Essex’s rebellion), encapsulates the importance of the study of the past in the sixteenth century.110 The immediacy of legal principles, even if they were centuries old, made the study of the Anglo-Saxon codes the study of the Elizabethan present; the point of Lambarde’s endeavors was not to examine the ways quaint Old English laws could shed light on obscure bits of history. Greenberg argues, ‘a study of the way things were provided a reliable guide to the way things are and ought to be,’ and these categories eventually interpenetrate to such an extent that we can hardly separate them.111 For Lambarde, as well as several of his contemporaries, Anglo-Saxon law and Elizabethan law were continuous and, in several important ways, identical (in the second definition of ‘law’ as the understanding of legal principles underlying legislation). Just as Elizabeth did not say that she was ‘like’ Richard II but ‘was’ Richard II, English common law was the ancient laws that were first made manifest in the Anglo-Saxon codes. In large part, the study of Anglo-Saxon law was the study of Elizabethan law, even as the period between the migrations and the Conquest was coming to be ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ for the same English writers who also wanted to create ‘Elizabethan England.’

109 110 111

Dunkel, William Lambarde, 177. W. Nicholas Knight discusses this conversation in light of Shakespeare’s play. ‘Equity, the Merchant of Venice and William Lambarde,’ Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 93–104. Greenberg, Radical Face, 16–17.

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Conclusion THE INVENTION OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND ‘It was invisible, buried in the mud. I only saw it because I was looking for it.’ ‘What! You expected to find it?’ ‘I thought it not unlikely.’ A. Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’1

T

HE SNAPSHOTS of early Anglo-Saxon studies presented in this book allow specialists in both medieval and early modern England to see what can be gained from examining Nowell’s and Lambarde’s research in the context of their social and professional circumstances. For medievalists, their work shows that Anglo-Saxon studies could speak to issues of language, topography, and the legal system, and were not limited to Anglican polemic; for early modernists, it demonstrates that early nationalistic historical explorations investigated Anglo-Saxon as well as RomanoCeltic history. Laurence Nowell and William Lambarde sought England’s heritage in the period of history between the Germanic migrations and the Conquest, and like Sherlock Holmes in the above quotation, they found what they looked for because they looked for it. Stating this does not negate the painstaking, careful research that they conducted, or the laborious process of copying, editing, and cross-checking variant readings that both scholars undertook. It does, however, underscore that if we are to understand the origin of ‘Anglo-Saxon England,’ we must not only look at what it was that Nowell and Lambarde found in their manuscripts, but what they were looking for when they opened them. This interdependency between

1

A. Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 404.

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Conclusion: The Invention of Anglo-Saxon England questions and answers is why my investigation of Old English studies has looked as much at the earliest Anglo-Saxonists’ aims as their results. Nor is this a new thing in early modern historiography. Philip Schwyzer, in his Literature, Nationalism, and Memory, describes a recent sea-change in modern ideas of Tudor historical research: The Tudor era was long associated by literary historians with the ‘discovery of England’—the process by which the English people became proudly conscious of their national language, geography, history, and destiny. A host of recent critical interventions … have challenged this comfortable narrative in a variety of ways. They have demonstrated conclusively that England, like all nations, was not there to be ‘discovered’ but rather to be invented or constructed—even ‘written.’2

The dual possibilities of his word ‘invented’ give us a way to think about antiquarian research that is not as sharply divided between ‘discovery’ and ‘construction.’ ‘Invention,’ of course, can mean the creation of a new concept or technology, and this is the most common current usage. For Tudor antiquaries working on Romano-Celtic Britain, this meaning is probably the primary one. However, as Richard Helgerson has pointed out, the Latin root inventio means a discovery, the revelation of that which has previously been present but has not been known.3 If we think about Nowell’s and Lambarde’s research as an ‘invention’ in an etymological sense, we can see their work as poised between uncovering what was hidden and shaping what did not previously exist—and this, I think, is more accurate for the Anglo-Saxon antiquaries than a view that places them into one camp or another. For discover they did: first the manuscripts themselves, then the texts in them. Lambarde did not compose the Anglo-Saxon law codes nor Nowell make up the Old English language as an exercise in linguistics; nor, despite some of the more outré theories on the Internet, did either of them ‘forge’ Beowulf or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. My examination has demonstrated both the painstaking labor that these scholars devoted to manuscripts, and the impressive number of the manuscripts available to them. Their physical activity of locating artifacts, manuscripts, coins, and other antiquities should not be overlooked, for it adds to our own understanding of the circulation of medieval manuscripts in the sixteenth century. Much labor has been spent 2 3

Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 144.

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The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England on Nowell’s and Lambarde’s access to and production of manuscripts, and more remains to be done, for they are still coming to light. Just as Sherlock Holmes did not plant the burnt match that he uncovers from where it had lain ‘invisible’ in the mud, but finds what was already there, Nowell and Lambarde pulled the documents they used from their linguistic ‘invisibility’ as each learned the Old English language and interacted with the texts. Many of the conclusions Nowell and Lambarde drew from their discoveries are, from our point of view, laughable. It is easy to apply Eric Stanley’s dictum ‘the history of scholarship is a history of error’ to the activities of the sixteenth-century antiquarians.4 Of course Ælfric wasn’t a protoAnglican. Of course King Edward the Confessor did not write the laws attributed to him. Of course many of the ‘etymologies’ Lambarde offers are quite wrong. However, the fact that many of the conclusions are no longer acceptable to us should not—cannot—negate their importance in both the history of medieval studies and in our knowledge of Tudor nationalism. Nor did things end there, for one key aspect of the invention of AngloSaxon England is that it requires constant re-affirmation. Men such as Edward Coke, Abraham Wheelock, Roger Twysden, and George Hickes in the seventeenth century also invented their own Anglo-Saxon England, based in part on that of their predecessors, and the process has not concluded. In later centuries, of course, discussions about ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ would be informed by new theories of race and new imperial desires. These have become increasingly obvious to modern students of the history of Old English studies.5 Anglo-Saxon ‘England’ requires constant clarification and re-formulation. Nowell and Lambarde helped establish Anglo-Saxon ‘England’ as a definitive moment in English history in a way that influenced the subsequent versions of the figures mentioned above, but did not dictate to them. And in fact, even in the sixteenth century they had competition, for the invention of Anglo-Saxon England was already multi-valent. Thomas Stapleton had used Bede as an example that England’s true religion was the Roman Catholic one.6 Richard Verstegen’s voice would be added to those

4 5

6

Eric Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury (1975; repr. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 110. See, for instance, Allen Franzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), especially 27–61; Kathleen Biddick The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially 80–117.

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Conclusion: The Invention of Anglo-Saxon England of Catholics who wanted to claim the Anglo-Saxon period as the foundational past. This vision also had competition from those to whom other moments better reflected their version of English heritage. However, even as English history continued to become politicized during the constitutional conflicts of the early seventeenth century, and fracture lines deepened between supporters of ‘British’ history and ‘Saxon’ history, Colin Kidd observes that ‘one should not exaggerate the degree of anti-Saxonism. Hostility to the Saxons was never vociferous or universal.’7 The studies of Nowell and Lambarde, and of Parker and Joscelyn, functioned alongside the British history, even in early Stuart England, at least as often as they opposed it. From the first few attempts to read and understand Old English manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon England remained, at least in potential, a foundational period as early modern England struggled to invent itself.

7

Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 106.

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INDEX Place names are given in modern spelling where these can be identified. If they cannot, the original version is given in quotation marks. Page numbers in bold type refer to illustrations and their captions. Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum see Howlet, Richard Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham 38 Grammar and Glossary 21, 34, 35, 40, 43–50, 98 see also manuscripts, London, Westminster Abbey Library 30 homilies 13, 21, 39–41 early modern interest in 21, 30, 44, 47–50, 70 letter to Sigefyrð 39 translation of Alcuin’s Interrogationes 98 Æthelred, King of Wessex 147 Æþelstan, King of Wessex 2 Alfred the Great, King of Wessex 95–96, 100–101, 183 early modern reception of 184 law codes 21, 40, 196 see also manuscripts, London, British Library Henry Davis Collection of Bookbindings 59 Anglo-Irish 160, 163, 166, 182–183 English depictions of 160, 165, 167–168, 181 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle composition 93, 95 manuscripts of 96–98 Nowell’s use of 22, 23, 37, 40, 91, 94, 96–100, 117, 149 antiquaries see Society of Antiquaries Archaionomia see under Lambarde, William Archeion see under Lambarde, William Ascham, Roger 3, 15, 21, 55, 60, 61–62, 65 The Scholemaster 61 Toxophilus 61–62 Ashprington 172 Arthur, King 111, 115, 170 Augustine, Saint 134–135 Bacon, Sir Francis 3, 11, 17 Bale, John 5–6, 89

Bamburgh 106 Bardey 173 Bardney 102 Barking 102 “Barmsey” 125 Barrow 102 Becket, St. Thomas 142–143 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 22, 91, 94, 96, 99, 100–103 Old English translation 38, 40, 42–43, 48, 100–103, 117 see also manuscripts, London, British Library Cotton Otho B.xi and manuscripts, London, British Library Additional 43703 Bedford 106–107 Benedictine reform 37 Bernicia 102 Beverley 132 Bishopton 133 Bridestowe 172 Bridgnorth 92–93 Britain elision with “England” 116–117, 119, 138, 149, 152–153, 173–174 interest in Romano-Celtic period of 3, 5, 11, 116, 184, 225 supposed Trojan origins of 110–111, 115 Burghley, First Baron of see Cecil, William Burke, McWilliam 164, 165–166 Bury St. Edmunds 172 Caernafon 114 Camden, William, Britannia 6, 90, 118, 121, 129, 136, 144 Canterbury 141–143, 172 Canute, King of England, laws 197 Carew 172 “Carr” 127 cartography see maps Cawdry, Robert 59 Cecil, Robert 203

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Index Cecil, Thomas 38 Cecil, William, 1st Lord Burghley 3, 58, 105, 158 antiquarian studies, interest in 13–14 career 13 cartography, interest in 14 employment of Nowell 11, 12 gardening, interest in 38 household and acquaintances 14–15, 55, 57, 60, 61, 76, 107 Ireland, interest in 153, 168–169 national identity, interest in 11, 13, 20, 152, 213 ownership of Nowell’s “General Description” 153–154 Chancery, Court of 203, 218 Charles I, King of England 218, 219–220 Chatham 139 Chaucer, Geoffrey 2, 184 Cheke, John 57–59, 60 Chippenham 124–125 chorography defined 89, 90–91, 118, 119, 120–122 see also maps and placenames, study of “Cnobsborowe” 128 Coke, Edward 3, 11, 17, 25, 200–201, 218–219, 221–222, 226 Common Pleas, Court of 203 Cordell, William 198 Cornwall 154, 172, 173 coterie poetry see literary circles Cotton, Sir Robert 6, 38, 218 Coventry 172 “Crayford” 144 Cromwell, Sir Thomas 89–90 Danes 75, 93, 96, 134, 145 Danegeld 146–147 Day, John 14 Deleware 143 DeVere, Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford 12, 15, 49, 63 “Dinsestant” 102 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 198–199 Donne, John 9, 10 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 224 Drayton, Michael 129 Dunstan, Archbishop and Saint 134 Early English Books Online 7 Edgar, King of Wessex 145, 183 Edward VI, King of England 109 EEBO see Early English Books Online Egbert, King of Wessex 173

“Egbrightston” 126 Egerton, Sir Thomas 18, 23, 185 Eirenarcha see under Lambarde, William Elizabeth I, Queen of England 14, 25, 61, 115, 121, 136, 137, 152, 156, 213, 214, 219–221 interview with William Lambarde 18, 222–223 Elstob, William 97 Elyot, Thomas, Bibliotheca 54 English language, Elizabethan interest in see Inkhorn Controversy Evesham 95 Exeter 171 Falmouth 172 Faversham 130 Finglas, Patrick, “Breviate of the getting of Ireland” 162, 169 Fitzgerald, “Silken Thomas” 164 Flattisbury, Philip 161 “Flintshire” 114 Folkestone 144 Foxe, John 14, 70 Gaelic-Irish 160, 163, 165, 166–168 “Galtresse” 125 “Gavelford” 93 gavelkind 195–196 Geoffrey of Monmouth 107, 116, 170 Gesta Siwardi 104 Geþyncþu 145–146, 147, 195 Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia 161, 169–170 glossaries, medieval 36, 48 see also Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, Grammar and Glossary Golding, Arthur 3, 15, 21, 55, 60, 69 Metamorphosis 15, 62–63, 64–65 prefatory poem in Baret’s Alvearie 64, 65 Work Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion 63–64 Google books 7 grammars 48–49 see also Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, Grammar and Glossary Gyles, Fletcher 122, 123–124, 125, 131 Harington, James 49 Hart, John 15, 21, 55, 60, 65 A Method, or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned 67 Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung 66 Orthographie 65–67 Harvey, William 215 n.80

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Index Hebrides 170 Henfield 93 Henry II, King of England 142–143 Henry VIII, King of England 89, 90, 109, 115, 146, 164 Henry de Marleburgh 161 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum 22, 91, 94, 99, 100, 104, 118, 129 see also manuscripts, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library HM 26341 English identity in 105–106 manuscript versions of 105 Heraclitus 198–199 heritage, explanation of 31, 191 Hesiod, Works and Days 71, 158 Hickes, George 226 Higden, Ranulf, Polychronicon 95, 104, 163, 170 Hoby, Thomas, The Courtier 57–58 Holmes, Sherlock 224, 226 Howlet, Richard, Abcedarium AnglicoLatinum 50 see also Nowell, Laurence, Abcedarium Inkhorn Controversy 21, 55 neologisms 56–57 relationship to national identity 57–59, 82 Ireland 14 Brehon law 179 compared to English past 157–158, 171, 183, 185 depictions of in English writing see Spenser, Edmund, View of the Present State of Ireland Elizabethan policy in 168–169 Isidore of Seville, Liber Synonymorum 39 James I, King of England 218, 219–220 John, King of England 140 “John of Brompton’s” Chronicle 104 John of Salisbury, Policraticus 217 John of Worcester 99, 107 Joscelyn, John employment by Archbishop Parker 8, 12–13 Old English dictionary 30, 41 wordlist see manuscripts, London, Lambeth Palace 692 Justinian, Institutes iuris civilis 202 King’s Bench, Court of 203, 219 Kent see Lambarde, William, Perambulation of Kent Knox, John 152

Lagus, Conrad, Methodica iuris utriusque traditio 202 Lambarde, William 120–122, 184–185 addresses to juries 193, 201–202, 205, 206–208, 211–213, 214–217 Alphabetical Description 15, 17, 22, 88, 119, 122–136, 192 compared to Perambulation of Kent 139–141, 144, 146 Archaionomia 3, 14, 16, 21, 51, 55, 73–74, 192, 196–200, 211, 221 Archeion 17, 193, 203–206, 208–209, 213–214, 218–220 career 15–18 Dictionarium Angliae see Lambarde, William, Alphabetical Description Duties of Constables 192–193 early life 15–16 Eirenarcha 17, 192, 201, 210, 221 Lincoln’s Inn, studies in 11, 15–16 maps 136–137, 177 Pandecta Rotulorum 222 Perambulation of Kent 2–3, 16–17, 22, 88, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125, 126, 130, 136–147, 176, 192, 221 English law in 145, 194–196 reception of 120, 218–222 Smith’s De Recta Scriptione, annotations in 21, 74–75, 79–82 use of Nowell’s manuscripts 15, 16, 44, 97, 107, 171, 197 Vocabularium Saxonicum, ownership of and annotations in 16, 21, 40, 51, 56, 71–73, 126–128, 199 see also Nowell, Laurence, Vocabularium Saxonicum law (Anglo-Saxon) 37, 183, 223 see also Alfred, King of Wessex, law codes and Lambarde, William, Archaionomia law (English common) contrasted with civil law 202–203, 205, 212 foundation for English identity 20, 23, 76–77, 183, 190–191, 192, 210–218 Immemorial vs. Gothic arguments 200–201, 205 “two bodies” of 193 use in “Body Politic” metaphors 213–217 Leland, John 92, 99, 115–117, 119, 123, 149, 152 Assertio Arturii 108, 111–112, 113, 114 career 89–90 Collectanea 108 Cygnea Cantio 19, 22, 108, 109–111,

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Index 114–116 see also Nowell, Laurence, Leland’s Cygnea Cantio, copy of Genethliacon 19, 22, 108, 109, 110, 114–116 see also Nowell, Laurence, Leland’s Genethlicon, copy of Itinerary 108 New Year’s Gift 89, 108 plans for antiquarian studies 5 Leinster 165 Leix 168 lexicography Early Modern English 21, 60, 189 “heroic” 30–31 Old English 29, 67, 69, 70, 83 see also Nowell, Laurence, Vocabularium Saxonicum and Nowell, Laurence, Abcedarium, Nowell’s lexical glossary in Lindisfarne 114 Lindisfarne Gospels see Manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels) L’Isle, William 38, 48 literary circles 9–11 livery of seisin 143–144 London 126 Looe 173 Lydford 172 Magna Carta 205–206, 218 Maidenhead 131–132 Manorbier 172 manuscripts Canterbury Cathedral Library Lit. E.1 97–98 Lit E.2 197 n. 25 Lit. B.2 98 Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 96 104 n.29 MS 383 189–190 Glasgow Glasgow University Library Hunter 288 105 London British Library Additional 20033 123 Additional 43703 35, 38–39, 53, 95, 96–97, 98, 101, 103, 117 Additional 43704 97, 98 Additional 43705 107, 117 Additional 43708 103–104, 117 Additional 62540 23, 148–149, 151, 153–154 see also Nowell,

Laurence, maps, “General Description” Cotton Claudius D.vi 154 Cotton Cleopatra A.iii 36, 48, 101 Cotton Domitian xviii 23, 98, 149, 161–178, 178–185, 190 Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels) 23, 48, 70 Cotton Otho B.xi 7–8, 12, 35, 38–39, 41, 96, 101, 190–191 Cotton Tiberius A.vi 97 Cotton Tiberius B.i 97 Cotton Tiberius B.iv 97 Cotton Titus A.xxvii 189 Cotton Vespasian A.v 125 Cotton Vespasian D.xiv 8, 35, 39–41, 46, 67 Egerton 3668 105 Harley 978 34, 37–38 Harley 3271 98 Henry Davis Collection of Bookbindings 59 30, 50, 68–70, 190 Royal 14.C.vii 154 Lambeth Palace Library MS 327 105 MS 692 34, 41–43 Westminster Abbey Library MS 30 44–47, 51 Oxford Bodleian Library Laud Misc. 636 97 Selden supra 63 see Nowell, Laurence, Vocabularium Saxonicum Rochester Rochester Cathedral Library Textus Rofensis 145, 195, 199 San Marino, CA Huntington Library HM 26341 101, 103, 104–107, 154 Washington, DC Folger Shakespeare Library MS X.d.213 123 manuscripts compared to printed books 5–7, 19 maps see also under Nowell, Laurence historical 174, 176–177 of Britain 23, 150, 152 of Ireland 23, 150, 164 purpose of medieval maps 154–156 Mary, Queen of Scots 14, 130 Mary I, Queen of England 152

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Index Laurence, Abcedarium, place-name index in travels 12, 16, 49 Vocabularium Saxonicum 36, 126 see also under Lambarde, William composition 50–52, 67 purpose 17 sources 40, 45, 52

Matthew Paris 125, 154–156, 157 medicine in Renaissance humors, theory of 215–216 relationship to legal discourse 213–216 national identity, English contrasted with local identity 118–119, 121–122, 174–176 see also Lambarde, William Alphabetical Description and Lambarde, William, Perambulation of Kent validity of term “nation” 24–25 Nennius 107 New Forest (Hampshire) 172 “Newndene” 144 “Noder” (river) 125 Northumberland 130–131 Nowell, Alexander 61 Nowell, Laurence Abcedarium see also Howlet, Richard, Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum codicology of Nowell’s copy 18–20, 91 Nowell’s legal glossary in 18, 19, 51, 189 Nowell’s lexical glossary in 28, 18, 29–31, 67 compared to Vocabularium Saxonicum 30, 32, 35, 50–53 composition 19, 20–21, 32–34 purposes 21, 60, 82–83 sources 21, 34–47 Nowell’s place-name index in 86, 18, 50, 88, 90, 127–128, 176 composition 19, 20, 21–22, 88, 91–95 purposes 22, 88–89, 118–119 sources 22, 88, 94–117 biography 12 employment by William Cecil 11, 12 Laws of King Alfred see manuscripts, London, British Library Henry Davis Collection of Bookbindings 59 Leland’s Cygnea Cantio, copy of 19, 112, 117 Leland’s Genethliacon, copy of index 19, 112–113, 117 maps Cotton Domitian xviii 23, 88, 90, 171–178 see also under manuscripts, London, British Library “General Description” 151, 14, 23, 88, 90, 148–149, 150–161 see also manuscripts, London, British Library, Additional 62540 place-name studies see Nowell,

O’Neill, Shane 168 Offaly 168 Oliver, Isaac Portrait of a Melancholy Young Man 159 onomastics see place names, study of Ortelius, Abraham 177 orthography 65–67 see also Hart, John and Smith, Sir Thomas, De Recta Scriptione Oxford, Earl of see DeVere, Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford Padstow 173 Palsgrave, John 59 Paracelsus 215 n.80 Parker, Archbishop Matthew 12, 40 Asser’s Ælfredi Regis Res Gestae, edition of 87 Defense of Priestes Mariages 47 manuscript collection 6, 8 Protestant polemic, interest in 6, 8, 13, 134, 144 Testimony of Antiquity 14, 15, 47, 203 Penn, William 143 Penzance 172 Perambulation of Kent see under Lambarde, William Peterborough 40, 173 place names, study of 87–88, 118–119, 121, 145, 175–176 see also Nowell, Laurence, Abcedarium, Nowell’s placename index in and Lambarde, William, Perambulation of Kent and Lambarde, William, Alphabetical Description Polesworth 132 “Port” 94 precedent, legal 189 printing 5–6, 14 Priscian, Grammatica 49 n.53 Quadripartitus 16, 53, 189 “Quinborow” 115 Requests, Court of 11, 203 Roche 173

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Index romances, Middle English 183–184 Rule of St. Benedict, Old English 37 Runcorn 127–128 Salisbury 172 Saxton, Christopher, Anglia 153, 174–175, 177 Scotland conflated with England 153 in English foreign policy 14 in English maps 155–156 see also Nowell, Laurence, maps ties to Ireland 170–171 Selden, John 218 Shakespeare, William 18, 62, 223 Sicily 153–154 Sidney, Henry 168–169 Sittingbourne 140 Smith, Sir Thomas 55, 60, 65 career 75–76 De Recta Scriptione 21, 56, 75–76, 77–82 De Republica Anglorum 76–77 Discourse on the Commonweal of England 79 Society of Antiquaries 18, 23, 65, 185, 218 Somner, William 44, 97, 98 Speed, John 177 spelling see orthography Spenser, Edmund 25 connection with Society of Antiquaries 23, 185 Faerie Queene 6, 184 View of the Present State of Ireland 23, 178–185, 190 Standard, Battle of the 106 Stapleton, Thomas 226 Star Chamber, Court of 203, 218–219 Starkey, Thomas 217 Stockes, Adrian 171 n.57 Sussex, Earl of (Lord Lieutenant of Ireland) 168 Sutton Coldfield 49 Swansey 173

tanistry 179–180 Tenby 172 “Temesford” 93 Textus Rofensis see under manuscripts, Rochester Cathedral Library Throckmorton, Nicholas 76 Thynne, Francis 10, 18 Tribal Hideage 98 Tutbury 129–130 Twysden, Roger 226 Tyndale, William 57 Ulster 170 Vocabularium Saxonicum see under Nowell, Laurence Vergil, Polydore 111–112, 123, 128–129 Verstegen, Richard 4, 226 Vikings see Danes Virgil, Aeneid 111 Walter of Gisburne 161 Wexford 165 Wheelock, Abraham 226 Whitby 104 “wild” Irish see Gaelic-Irish William of Malmesbury 104 William the Conqueror, King of England 137, 195–196, 204 Wilson, Thomas 65 Arte of Rhetorique 58 Wimborne 133, 172 Windebank, Thomas 38 Windsor 123–124, 135 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 89 Worchester 95, 173 Wotton, Nicholas 107 Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, homilies 35, 37

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Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan R. V. Young Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature Kisses of their Mouths Noam Flinker Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England James Doelman Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes John T. Shawcross Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century James Ellison Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli John Roe Volume 10: John Donne’s Professional Lives Edited by David Colclough Volume 11: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Alex Davis Volume 12: Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear Michael L. Hays Volume 13: John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit Jeanne Shami Volume 14: A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England Adam Smyth

rackmann, Rebecca

he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

Volume 15: John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction Beth Lynch Volume 16: The Making of Restoration Poetry Paul Hammond Volume 17: Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser Christopher Burlinson Volume 18: Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene Paul Suttie Volume 19: Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in English Drama, 1558–1642 Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen Volume 20: The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance Sue P. Starke Volume 21: Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685 Matthew Birchwood Volume 22: Early Modern Tragicomedy Edited by Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne Volume 23: Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England Andrew Zurcher Volume 24: George Gascoigne Gillian Austen Volume 25: Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature Stewart Mottram Volume 26: The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare Robert Hornback Volume 27: Lord Henry Howard (1540–1614): an Elizabethan Life D. C. Andersson Volume 28: Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in mid-seventeenth-century England Takashi Yoshinaka Volume 29: Renaissance Historical Fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe Alex Davis

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he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study

Cover: Laurence Nowell’s annotated copy of Richard Howlet’s Abcedarium. Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Studies in Renaissance Literature Series Editors: Raphael Lyne, David Colclough, Sean Keilen

The

Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English

BRACKMANN

Copyright © 2012. Boydell & Brewer, Limited. All rights reserved.

Laurence Nowell (1530–c.1570), author of the first dictionary of Old English, and William Lambarde (1536–1601), Nowell’s protégé and eventually the first editor of the Old English Laws, are key figures in Elizabethan historical discourses and in its political and literary society. Through their work, the period between the Germanic migrations and the Norman Conquest came to be regarded as a foundational time for Elizabethan England, overlapping with and contributing to contemporary debates on the shape of Elizabethan English language. Their studies took different strategies in demonstrating the role of early medieval history in Elizabethan national – even imperial – identity, while in Lambarde’s legal writings Old English law codes become identical with the ‘ancient laws’ that underpinned contemporary common law. Their efforts contradict the assumption that Anglo-Saxon studies did not effectively participate in Tudor nationalism outside of Protestant polemic; instead, it was a vital part of making history ‘English’. Their work furthers our understanding of both the history of medieval studies and the importance of early Anglo-Saxon studies to Tudor nationalism. Rebecca Brackmann is Assistant Professor of English, Lincoln Memorial University.

The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England

Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... A book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to ethnic identity and the national past. Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com Brackmann, Rebecca he Elizabethan nvention o Anglo-Saxon England Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study o Old English, Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2012 ProQuest Ebook Central, http //ebookcentral proquest com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail action?doc D 948390 Created rom nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-08-12 16 59 38

Rebecca Brackmann