CHAPTER ONE
Loss and Foundations
Camden’s Britannia and the Histories of English Architecture
Quite rationally, most histories of English architectural writing begin with books that are actually about architecture. As the introduction to this study points out, this is a sparse and attenuated category in pre-Restoration England. Nonetheless, a handful of original and translated treatises by John Shute, Hans Blum, Sebastian Serlio, and Henry Wotton lay out elements of building design, or of classical and Renaissance aesthetics, in ways that recognizably relate to our modern sense of the architectural profession.1 William Camden’s Britannia (Latin 1586, English 1610), by contrast, is not concerned with any of these topics. But if the Britannia tells us little about the history of architectural theory in England, it undoubtedly tells us more about the history of actual English buildings than all of these early treatises combined. Shute, Blum, Serlio, and Wotton together mention a total of one real English building, while the Britannia’s survey stretches easily into the hundreds, locating in the English landscape more than 100 former monasteries, more than 150 country houses or palaces, more than 130 castles or other fortifications, and at least 60 churches or cathedrals.2 The first printed work to realize John Leland’s ambitious vision of a complete historical and topographical survey of Britain’s counties, the Britannia comprehends nearly every type of building and positions these structures in a history that stretches from Roman Britain to Camden’s day. Thus, while early treatises tell us more about how the English came to understand and assimilate the aesthetic traditions of the classical world and the Italian Renaissance, the Britannia gives a much fuller idea of how its author and contemporary readers thought about the built environment that already existed around them and how they interpreted architectural landmarks and remains that had been coming into and fading from existence for more than a thousand years.
In this chapter, the Britannia is used to lay historical groundwork for the many types of architectural writing we will see in subsequent chapters. Camden’s popular chorographic work illustrates three important patterns and features that will recur in texts throughout this study and will be detailed below. It also provides a way of tying the emergence of these patterns and features to antiquarian thought and to Camden’s own post-Reformation moment. While modern scholarship has most often praised the Britannia for its proto-archaeological method and its capacity to separate solid empirical evidence from fiction and fantasy, the work does not consistently authorize things over words, and even when Camden attempts to sort historical truth from wishful mythology, he tends to include both.3 Documentary and written evidence, oral tradition, and visible architectural remains combine in the Britannia’s depiction of the physical landscape, with the result that architecture is very often positioned through its relation to narrative records and traditions, viewed through the lens of the stories that had been written and told about it.4 As Angus Vine has written, “One moment an antiquary might be describing the tessellated fragments of an unearthed Roman pavement, whilst the next he might report an oral tradition or rumour associated with the same place. He might then switch his attention to the ancestors of the local gentry. The point is to note how easily and readily the antiquaries moved from one context to another.”5 Sometimes, in fact, architecture survived for Camden only in writing. In the flexibility and variety of its narratives, the Britannia prepares us for the wide range of authors and texts that would make use of architecture over the course of the seventeenth century. Architecture in the Britannia is valued for the stories it might tell, and its particular locative qualities lend themselves to a strand of antiquarian writing that diverges from the histories of collecting with which antiquarianism is now most often identified.6 Inalienable from its original site and resistant to physical preservation, architecture encourages a form of antiquarian production that expresses itself most fully in narrative genres and culminates in the reproduction and circulation of texts, not the acquisition and display of rare or antique objects. For both practical and methodological reasons, in this approach, architecture and storytelling are interdependent practices. Architecture is experienced as a process of reading, rather than solely of seeing.
The Britannia’s narrative and historical descriptions of architecture coalesce into recognizable models and genres that were consciously appropriated by contemporary and subsequent writers. Again for practical and methodological reasons, particular kinds of stories became associated with certain kinds of buildings, and these stories were told in formally similar ways. In perhaps the most pervasive and widely adapted of these patterns, descriptions and celebrations of the country house placed these buildings at the center of a narrative genre invested in the compilation, and manufacture, of ancestral history and social legitimacy. In these written works, the current genteel and aristocratic owners are made to rest—literally—on ancient foundations, becoming the capstones of histories that channel the description of the architecture toward celebration of the family’s stability and their connections to the landscape that Camden’s Britannia surveys.
The Britannia will also be used to break down a series of common critical assumptions about the causal relationship between the Reformation and English perceptions of architecture during this period. It has generally been assumed that architecture as a discipline carried some kind of doctrinal marker or that it produced a range of associations that might account for England’s differences from the Continent. Converted monasteries, monastic ruins, and certain features of churches, for instance, could be associated with a Catholic past, while classical style in general might be suspect for its Roman heritage. Alternatively, scholars have suggested that classicism was consciously appropriated as part of a Protestant iconography.7 More broadly, it has been suggested, architecture’s visual vocabularies might have alienated a Protestant audience with an inherent distrust of images.8 While Camden cannot be used to represent every case, he does present an alternative model, in which architecture—even religious architecture—is not understood through these sorts of doctrinal connotations. Buildings are instead mined for the array of idiosyncratic and secular stories that could be told about them—in short, we might say, for the human stories they could tell.
For obvious reasons, the thousand or so folio pages of the 1610 Britannia are rarely read cover to cover today, and the work is primarily studied in the context of other antiquarian and chorographic enterprises by such authors as John Stow, John Selden, James Ussher, William Dugdale, and Roger Dodsworth. But the Britannia was, in its day, a very popular book, and this small band of antiquarian scholars does not accurately represent the apparent breadth and variety of its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readership. Unlike most pre-Restoration architectural treatises, the Britannia enjoyed a publication history any modern academic press would envy, running through six successively enlarged Latin editions (1586, 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600, 1607) before being translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1610.9 While the Britannia is readily available (often in multiple copies and editions) in rare book libraries across the United States and Great Britain, John Shute’s First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563), survives in only five copies. Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624) was not republished until after the Restoration.10 An additional edition appeared after Camden’s death in 1637, and in 1695 Edmund Gibson orchestrated a completely new translation augmented with additions and corrections by multiple contributors. Although the Britannia seems originally to have been written for a community of foreign scholars, its publication history, and especially its eventual translation, indicates that it appealed to an English audience with a broader range of social and educational backgrounds. Holland’s translation, writes Graham Parry, “became a common item in gentlemen’s libraries, and did more to create a readership for antiquarian writings than did any other volume of the age.”11
It seems likely, then, that the Britannia’s approach to the interpretation of architecture was at least as influential and interesting to English readers as the precepts expounded in architectural treatises, and that its perception of architecture as both the object and the source of historical narrative could have become characteristic of English texts in many genres over the course of the seventeenth century. The Britannia was known to several of the authors considered in the coming chapters: Ben Jonson was Camden’s pupil at Westminster school, and in Epigram 14, he praises Camden’s “sight in searching the most ántique springs!”12 John Stow was a fellow member of the Society of Antiquaries. Later in the century, Anne Clifford would cite the Britannia in her Great Books and include it among the volumes depicted in the Great Picture (1646) of her family. At the end of the century, John Evelyn contributed notes on the county of Surrey for the new translation of 1695.13 It is not that the Britannia provides source material for all of these works, but it elaborates a historical view of architecture that is common to them all, revealing their—often as yet unnoticed—indebtedness to antiquarian habits of thought.
Scholars have found it difficult to say exactly what the Britannia is about, but architecture has never been a candidate.14 The work has generally been classified according to three of its main, and admittedly overlapping, interests: the rediscovery of Roman Britain, post-Reformation antiquarian study of a vanishing Catholic past, and chorography, which, broadly defined, is the historical description of landscape and cartographic space. Viewed through these multiple lenses, the Britannia appears to be several different books. Stuart Piggot, for instance, writes, “I do not think we can escape from the conclusion that the Britannia was originally planned to elucidate the topography of Roman Britain . . . which would enable Britain to take her rightful place at once within the world of antiquity and that of international Renaissance scholarship.”15 As Parry points out, though, even the first edition of 1586 “made evident, from the abundance of material remains, that there was much more history to be investigated than that relating to the Roman occupations.”16 And this broader focus is not surprising when we consider Camden’s debt to Leland’s Itinerary. (The outraged herald Ralph Brooke would accuse Camden of unacknowledged plagiarism in 1596.17) It is in this tradition of “British Antiquarian Research . . . conducted with reference to field work” that T. D. Kendrick places the Britannia.18 Bernhard Klein offers another perspective, contending that the Britannia is mainly “preoccupied with names and boundaries,” so that “even when the description follows a county’s rivers, these are shown to be flowing exclusively around stately mansions, ancient castles, and private parks.”19 Despite the diversity of these assessments, it is difficult to disagree with any of them because, depending on the pages or passages we select from this vast work, all are at once correct.
It is the layering and simultaneous presence of these interests that draw the Britannia’s focus so often to buildings and that produce the work’s distinct approach to architectural description. All these emphases interpret architecture through its relationship to both landscape and history, as a plot point in the map of an ancient Roman town, for instance, an object observed during itinerant antiquarian “field work,” or as a visible reminder of a family’s long-standing connection to a measured expanse of land. In each tradition, architecture accrues its significance from its association with particular human ancestors, not to abstract aesthetic ones. Whatever their state of completion, destruction, or decay, buildings were the marks of a history that comprised conquest and failure, devotion and decadence, prosperity and decline. The simultaneity and diversity of these foci contribute to the flexibility of architecture’s possible significance, broadening the range of historical events and periods in which it might be implicated.
CAMDEN’S INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
William Camden’s reliance on firsthand observation and his skepticism of “fables” and “extravagant digressions” are often hailed as advancing a methodology that would push the study of history toward the solid ground of the social sciences and away from the muddy waters of literature and mythology.20 The empirical and the literary are frequently cast by modern scholars as competing historiographic modes that pull in entirely different directions. While the study of literature and philology—at least as the vehicles of history—is often portrayed as the unfortunate residue of the Middle Ages, empirical observation of material evidence is viewed as looking forward to later developments in historical method, archaeology, and natural philosophy. Both Parry and Marjorie Swann have placed the Britannia at the beginning of a shift, over the course of the seventeenth century, from the study of words to the study of things, imagining Camden as an early adopter of the empirical method or of the late-seventeenth-century Baconianism that would be taken up in earnest by post-Restoration collectors and members of the Royal Society. Parry sees a parallel between the Britannia’s archaeological strands of inquiry and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, in which, he says, “Bacon . . . rightly drew a distinction between ‘Words’ and ‘Things’ as unprofitable and profitable means of inquiry.” While Camden did not have “the benefits of an archaeological outlook,” his “attention to Things,” Parry argues, was “what the study of antiquity needed.”21 From Parry’s perspective, therefore, the Britannia might be seen as participating in the development of objectivity, in both of the senses defined by Julie Robin Solomon: “the holding in abeyance, or erasure, of the individual mind’s desires, interests, assumptions while that mind is in the process of knowing the material world” and “the idea that the material world is itself capable of authorizing knowledge.”22
In its solidity and materiality, architecture might seem to contribute to this objective emphasis. Camden’s interest in observation of the built environment could then appear to indicate a divergence of the two fields—literature and architecture—that this study is meant to unite. And on the one hand, this view of the Britannia is partly accurate. Camden purports to have undertaken the work in “a firme setled study of the truth,” and he dismisses Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval Brutus myth because he can find no corroborating evidence (“Author to the Reader,” [7]). In addition, successive editions of the Britannia acquired more and more maps, illustrations, and descriptions based on the first-hand observation of places and artifacts. But, it is difficult chronologically to cast Camden as the intellectual offspring of Bacon when influential works such as the Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) were not published until the Britannia had gone through several editions.23 And, as F. J. Levy has pointed out, Bacon himself was not particularly Baconian in his study of history. He did not write history according to his own standards for the investigation of natural philosophy, nor, really, to his own standards for writing history.24 More important to my argument here is that the Britannia does contain literary sources, folkloric traditions, and verbal modes of inquiry, in abundance.25 Long blocks of Latin poetry, some of it by Camden himself, stand out on the page; and even after acknowledging that philology is a speculative and imperfect art, he frequently resorts to it. Classical texts carry at least as much weight as Roman artifacts, and it is telling that when Camden does reflect on the corroborative “unity” of words and things, he refers not to Bacon but to Plato’s Cratillus, authorizing archaeological study through recourse to a classical text (“Author to the Reader,” [5]). Jennifer Summit has persuasively softened Parry’s distinction between the ways “words” and “things” operate in the Britannia; Camden’s method, she says, is a “literary archaeology,” which does not so much distinguish between things and written sources as it transforms written sources into artifacts. Furthermore, these written artifacts require the interpretation and reframing of the Protestant historiographer: “Manuscripts,” writes Summit, “will not speak the truth themselves; instead, they must be made to do so through active intervention.”26 It is not, then, that Camden’s sources, whether verbal or material, speak for themselves with an authentic immediacy; rather, it is the work of the Britannia to locate them temporally and to extract their significance through mediation and explication.
Despite this pervasive formal and methodological interdisciplinarity, Camden is often praised today for his ability to keep disciplines apart, to separate history and poetry, and, as Wyman Herendeen says, to give them “styles and importance proper to themselves.”27 To characterize Camden as the great divider of literature and history, of philology and archaeology, is to miss the degree to which the Britannia does not separate words from things, stories from material objects, or known fables from ostensible facts.28 On the contrary, the chorographic organization of the Britannia as a journey from one place to the next means that such sources are often aligned with one another, if not through a shared vision of history then through their attachment to a single place. In his address to the reader, Camden defends the thoroughness of his research in a way that repeatedly places material or archaeological forms of evidence in parallel with written and orally related stories:
I have in no wise neglected such things as are most materiall to search, and sift out the Truth. I have attained to some skill of the most ancient, British, and English-Saxon tongues: I have travailed over all England for the most part, I have conferred with most skillfull observers in each country, I have studiously read over our owne countrie writers, old and new, all Greeke and Latine authors which have once made mention of Britaine. I have had conference with learned men in other parts of Christendome: I have beene diligent in the Records of this Realme. I have looked into most Libraries, Registers, and memorials of Churches, Cities, and Corporations, I have poored upon many an olde Rowle and Evidence. (“Author to the Reader,” 4)
Interestingly, the passage begins with what we might think of as an archaeological metaphor (“sift out the Truth”), but much of what Camden considers most “materiall” is not material in a literal sense at all. This protestation is immediately followed by an assertion of his skill in philology, and conversation (“I have conferred”) is juxtaposed in grammatical parallel to direct observation (“I have travailed”). Further, despite the Britannia’s chorographic and topographical emphasis, Camden claims that his research has been largely a process of reading and talking. The “Records of this Realme” are presumably written documents here, as are “Libraries, Registers, and memorials of Churches, Cities, and Corporations,” “Rowle[s], and “Evidence.” Significantly, when Camden mentions the “memorials” of the churches and cities, context suggests that he is referring to these documents, not to the built architectural memorials that he also sought out on his travels. Very often, historiography is not a matter of sorting or separating types of sources but of collecting them in a way that evinces their interrelations. As Vine convincingly argues, “Archaeology . . . was only one aspect of early modern antiquarianism, no more or less important than many other fields, from etymology and epigraphy to numismatics and numerology.”29 Words were valuable to Camden as the philological wormholes to the map of Roman Britain, but they were also a means through which things themselves were understood and interpreted. Verbal narrative was not simply corroborated or effaced by archaeological evidence; it equally had the capacity to confer meaning on the artifacts of the past.
The chorographic organization of the Britannia produces the effect of an anthology, rather than a hierarchy, of Camden’s various kinds of sources. Literary, folkloric, and documentary evidence are bound to architecture or architectural remains through their attachment to a place. As an example, I take Camden’s description of the dwindling town of Richborough, Kent, formerly the flourishing Roman settlement of Rhutupiae:
[W]riters record, that it was the Roiall palace of Ethelbert King of Kent and Bede gave it the name of a City. But ever since, it beganne to decay: neither is the name of it read in any place afterward, as farre as I knowe . . . . Now hath time razed out all the footings and tractes thereof, and to teach us that Cities as well as men have their fatall periods, it is a verie field at this daie. . . . [W]hen the corne is come uppe a man may see the draughts of the streetes crossing one another: (For, wheresoever the streetes went, there the corne is thinne) which the common people terme Saint Augustins Crosse. And there remaine onelie certaine walles of a Castle of rough flinte, long Britain brickes in the form of a quadrant, and the same cemented with lime, and a most stiffe binding sand, mightily strengthened by tract of time, so that the cement is as hard as stone. Over the entrie whereof is fixed a head of a personage engraven in stone, some say it was Queene Berthas head, but I take it to be a Romane worke. (341–342)
In this description, multiple kinds of research converge, and the built environment is understood and interpreted both through an examination of its physical fabric and through compilation of the stories and documents surrounding it. On the one hand, Camden deploys what we might call an archaeological method, and in judging the castle to be Roman work, he does choose one story over another. As he knew from his observations throughout the country, “Britain brickes” were characteristic of Roman architecture, and he was familiar, as well, with Roman building techniques such as the compounding of lime and mortar (349). It is not surprising, then, that subsequent scholarship has judged Camden to be correct in the matter; stretches of the Roman walls remain today, and this history is part of the way Richborough markets its interest to present-day tourists.30
On the other hand, archaeology produces only half of Camden’s account, and the remains of Richborough are enfolded in texts and stories. In the first sentence “writers record,” and the historian Bede calls it a city. Significantly, as well, Camden is as inclusive as he is discriminating, retaining a story he does not actually believe to be true, and thus compiling his sources, rather than sifting for truth. Bertha and Augustine belong to the same history: Bertha was the wife of King Ethelbert at the time of England’s conversion to Christianity, and Camden says that she founded a church for Christian worship in Canterbury before Augustine’s arrival (338). Surviving in the lore of “the common people,” and uncorroborated by material evidence, this might seem exactly the kind of misleading fable that Camden claims to have avoided. In contrast to Camden’s pronouncement that architectural materials indicate “a Romane worke,” the names of Augustine and Bertha introduce an entirely different conception of the relationship between words and things, one that we might call imaginative or evocative rather than empirical or evidentiary. St. Augustine’s Cross, marked out by the absence of seasonal grain, is clearly not, in any literal or direct way, the imprint of Augustine’s presence; and Queen Bertha’s face is imagined over material effacement, read backwards onto the worn features of an unidentifiable head. In a moment that reverses the process of empirical deduction involved in Camden’s observation of the “Britain brickes,” the remains of the built environment are understood through the terms and names of a popular story.
Even as Camden evaluates his sources objectively, then, the Britannia produces the impression that buildings accrue stories, both fanciful and true. In this respect, it illustrates a principle common to several of the texts discussed in the chapters that follow. The story of Rhutupiae is not the only case in which imaginative or literary and empirical observations are brought together by Camden, even when one fails to corroborate the other. In Oxfordshire, he views the tomb of Henry II’s celebrated mistress Rosamund and comments on the surviving palace and park nearby: “so much were our ancestours ravished with an extraordinarie delight in hunting.” In the following lines, archaeological and narrative forms of evidence diverge: “Our Historians report, that King Henrie the second being enamoured upon Rosamund Clifford . . . to hide her out of the sight of his Jealous Juno the Queene, he built a Labyrinth in this house, with many inexplicable windings, backward and forward: Which notwithstanding is no where to be seene at this day” (375). The complete lack of architectural evidence seems to relegate this story to the realm of literature or fable, an effect that Camden reinforces by describing Henry’s queen through an allusion to Roman mythology.
As the story of St. Augustine’s Cross has already demonstrated, these imaginative interpretations of architectural evidence often comprise folkloric and popular traditions in addition to literary or historical ones. At Redcastle, coins and Britain bricks once again speak to the presence of a Roman settlement, yet, Camden adds, “the neighbour inhabitants . . . report that it was a most famous place in King Arthurs daies, as the common sort ascribe whatsoever is ancient and strange to King Arthurs glory” (594). And at Dover in Kent, Camden describes “A most stately castle like unto a pretty Citie . . . . The common sort of people dreameth, that it was built by Julius Caesar, and verilie I suppose by the British Bricks in the Chappell there, that it was built by the Romans, who used such in their great buildings” (344). Camden’s verb “dreameth” seems to acknowledge that the association with Caesar is untrue or unlikely. Nevertheless, he weaves the threads of this narrative through the fabric of the building itself, allowing imaginative storytelling to color the disciplined observation of familiar Britain bricks. Single sites thus collect multiple forms of history—architectural remains, written evidence, and reported or dreamed local mythologies—and conjoin these sources in different ways. At times, various forms of evidence and interpretation seem to contradict one another; at others, they become collaborative components of the same narrative.
The co-identification or conflation of architectural and textual forms of evidence is most complete in the many instances in which buildings survive only as text. Even though Camden personally visited the supposed sites of many former buildings, he often used texts in lieu of absent architectural evidence; so text rather than building material fills out the architectural setting of some histories. We read of Deorhurst, in Gloucestershire, a small town mentioned by Bede, which “had in it sometimes a little Monasterie, which being by the Danes overthrowen flourished againe at length under Edward the Confessor; who, as we read in his Testament, assigned The religious place at Deorhirst and the government thereof to Saint Denis neere unto Paris. Yet, a little while after, as William of Malmesbury saith, It was but a vaine and void representation of antiquitie” (360). To read this narrative is something like looking at the building—a flourishing “little Monasterie”—through its own photographic negative—“a vaine and void representation”—which is itself produced through the layering of interposed texts. The monastery is available to Camden only through the practice of reading records that, even in the day of William of Malmesbury, indicated the absence of the original object. When multiple, nonidentical narratives compile, the materiality of the lost architecture recedes from the reader and singular objects dissolve under the varying layers of textual evidence. In a description of the ruined church of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, the reader is led into a building which is itself no longer extant—“now . . . at this day . . . buried under his owne ruins, and the rest . . . converted to the Kings house”—to examine an epitaph that is no longer physically there. There are two surviving stories about St. Augustine’s epitaph. One records it as a brief Latin couplet “witness[ed]” by Thomas Spot, and the second reproduces a much longer prose inscription, also in Latin, “as Bede reporteth, who is rather to be credited,” and Camden asserts that “this is the more ancient Inscription of the tomb” (337–338). Viewed through conflicting stories, architecture is fuzzily reconstructed and the object of observation either becomes a blurry image or recedes to an inaccessible vanishing point. Rather than consistently discriminating “between ‘Words’ and ‘Things’ as unprofitable and profitable methods of inquiry,” as Parry suggests Bacon did, the Britannia elaborates and allows for many possible relationships between them.
On the whole, it is not surprising that so many of the buildings the Britannia describes had fallen to ruin or disappeared altogether. Architecture that had outlived its original uses was resistant to preservation. There would have been little point, in Camden’s day, in reconstructing a Roman fortress or a decrepit monastery, even if the extraordinary means to do so had been available; and, as the previous examples show, it was precisely the impracticality of preserving architecture itself which made architectural description particularly dependent on textual records. As the object of historical or antiquarian study, architecture had other qualities that made it particularly susceptible to inclusion in narrative and literary traditions. The study of architectural remnants culminates in the reproduction and circulation of texts, ideally ones that are not rare or singular but abundantly reproduced, or, as John Bale put it, “by the art of pryntynge . . . brought into a nombre of coppyes.”31
It is often taken for granted now that whatever their differences, antiquarians of Camden’s time shared “the antiquarian mania of collecting and conserving,” as Jonathan Gil Harris has called it. Speaking of the London chorographer John Stow, whose Survey of London (1598) will be treated in Chapter 3, Harris writes, “Saving the past’s material traces from extinction is Stow’s cause.”32 For practical reasons, this desire is difficult to apply to architecture, so saving architecture’s material traces must often be done through writing and textual production. In contrast to coins, whose integrity, Camden points out, was often protected by law, the stones and timber of defunct buildings were dispersed and scavenged for use in new and more serviceable structures.33 Architecture demanded a different kind of antiquarian activity, one that relied more on the acquisition, transmission, and survival of stories and interpretations than of original objects themselves. Introducing his completely new translation of the Britannia in 1695, Gibson observed that it was not buildings but books about them that would be renovated and preserved; it was not the built environment but the Britannia that would penetrate the present moment. Whereas the deeds of dead men do not change, he says, “the Nature of the Work makes a large difference. . . . [T]he condition of places is in a sort of continual motion, always (like the Sea) ebbing and flowing. And one who should attempt such a complete Description of a single Town, as might serve for all Ages to come, would see his Mistake by the experience of every year, every month, nay almost of every day.”34 The histories of collected objects often entail their provenances, what Harris has called “the diachronic trajectories of things through time and space.”35 In fact, we might call many of Camden’s architectural histories reverse provenances; they are stories of how things came to disappear.
As Gibson suggests, in the Britannia, one of architecture’s most reliable qualities is its tendency to dematerialize; when defunct or superannuated, it must either be renovated under a new identity or linger to speak of absence and recession as much as of discovery, illumination, or the immediacy of the past. As time moves forward, the object does not; eventually, material history disappears and the verbal narrative is all that remains. At “old Winchester,” for example, a “large rampier” pointed to the city it no longer protected: “by report, there stood in old time, a cittie, but now neither top nor toe, as they say remaineth of it: so as a man would quickly judge it to have beene a summer standing campe, and nothing els” (269). At Selsey, in Sussex, “remaineth onely the dead carkasse, as it were, of that antient little citie . . . and the same quite hidden with water at everie full sea, but at low water, evident, and plaine to be seene” (308). At Dorchester, “of late by turning London high way from thence, it hath decreased so, as that of a citie it is scarse able now to maintaine the name of a towne, and all that it is able to doe, is to shew in the fields adjoyning ruines onely and rubbish, as expresse tokens of what bignesse it hath beene” (384). Abandoned by their original occupants and surroundings, it is these buildings’ very stability that renders them unstable over time; they don’t move, but other things do. The ramparts of old Winchester watch vacantly over a camp that has passed like a summer; Selsey disappears as its land is tugged gently out from under it, “quite hidden with water” at every high tide. Dorchester shrinks away from its very name “of a citie” as the road turns away to leave it desolate.
Several of England’s most famous early collectors and collections do appear in the Britannia, and their presence shows how Camden’s treatment of architecture differs from the usual antiquarian treatment of objects. Britannia mentions, among others, the famous manuscript library of John Stow, Bishop Frances Godwin’s collection of “antique inscriptions,” and, several times, Sir Robert Cotton’s house at Connington, where Cotton, “having gathered with great charges from all places the monuments of venerable antiquity . . . [began] a famous Cabinet” (820, 637, 500).36 Camden recognized the rise of an economy of collecting, in which scarcity, rather than inherent quality, would beget value. Near Kilman Lhyd, Caermardenshire, there had been discovered a certain kind of coin “which among Antiquaries” was considered “of the greatest price and estimation, as being most rare of all others” (650). In comparison to a coin, however, architecture is far less susceptible to being collected, moved, and rearranged; and to tour the buildings of the Britannia one turns away from Cotton’s cabinet and walks down another path altogether, gaining access to a strand of antiquarianism that we might broadly call local history. Architectural inscriptions were sometimes collected and moved to new locations, but their presence pointed evocatively to what could not be relocated, even if it had survived. Cotton himself “translated” from Richmondshire to Huntingdonshire a plaque that Camden took to commemorate renovation of a Roman bath house, although others had postulated that it recorded the name of a town. “Heere,” he writes, “must I cause them to forgoe their error, who by this inscription falsely copied forth, whiles they red untruly BALINGIVM for BALINEVM. . . . But if a man look neerer to the words, hee shall find it most evidently engraven in the stone BALINEVM, that is, a BATH, or Hotehouse” (732). In such examples we become aware that architecture defies reappropriation. The study of material artifacts bleeds into philological speculation, and the absence of either town or bath house, as much as the inscription’s odd new situation in Cotton’s collection, reminds the reader of what could not have been collected, even if it were still available to be observed.
For the antiquarian tourist of Camden’s day, then, the built environment contained its own verb tenses: what had been a present-tense artifact for one writer or observer could be viewed by another only in the past tense. The Britannia contains many examples in which the passage of time slides between words (such as names or inscriptions) and things (such as architectural remains). The two no longer match each other, but neither is false. Put differently, Camden could only describe defunct buildings—monasteries, for example—in terms of what they had been; a monastery could not be, to him, what it was to Bede, or to William of Malmesbury, or to any of its vanished monks. And Camden’s present followed the course of his narrative: his account of the Benedictines at Glastonbury illustrates how his temporal perspective differed from that of his historical sources. This powerful order “reigned as it were in all affluence 600. yeres (for all their neighbors round about were at their beck) they were by King Henry the Eighth dispossessed & thrust out of all, & this their Monastery, which was growen now to be a prety Citie, environed with a large wall a mile about, & replenished with stately buildings, was raced and made even with the ground: and now onely sheweth evidently by the ruines thereof, how great and how magnificent a thing it was” (227). One “now” comes up against another “now” (“growen now” and “now only sheweth”), compiling two definitions of the present, since the two do not refer to the same time period. Similarly, architectural evidence can point in two temporal directions at once. In Camden’s narration, “a prety Citie” is both remembered and “raced” by the observation of its own “ruines.” What is “evidently shew[n]” is not only what was once there but that it no longer is. In the final phrase, the former “great and . . . magnificent . . . thing,” which the passage as a whole has helped us to imagine, is suddenly reduced and removed from the present by the final verb, “was.”
In such cases, description implies the passage of time; it is the mediation of narrative, with its temporal inflections, which makes it possible to reassemble history at all. Harris has compared the built environment of this period to a palimpsest, a surface on which the marks of one historical period were aggressively but imperfectly erased to make way for the constructions of another.37 The result is a perception of topography that he calls “polychronic,” collating a series of historical moments in the same material object or geographical space. This effect of temporal depth and collation is what narrative expresses all the time, of course. One way to negotiate a polychronic or multitemporal view of something is to tell a story about it, which may easily comprise past, present, and future. As much as it might produce a sense of what Harris calls the “untimely,” this experience of the polychronic is not necessarily disjointed or unsettling, to early modern antiquarians or to us. An antiquarian view of the built environment produced historical narrative, spinning out the threads of various stories as the perception of multiple time frames was negotiated and expressed through language.
Narrative becomes part of the process of architectural description. Historical buildings are understood in part through written historical sources. Because of their immobility, buildings tend to inspire records whose complexities are mediated by verb tenses and other temporally inflected words. The relationship between words and things in the Britannia becomes complementary, rather than necessarily corroborative, and fluid, rather than hierarchical. Sometimes, material remains are used as the starting point for observations or conjectures about the past. Equally often, this process is reversed and architectural evidence accrues meaning through the stories that survive about it. An example is Corf Castle, Dorsetshire, which comes into view only in the light of the historical narrative Camden relates, not through his observation of the building itself. The castle “after a long combat with time somewhat yeelded . . . until of late it hath beene repaired and is a notable testimonie an dmemoriall [sic] of a Stepmothers hatred.” This sensational detail is apparently not inscribed anywhere on the building, so it is not a memorial to anything until we are told by Camden’s text to remember it that way. Camden activates the architecture’s commemorative capacity by telling the story of Aelfrith, who, wishing “to make way for her owne sonne Etheldred to the Crowne,” murdered her son-in-law Edward while he was on a hunting expedition at the castle. Camden’s description of the deed is unusually graphic: Aelfrith “set some villaines and hacksters to murder him, and like a most wicked Stepdame fed her eies with his bloud” (211). Later, gratifyingly wracked with guilt, the unhappy Aelfrith founded a monastery. Camden’s goal here is not to preserve architectural evidence or even to describe it. Instead, he attaches a story to a visible feature of the built environment, providing his reader with access to the landscape through the process of retelling and moralizing the past. The object sponsors the relation of history but is itself partly displaced by the story, for it is largely through this interpretive act of retelling that the building is really “seen.”
ARCHITECTURE, ANTIQUARIANISM, AND ARISTOCRACY
As buildings become inseparable from narratives about them in the Britannia, certain types of buildings become associated with certain types of narratives, creating a series of subgenres that we might roughly classify as castle stories, country house stories, monastery stories, and so forth. In the second of these categories, to be examined in greater detail in the next chapter, architectural history is structured around the familial histories of England’s genteel and aristocratic families. These stories are “streamline[d],” (to use Klein’s term) and directed in a way that contributes to the celebration of those families, and the narratives culminate in the names and praises of landowners at the time of writing.38 In fact, Camden’s country house narratives differ in tone from many of the other architectural stories of the Britannia; they are less wandering and more focused, less speculative and more certain as the strands of history are resolutely directed toward a common end. Ancestral and architectural histories shape each other; while the buildings are mined for their heraldic possibilities, the locative nature of architectural description provides a way of collating these stories, producing impressions of coherence and continuity, even when historical fact did not readily lend itself to that end.
I have chosen this type of narrative because it seems to have been among the most attractive to writers in several genres over the course of the seventeenth century, serving their social priorities in a variety of ways. John Stow would attempt to apply its conventions to the architecture of early modern London (producing a very different result from the Britannia). Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and The Alchemist both seem to adapt the antiquarian country house narrative, to very different effect. Henry Wotton would defer to these traditions in The Elements of Architecture; Anne Clifford would exploit them in both her diaries and her buildings; and in his post-Restoration translation of Roland Fréart’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne, John Evelyn would display a sensitivity to the well-established relationships among architecture, history, and aristocratic patronage. Modern scholarship has focused mainly on the social and political contexts in which these narratives functioned.39 While attending to these contexts, Chapter 2 also establishes an ancestry for the genre itself, tying both its form and content to particular currents of antiquarian thought and methodology. Country house narratives were strategically constructed, but as the product of an antiquarian tradition that understood architecture through its relation to written history, these narratives were also shaped by the documents that survived about them and that they themselves often physically preserved.
Country houses are not the only buildings that generated recognizable narrative patterns, but it seems likely that writers found their stories especially serviceable, for social, legal, and political purposes. Because they dealt with buildings occupied by socially prominent families, country house narratives provided points of entry to significant contemporary conversations about legitimacy, social ascendance, and patronage in ways that other building stories did not. As a point of contrast, it is worth pausing to look at the types of narratives associated with a different kind of building: the castle. Because castles were originally fortifications, which became unnecessary and impractical as rulers or enemies faded away, narratives about them tend not only to account for their material degeneration but to extend those observations into reflections about decay and the wear wrought by the passage of time. In Shropshire, wrote Camden, “these castles with others which I am scarce able to number and reckon up, for the most part . . . are now ruinate not by the furie of warre, but now at length conquered even with secure peace, and processe of time” (593). At Marlborough, Wiltshire:
wee read, that John surnamed Sine terra, that is, Without Land (who afterwards was King of England), had a Castle here, which when hee revolted from his brother King Richard the First, Hubert Archbishop of Canterburie, tooke by force: and which afterwards was most famous by reason of a Parliament there holden . . . But now being daunted by time, there remaineth an heape of rammell and rubbish witnessing the ruines thereof, and some few reliques of the walles remaine within the compasse of a dry ditch, and an Inne there is adjoyning thereto, which in stead of the Castle, hath the signe of a Castle hanging out at it. (255–256)
Like a country house, the castle’s significance is defined in terms of socially and politically important figures associated with it, and the building is made to gesture toward its human—rather than aesthetic—ancestors. But the motion of the story is toward dissolution not monumentality, focusing on time’s capacity to erase identity and influence rather than to bolster and create them, in the way that the preservation of ancestral history would do. The disappearance of the physical architecture renders history elegiac and reductive. While the Britannia records the history of former rulers and statesmen involved with castles, Camden concludes by telling us that the architectural evidence has forgotten them; kings and parliaments and archbishops are counterbalanced in Camden’s story by “an heape of rammell and rubbish . . . some few reliques of the walles” and—“in stead of the Castle”—a faint echo of its memory preserved on the sign of an inn.
There would have been little point in celebrating one’s family or a prospective patron with the observation that glory fades, and country house narratives produce the opposite impression: status continues and, in fact, accumulates as time passes. On the one hand, as critics have observed, descriptions of the country house during this period were often nostalgic, evoking comparisons to a golden age or an idealized past.40 On the other hand, Camden reminds us, country houses were emphatically imagined in the present tense, and history was enlisted insofar as it served a celebration of a present moment. As an example of the country house narrative’s most common characteristics, we might take Camden’s description of The Vine, in Hampshire:
a verie faire place, and Mansion house of the Baron Sands, so named of the Vines there, which wee have had in Britaine, since Probus the Emperour’s time. . . . The first of these Barons was Sir William Sands, whom King Henrie the Eight advanced to that dignitie, being Lord Chamberlaine unto him, & having much amended his estate by marrying Margerie Braie, daughter and heir of John Bray, and cousin to Sir Reinold Bray, a most worthy Knight of the Order of the Garter, and a right noble Baneret: whose Sonne Thomas Lord Sands, was Grandfather to William L. Sands that now liveth. (269)
The passage combines architectural history (the “Mansion house”) with natural history (“so named of the Vines there”), familial history (the Sands and Bray lineages), and political history (“whom King Henrie the Eight advanced”) in order to promote the name and titles of the present landowner (“William L. Sands that now liveth”). Details cluster around the story of the family, which is introduced through its connection to a specific architectural setting. Extending historical associations to the Emperor Probus, the name of the house—The Vine—lends the family even deeper roots, so that the architecture constructs lineage and history as much as these lenses enable the Britannia’s description of architecture itself. Similarly, in Derbyshire, a description of Hardwick Hall both shapes and is shaped by the history of its owners:
upon a rough and a craggie soile standeth Hardwic, which gave name to a family in which possessed the same: out of which descended Lady Elizabeth Countesse of Shrewsbury, who beganne to build there two goodly houses joining in maner one to the other. . . . This now giveth the title of Baron to Sir William Cavendish her second sonne, whom King James of late hath honored with the honor of Baron Cavendish of Hardwic. (555–556)
It is through their ownership of “two goodly houses” that the Cavendish family is tied to the “rough and . . . craggie soile” of Derbyshire. The end of the story collapses the identities of owner and architecture, as “Hardwic” comes to designate both William Cavendish (as part of his title) and the place to which he is attached. Architecture becomes both the expression and the creator of human identity as it moves from objective (“beganne to build . . . two goodly houses”) to active grammatical roles (“This now giveth the title of Baron to Sir William Cavendish”).
In these examples, then, as elsewhere in the Britannia, architecture mediates between the Britannia’s relation of human history and its description of the landscape, with the building itself hinging these two elements of the story. In the case of the country house narrative, the effect is both to naturalize aristocratic power by rooting these narratives in topography and to make the landscape more artificial, an emblem as much as a thing in itself. The vines of Hampshire are transposed from their literal referent to the house itself, while the house becomes a heraldic object in which family history might be recorded and discerned. As Richard Helgerson has pointed out, many early modern maps of England imposed the arms of prominent families over portions of the landscape where they lived.41 In the Britannia, architecture often serves the same function, as buildings are explicated in the same terms with which one might decode the language of a heraldic escutcheon. In Cornwall, for instance, Camden describes Lhanheron, “the seat of the Arondels, a familie of Knights degree, who for their faire lands and large possessions were not long since called, the Great Arondels. In some places they are written in Latin De Hirundine, and not amisse, if my judgement be ought: For Hirundo, that is, a Swallow, is named Arondell in French: and in a shield sables, they beare for their armes six Swallowes argent. Certes, a very ancient and renowned house this is, spreading far and neere the branches of their kinred and affinity” (193). Through its context in the Britannia, the “seat” of the Arundels is located firmly in Cornwall, but rapidly, features that might be understood on a literal level in a naturalistic description of the landscape (here, the swallow) become philological and symbolic abstractions, transfigured from features of the Cornish countryside to the stylized ornaments of a “shield sables.” By the end of this passage, the physical house presumably indicated in the “seat of the Arondels” has also become the symbolic “house” of a dynasty, which is in turn re-anchored to the landscape through the locative phrase “far and neere.” Architecture thus becomes a strategic point of contact between physical and political understandings of the landscape, which early modern maps strove so often to combine.
As we see in each of these examples, by joining human and natural histories and by allowing many stories to accumulate on a single geographical site, architectural description could thread together disparate histories and manufacture a sense of continuity and longevity from stories that might otherwise appear disjointed and abrupt. Architectural and geographical continuity might thus conveniently stand in for the continuity of an ancient lineage. Appearing at the culmination of a country house narrative, the socially ascendant William Cecil acquires a longer and more illustrious history than he possessed through ancestry alone. At Welland, Northamptonshire, wrote Camden, “Ladie Margaret Countesse of Richmond, king Henrie the Seaventh his mother built a goodly faire and stately house.” Camden then manufactured a sense of continuity by ignoring the fact that there was no direct family connection between the Countess of Richmond and the house’s subsequent owners, the Cecils. What might be perceived as historical rupture is glossed over by the seamlessness of the narrative: “Now by this time is Welland come to Burghley whereof the most prudent and right honorable Councellour Sir William Cecil, Lord high Treasurer of England, yea a singular treasure and supporter of the same, received the title of Baron Burghley, for his great good deserts, at the hands of Queene ELIZABETH. Which title hee adorned with the lustre of his vertues, and beautified this place with magnificent sumptuous buildings, adjoining thereto a large Parke encompassed about with a stone wall of a great circuite” (514). In this passage, Cecil acquires with his house a history that is not his own, in part erasing the newness of his social prominence. His moral and political credentials are reinforced by his position in this country house narrative, for Camden makes his tenure the stable capstone of a longer architectural history. The identification between architectural and human narratives is cemented in the final line of the description, where personal virtues and architectural beautifications are placed parallel as joint expressions of Cecil’s worth. The conventions of the country house narrative seem to carry authority here, legitimizing Cecil.42
Similarly, Penshurst, in Kent, was “the seat anciently (as it seemeth by the name) of Sir Stephen de Penherst who also was called de Penchester a famous Warden of the Cinque ports.” In Camden’s day, though, the house belonged to Robert Sidney (brother of the poet Philip Sidney), whom “James our soveraigne King, made right honorable, first by the title of Baron Sidney of Pensherst, and afterwards, of Vicount Lisle” (329). Camden’s story is really the history of a title and a place, rather than of a person or family, because the designation “of Penshurst” floats from one owner to the next. The title is conveyed with the house, so it is architecture that provides the coherence in this case, rather than human lineage. Through architectural description, then, Camden is able to insert Robert Sidney into a history that is not his, granting him pride of place in both narrative and geographical terms.43
Camden, like some other writers who would adapt the country house narrative, clearly uses these aristocratic foci as indices of social and political concern, in acts of deference to prominent individuals who had served or might serve as patrons. But attention to such concerns was also born of more practical historical contingencies and from antiquarian methodologies that affected the emphases of Camden’s stories and affect how buildings become legible to readers of his text. As mentioned, Camden’s view of the landscape was heavily mediated by his access to texts and documentary evidence, and country houses tended both to generate and to preserve particular kinds of documents, which supplied and shaped the content of country house narratives. Being the objects of expenditure, ownership, and inheritance, these buildings were also frequently the subjects of deeds, wills, inquests, and accounts. They also preserved such records over time. As Lena Cowen Orlin has pointed out, documents, as well as buildings, have “spatial histories,” and one reason records about wealthy households of the time tend to have survived is that wealthy households had good reasons and good places to keep them.44
Tracing expenditures, deaths, rewards, marriages, and inheritances—points at which properties changed or changed hands—these documentary sources are often easily discernible in Camden’s architectural histories; buildings are described in a way that clearly reflects the content of their own libraries and muniment rooms. Many stories, rather than being based on visual artifacts, are compilations of legal agreements and official papers. It was with such sources that Camden could document that the dwelling named Nonesuch had originally been Henry VIII’s palace. “Yet Queene Marie made it over to Henrie Fitz-Alan Earle of Arundell for other Lands: and he, when he had enlarged it wirh [sic] a Librarie passing well furnished, and other new buildings, passed over all his right when he died to the L. Lumley, who for his part spared no cost . . . and from him now is it returned againe by compositions and conveiances to the Crowne” (299). And we read of Einsham Abbey, in Oxfordshire, “which, Aethelred King of England in the yeere of salvation 1005. confirmed to the Benedictine Monkes, and in his confirmation signed the priviledge of the liberty thereof (I speake out of the very originall grant as it was written) with the signe of the sacred Crosse: but now is turned into a private dwelling house and acknowledgeth the Earle of Derby Lord thereof” (374). In each case, Camden pieced together architectural description from a series of legally significant documents about the house. The distinctive features of the country house narrative, which would appear in many incarnations over the course of the seventeenth century, can thus be traced to exactly the sort of interdisciplinary antiquarian method described in the first section of this chapter. Country house stories were not only opportunistic social constructions; they were the products of an approach to historiography that saw architectural and written forms of evidence as complementary and mutually productive ways of remembering and retelling the past.
THE REFORMATION AND ENGLISH PERCEPTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE
It is perhaps to be expected that Camden’s stories about country houses are frequently secular in nature. More surprising, however, is that this statement also applies to his treatments of religious buildings, such as churches and monasteries. I suggest two ways in which the Britannia undermines the relationships scholars have traditionally formulated between architecture and religion in post-Reformation England. First, The Britannia fails to support the notion that classical and Renaissance architectural styles were associated with Catholicism and with Rome, and second, it demonstrates that religious architecture was not always viewed through the lens of post-Reformation polemic and classified as either Catholic or Protestant, Laudian or Calvinist.45 Instead, Camden values churches and monasteries for their important role in curating England’s historical record. As the long-established centers of parish and local history, they preserved history of many kinds and were particularly susceptible to historical and antiquarian interests and interpretation.
In modern scholars’ attempts to explain the obvious differences between the architecture of the Italian Renaissance and the architecture of early modern England, the most common explanation has been that to a Protestant audience, classical and Renaissance styles were suspect, either because they were a potentially idolatrous form of visual display or because they were derived from Roman architecture. If anyone could have made this sort of conceptual association, it was Camden, a virulent Protestant and an internationally connected humanist scholar. But Camden does not resort to this idea. The Britannia does refer to Vitruvius more than once, but always as a historical source for ancient Roman history, never as an aesthetic or practical treatise that might be used by modern builders or applied in the judgment of modern buildings. For instance, Camden tells the story of a gardener in Flintshire who, “digging somewhat deepe into the ground, happened upon a very ancient peece of worke, concerning which there grew many divers opinions of sundry men.” Vitruvius is evoked not as a building manual, exactly, but as the source Camden uses to identify this artifact: “hee that will with any diligence reade M. Vitruvius Pollio, shall verie well perceive, it was nothing else but a Stouph or hote house begunne by the Romans, who as their riotous excesse grewe together with their wealth, used bathes exceeding much” (681). Whatever Camden’s interest in the aesthetics of Roman architecture, it is not apparent in the Britannia. Vitruvius functions as a document about Roman history and culture, but not as a manual of style.
Camden, in fact, rarely comments on architectural aesthetics at all—beyond calling certain buildings “fair”—and only once does he associate architectural display with Italy. Near the ancient castle of the Corbet family in Shropshire, Camden tells us: “[W]ithin our remembrance, Robert Corbet, carried away with the affectionate delight of Architecture, began to build in a barraine place a most gorgeous and stately house, after the Italians modell: But death prevented him, so that he left the new worke unfinished and the old castle defaced” (594). If Camden had wanted to taint Renaissance architectural styles with suggestions of Catholicism, this example would have provided him the opportunity, since the charge could easily have strengthened this mild critique of Corbet’s over-reaching. Instead, Camden demonstrates his capacity to associate a certain architectural style with Italy—knowledge which, Llewellyn and Hunneyball have argued, many English people would not have shared—but the building still does not carry any religious or doctrinal marker for him.46 Although his failure to comment on architectural aesthetics might be read as a pointed Protestant rejection of such concerns, it seems more likely that Camden either did not associate classicism with Catholicism or found the idea irrelevant to the historical interests and, mainly narrative, form of the Britannia.
A second hypothesis about the relationship between the Reformation and English perceptions of architecture seems to fit more readily on the Britannia. Rather than parsing England’s new building projects in search of classical inflections, several scholars have focused on the provocative features of religious architecture, including churches and ruined or converted monasteries. It has generally been assumed that the English viewed such buildings through the lens of Reformation polemic, and that the structures were of interest for their Catholic or Calvinist characteristics. The Britannia does not support this premise. While churches and monasteries appear in abundance throughout its pages, they are not defined in terms of an implied or explicit polemical context. Instead, they are presented as places that preserve history and about which history has been preserved. As libraries were dispersed and funeral monuments defaced, it was not only England’s religious past that became suddenly more interesting. The Britannia and other antiquarian texts reflect an awareness of many types of history associated with such architectural features. Expressions of Camden’s judgment of the monasteries and of England’s Catholic past are remarkably sparse and inconsistent, and they seem to depend on the documents he had to hand rather than on any predetermined polemical stance from which he himself viewed the past. And many of the historical documents on which he depended could not have had anything to do with the Reformation, because they were written long before it happened.
Monasteries and churches were, of course, objects of special interest to Camden and other antiquarians. It was the imminent loss of monastic libraries that had spurred Camden’s predecessor, John Leland, into the commencement of his journeys. Leland was vehement in his condemnation of Catholic institutions, but his admiration for their libraries was equally strong. “I dolorouslye lamente so greate an oversyghte in the moste lawfull overthrow of the sodometrouse Abbeyes & Fryereys,” he wrote, “when the most worthy monumentes of this realme, so myserably peryshed in the spoyle. Oh, that men of learnyng & of perfyght love to their nacyon, were not then appoynted to the serche of theyr lybraryes, for the conservacion of those most noble Antiquitees.”47 In the Britannia, as well, monasteries and churches are frequently useful by virtue of the histories they might have preserved. About Monks Weremouth, in the Bishopric of Durham, Camden quotes William of Malmesbury, whom he has already lauded for “learned industry” in “the Histories of England both civill and Ecclesiasticall”: “Benedict Bishop beautified with Churches and built Abbaies there, one in the name of Saint Peter and the other of Saint Paule. The painfull industry of this man hee will wonder at, who shall read his life; for that he brought hither great store of Bookes” (242, 742–743). In addition, the funeral monuments these buildings contained were often adorned with arms and inscriptions that recorded names, births, deaths, marriages, and progeny. In 1600, Camden published a transcription of the funereal inscriptions in Westminster Abbey, and he attends to inscriptions in the Britannia as well. At Arundel, in Sussex, for instance, he wrote, “in the Church are some monuments of the Earles there enterred, but one about the rest right beautifull, of Alabaster, in which lieth in the mids of the Quire Earle Thomas, and Beatrice his wife, the daughter of John King of Portugall” (310). At Bildas Abbey in Shropshire, “there flourished a faire Abbay, the Sepulture in times past of the noble familie of the Burnels, Patrons thereof” (593).
As these examples show, churches were objects of aristocratic expenditure; as such, they generated and preserved both written and architectural evidence of aristocratic investment and wealth. In some cases, then, the histories of churches fulfilled the same functions as those of the aristocratic or genteel country house. In addition to surviving in the pages of grants, deeds, and accounts, the names of donors and founders were sometimes inscribed in the fabric of parish churches themselves, so that the history and presence of a wealthy family were—literally—integrated into the space of the local community. At Chippenham, in Wiltshire, the Britannia recounts, “Nothing is there now worth the sight but the Church, built by the Barons Hungerford, as appeareth every where by their coats of Armes set up thereon” (243). And at York Cathedral, following a fire: “John Roman Treasurer of the Church laid the foundation of a new worke, which his son John, William Melton, and John Thoresby, all of them Archbishops, brought by little and little to that perfection and beauty which now it sheweth, yet not without the helping hand of the nobility and gentry thereabout, especially of the Percies and the Vavasours, which the Armes of their houses standing in the very Church, and their images at the West gate of the Church doe shew, Percies pourtraied with a peece of timber, and Vavasours with a stone in their hands” (706). As we see in these images of helpful aristocrats, church building and identity building become inseparable activities. To Camden, in this case, one of England’s most impressive cathedrals functions as a slate on which local and ancestral histories are inscribed.
The stories of defunct monasteries in some cases resemble those of the country house, in that history from diverse sources tended toward the consolidation of aristocratic power. At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Tanner would defend his abridged translation of William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth’s massive monastic history, the Monasticon Anglicanum (1655), on the grounds that the work was relevant to contemporary aristocratic land rights. “[T]he Monks,” he wrote, were “so accurate in Registering the Donations, and preserving all Charters, Leases, and other Deeds, relating to their possessions not only after, but also before it came into their hands.”48 As Tanner suggests, lands and rents were frequently recorded in the transactions between monasteries and aristocratic founders or benefactors, again intertwining architecture, aristocracy, and landscape, but monastic architectural histories also allowed the antiquarian to combine the adumbration of ranks and titles with reflections on the spiritual and moral nobility that ideally accompanied social status. Camden, like Tanner, was willing to exploit monastic history for its lofty social connections, as opposed to its Catholic ones. At Hertland, in Devonshire, “famous in old time for the reliques of that holy man Saint Nectan,” Camden wrote, “there was erected . . . a little Monasterie, by Githa Earle Goodwines wife, who had this Nectan in especiall reverence, for that she was perswaded, that for his merits her husband had escaped the danger of shipwracke in a violent and raging tempest” (206). This story of devotion is quickly capped by another, more legally serviceable, account of the monastery’s foundation: “Howbeit afterwards, the Dinants, who are also named Dinhams, that came out of Bretagne in France, whose demeans, as in see it was, were counted the founders thereof: and from them descended Baron Dinham, Lord high Treasurer of England, under K. Henrie the Seventh, by whose sisters and heires, the inheritance was divided between Lord Zouch, Bourchier Fitz-warin, Carew, and Arundell” (207). Rather than traumatic occurrences that ruptured the present with reminders of the Catholic past, monasteries represented to Camden and other antiquarians a source of legal, political, and ancestral documentation.
Camden does occasionally comment on the monasteries as abandoned Catholic institutions, but his conclusions are ideologically inconsistent, ranging from predictable Protestant denigration to what might look suspiciously like wistful Catholic nostalgia. As Camden switches allegiances, though, his methodology remains constant: his depictions are contingent on the documents he summarizes and compiles. At Bolton Abbey, Staffordshire, for example, a snatch from a “Leger-Booke” records the founder’s extravagant payments of protection money—“that his donation might stand good and sure”—to “every bishop . . . beside to Alfrick Archbishop of Canterbury.” Here, Camden’s reflection ironically reverses any nostalgic idealization of the medieval church by replacing the “golden world” of a longed-for past with the gold which greased the palms of greedy church officials: “[W]e may understand, that there was a golden world then, and that gold swaid much yea in Church matters, and among church men” (586). In an introductory section on “the Division of Britaine,” however, financial and legal accounts of the dissolution produce the opposite result: “England groned” at the overthrow of “the greatest part of the Clergie, together with their most goodly and beautifull houses . . . under a faire pretence & shew of rooting out superstition” (163). In light of the cash sums obtained through the sale of monastic properties, England’s conversion changes from a transition between Catholicism and Protestantism to one between religious and secular forms of acquisition and investment. Emptied of their specifically Catholic value, but retaining their religious associations, the monasteries became “[m]onuments of our forefathers pietie and devotion, to the honor of God, the propagation of Christian faith and good learning, and also for the reliefe and maintenance of the poore and impotent” (163).
A pair of examples illustrates the flexibility and variety of Camden’s monastic histories. Viewed with the aid of documents and legends from both the pre- and post-Reformation periods, not solely from the perspective of post-Reformation polemic, monastic architecture becomes susceptible to a much greater, and far more unpredictable, range of meanings. These meanings tend to be local and idiosyncratic, reflecting the whims, desires, and commitments of individuals rather than abstract doctrinal principles. At Whorwell, in Hampshire, we again encounter Queen Aelfrith, the murderous stepmother connected to Corf Castle. Aelfrith, it turns out, was a great beauty and a busy murderess; at Worwhell she endowed a monastery in order to “expiate” her soul and “wash out” her evil deeds, which included not only the untimely dispatching of her stepson but the murder of “her former husband Aethelwold a most noble Earle, whom King Edgar trained forth hither a hunting and then strake him thorow with a dart, because hee had deluded him in his love secrets, and by deceitfull and naughty meanes prevented him and gotten for himself this same Aelfrith the most beautifull Ladie that was in those daies” (262). At another site, the monastery at Peterborough, which had been sacked by the Danes, was “re-edified” in atonement for a less malicious manslaughter, with “the helping hand especiall of K. Eadgar, and Adulph the kings Chancellor, who upon a prick of conscience and deepe repentence, for that hee and his wife together lying in bed asleepe had overlaid and smothred the little infant their onely son” (512). There is no set of broad polemical or doctrinal categories that would allow us to equate monasteries with “love secrets” or squashed babies, yet when they are viewed as both historically and geographically local, these are the sorts of stories that monasteries tell.
Taken together, the features of Camden’s Britannia outlined here prepare us for the many kinds of building stories the coming chapters will examine. By connecting those stories to patterns of post-Reformation antiquarian thought indebted to the chorographic project of John Leland, these shared features also ground the development of these stories in the specific historical and cultural conditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. What becomes clear in the Britannia is that the architectural writing of this period is as deeply implicated in the production of narratives and texts, in the fields of literature and historiography, as it is in those of visual or material culture. As much as it anticipates the perspectives of Baconian empiricists, it also looks back to Leland with a post-Reformation sense of loss, to a model that is far less invested in the preservation of things than in the circulation of texts, and less interested in touching the physical artifacts of the past than in telling its stories.
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