INTRODUCTION
Decades before the Dutch antiquary Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–73) was mocked in Ben Jonson's (1572–1637) comedy The Alchemist (1610), he elicited a more favorable response in a sixteenth-century text of a different kind.Footnote 1 In the dedication of his The principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation (1589), Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) quotes in Latin a part of the “excellent history intituled Origines of Joannes Goropius,” where Goropius, who spent time in England, describes being approached with a proposal to travel through Asia at the behest and expense of Henry VIII (1491–1547).Footnote 2 The venture faltered—and may never have been more than a vague plan anyway—but Goropius's hopes to undertake it were real enough. Long before writing the work that made him known to English readers such as Hakluyt, Goropius had once envisioned himself exploring distant places for the English nation.
But in the passage from his monumental Origines Antwerpianae (The origins of Antwerp, 1569) where Goropius described the proposed expedition and lamented its not being carried out, his main regret was not the missed opportunity to bring back up-to-date geographic knowledge. Rather, this regret had to do with the biblical antiquarianism that underlay Goropius's project of tracing the origins of his home city of Antwerp. In the Origines, among other aspects of the Asian Continent, where Goropius believed humanity to have originated with Adam and Eve, this antiquarianism extends to determining the actual species of the Tree of Knowledge. If only the expedition had taken place, he would have been able to see with his own eyes the kind of tree it was.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, from his reading of Strabo (63–21 BCE), Theophrastus (371–287 BCE), and Pliny (23–79), along with Genesis, Goropius thought he knew anyway: the Indian fig. This tree had a unique configuration that would have allowed both Adam and Eve to be positioned in its midst while hiding from God.Footnote 4 The Indian fig was in fact many trees, spaced apart in rings but in the manner of vine shoots that grow from a single “mother.”Footnote 5 So long were the branches of the parent tree that they bent down and formed roots in the earth. From these would come forth new trees, whose branches would in turn root themselves in the earth. Eventually, the parent tree was surrounded by concentric circles of its own progeny. Or, as John Milton (1608–74) described the same species in Paradise Lost, “The bended twigs take root, and Daughters grow / About the mother tree, a Pillar'd shade.”Footnote 6
Whether Hakluyt had this identification of the Tree of Knowledge in mind when he characterized the Origines as an “excellent history” is an open question. For though the Origines did make Goropius known for his opinions about the Garden of Eden, the views that brought him the greatest fame—as well as notoriety—did not concern its “mother tree” but rather the mother language for all of humanity. With considerable erudition and ingenuity, Goropius departed from prevailing ideas about the original Adamic speech, whose roots might still be found in post-Babelic languages. Instead of Hebrew being this “mother of all languages,” or Syriac, as some dissident church fathers maintained,Footnote 7 Goropius believed it to be Dutch. According to his theory, which the Origines supports with a multitude of etymological arguments, contemporary Dutch was the same as ancient Cimmerian, or Cimbrian, and this was the mother language, predating even Hebrew.Footnote 8
Although eccentric, this belief was not entirely sui generis either. Ultimately, it was based on the lineage of Noah from the Bible, which, however, had long been augmented with nonbiblical sources to account for the postdiluvian propagation of humanity.Footnote 9 In particular, a race labeled “Scythian” or “Cimmerian”—or both—was supposed to have descended from Noah's grandson Gomer, and, according to some accounts, populated parts of Europe.Footnote 10 Such “ethnic theology” enjoyed much influence during the early modern period, and it continued to do so well into the eighteenth century.Footnote 11 Still, few of its adherents were quite so imaginative as Goropius, who reconfigured the traditional order of linguistic relationships by absenting the Cimmerians from the confusion of Babel. Because the Cimmerians were elsewhere when the rest of the human race was building the infamous tower, they escaped its aftermath and kept the language of Eden.Footnote 12 Eventually, their migrations transmitted this language from Asia to Europe.
But only in his native speech did Goropius believe the ancient Cimmerian language to remain pure. For him this speech was both a present-day unityFootnote 13 and an ancient mother tree with roots appearing in modern vernaculars, as well as Latin, Greek, and the now-dethroned Hebrew.Footnote 14 By contrast, however, even apart from Babel, these other languages “degenerate little by little.”Footnote 15 What purity they enjoy is not their own but rather comes from “proximity to the roots of the first language.”Footnote 16 Even so, Goropius's etymologies did not always necessitate the direct use of Dutch/Cimmerian; they could also employ one of the corrupted languages as the source for another. When he turns his attention to English, Goropius is looking for words of Scandinavian origin to show that an offshoot of the Cimmerian language first reached Britain via a migration of Danes.Footnote 17 In the Origines, claims about linguistic and ethnic relationships are intertwined, and thus for Goropius these Danes were the original Britons.
As the different responses of Jonson and Hakluyt suggest, the reaction to the Origines in England (and elsewhere) was mixed, and here I want to examine its reception by a contemporary of theirs who had more in common with Goropius than he cared to admit. This was Jonson's own teacher at Westminster School, William Camden (1551–1623), whose landmark work of antiquarian chorography, the Britannia, went through six Latin editions between 1586 and 1607 before being translated into English in 1610. Not only is the Britannia full of etymologies of the names of places and peoples belonging to Camden's native land, but it uses such evidence to advance its own controversial thesis about the origins of the people who settled the island long before the Romans or Anglo-Saxons conquered it. In the still-influential account of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100–56), the original Britons were Trojans who came from Italy and had to defeat a race of giants to make the island their own.Footnote 18 By contrast, although he did not outright deny that giants once existed, Camden was dismissive of most stories about them,Footnote 19 and, in lieu of Trojan origins, he argued that the Britons were Cimmerians—not, however, from Scandinavia but rather Gaul, whence they also brought their language.Footnote 20 In the Britannia the pieces of this language that come to light in etymologies are as much evidence of a Cimmerian migration as coins stamped with the profiles of emperors are of Roman occupation. These etymologies depend, in turn, on the belief that the ancient British language was preserved intact in modern Welsh. By no means alone in this belief—it had outspoken Welsh advocates during the early modern period—Camden was nevertheless innovative in making it the primary basis of determining the origins of the Britons.
Camden and Goropius shared a grounding in humanist philology,Footnote 21 but to arrive at their theories of origins, they both held in partial abeyance a familiar tenet of this philology—namely, the mutability of languages, or what Goropius himself identified as their tendency to “degenerate little by little.”Footnote 22 Each made a still-spoken European language the exception to mutability, and Camden's case for Welsh was further complicated by the fact that he was not a native speaker. Thus, in his Antiquae Linguae Britannicae Rudimenta (The rudiments of the ancient British language, 1621), the Welsh scholar and lexicographer John Davies (1570–1644) cited the Britannia to support his claim that the ancient British language had survived “without any notable change or admixture from another language.”Footnote 23 But Davies also complained that the use of British words to prove the Gallic origin of the Britons involved “conjectures” so “frigid” and “light” that they did not merit a response.Footnote 24 So, too, in his Celtic Remains (published 1878), although he acknowledged that Camden was right about the “British tongue” being “pure and unmixed, and extremely ancient,” Lewis Morris (1701–65) denigrated Camden's etymologies to the point of comparing them to those of Goropius; both men, Morris suggested, too easily gave way to the “itch of playing with words.”Footnote 25
But even as the “conjectures” of the Britannia (and Camden was the first to call them that) have ultimately not won over many more adherents than the linguistic arguments of the Origines,Footnote 26 etymology remains central to both works. For Camden and Goropius, speculative word derivations (to be sure, Goropius was less inclined to acknowledge their speculative character) were not a curiosity but a necessity, born of the particular difficulty of the object of antiquarian study. Thus, Goropius argues that in the “investigation of antiquities concerning which we have little or nothing memorialized through writing,” the only real recourse is “true reasons in names.”Footnote 27 Although Goropius does cite Plato here—as Camden also does in the Britannia Footnote 28—his reliance on such “reasons in names” owes as much to the paucity of other viable options as it does to Cratylism. Without a willingness to investigate names, the antiquary who wished to uncover the remote past would be dependent on a few extant writings, and if their scarcity were not problematic enough, their quality was even more so. They often seemed as misleading to Goropius as to Camden. Along with dubious medieval accounts of this underdocumented era, both rejected the forged Antiquitates (1498) of Annius of Viterbo (1432–1502), which purported to fill vast gaps in the knowledge of this same era with the recovery of ancient texts.Footnote 29
The irony is that, in their efforts to remove one set of implausibilities, Camden and Goropius not only introduced another into the study of antiquity but also did so in such a way as to make philology the basis for the kind of assumption it so often critiqued, the assumption that words could remain static, unaffected by the passage of time. Writing about Goropius, Anthony Grafton has noted the tendency of sixteenth-century philology to be “at once the destroyer and creator of mythical history.”Footnote 30 The validity of the latter part of this observation is less obvious in the case of Camden, whose overall legacy is one of painstaking scholarship and whose speculative etymologies have thus only begun to receive serious attention, much less be deemed a mythical history.Footnote 31 But the story of ancient British remaining a “living language” in contemporary Welsh and of its providing a readily accessible key to the remote past proved compelling, even as particular etymologies in the Britannia drew critical scrutiny.Footnote 32 In the early eighteenth century, this story would receive new impetus from a foreign source—the “wild theories” of the “Goropising” French abbot Paul Pezron (1639–1706).Footnote 33 But the acceptance that Pezron's theories soon won on the other side of the Channel may have been partly due to the ground for them already having been prepared there a century before by an antiquary with a much different reputation.
ANCIENT AND MODERN LANGUAGES
“I would not go mad with the insanity of Goropius”:Footnote 34 this announcement interrupts a part of the Britannia that is dense with evidence of its methodological similarity to the Origines, and the resemblance is only highlighted by so abrupt a caveat, not to mention the extreme terms in which it is couched. Given his personal connections in the Netherlands, Camden's acquaintance with the Origines is not surprising. The writing of the Britannia was spurred on by the encouragement of another Antwerpian, the famed cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–98), who, along with Camden, was part of an Anglo-Dutch network of antiquaries and poets that was especially active in the years leading up to the Anglo-Dutch alliance of 1585.Footnote 35 Among these was no less a figure than the poet, scholar, and diplomat Janus Dousa (1545–1604), in whose album amicorum both Camden and Goropius have entries;Footnote 36 nevertheless, the connection to Ortelius in particular put Camden at one degree of separation from someone who may have been sympathetic to Goropius's theories. At least according to the Catholic exile Richard Verstegan (1548–1640), Ortelius was not only acquainted with Goropius but also “did much incline” to his “conceit.”Footnote 37
A need to dissociate himself from Goropius, however, also put Camden in good company abroad. As Anthony Grafton notes, Goropius may well have been the unwanted “Doppelgänger” of Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), who also leveled the charge of insanity at him even as both applied the “same tools” to chronology.Footnote 38 Still, the methods of Scaliger and Goropius did not overlap as much as they could have. One tool of inquiry about the past that the two men did not share was the sort of rampant etymologizing that Scaliger regarded as a “perilous way” of proceeding. Indeed, for Scaliger, Goropius's etymologizing served as a cautionary tale, a demonstration of just how misguided it was to pursue the “etymon” of nations out of a comparison of their languages.Footnote 39
Camden knew Scaliger's opinion of Goropius,Footnote 40 but even so he embarked on the perilous path, albeit with an awareness of its dangers. By his own admission, the etymologies in the Britannia are less than certain; he has dared to “hunt” the “origins of names” through “conjectures.”Footnote 41 Nevertheless, the etymologies that he uncovers in this manner are crucial to his goal of restoring Britain and “antiquity” to one another.Footnote 42 In the same preface where he announces this goal, Camden states his intention of inquiring, however cautiously, into both the “etymon” of “Britain” as well as the identity of its earliest inhabitants,Footnote 43 and in the opening chapters of the Britannia these prove to be two sides of the same inquiry. To be sure, Camden makes no claims about the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. He is also vehement in his rejection of specific etymologies put forward by Goropius, which merit “laughter” or dismissal as “dreams.”Footnote 44 But even his criticisms show how careful a reader Camden was of parts of the Origines, to which he had already been introduced when the Britannia was in its earliest stages of development. A 1579 letter to Camden from Ortelius assumes Camden's familiarity with one of Goropius's etymologies.Footnote 45
In the Britannia, moreover, the “British, or Welsh (as they now call it) language” plays a role similar to that of Dutch in the Origines.Footnote 46 Since the modern language equals the ancient one by another name, its own usefulness can pick up where legendary accounts of the remote past leave off being believable. In particular, Camden had to rely on the British/Welsh language after discrediting the Galfridian story of Trojan refugees, who, in addition to winning the island from giants, named it after their leader Brutus. Here his argument runs parallel to that of Goropius, who refuted the existence of giants and had no patience for “Trojan trifles” either.Footnote 47 In accordance with his rejection of such fabulous material, Goropius offered a broad critique of eponyms as “the worn-out and royal way in hunting down first founders … from the ancient name of a city or region, to discover the name of a person who may be said to have found a name for the place.”Footnote 48 Although here discussing the name “Brabantia,” which he did not believe to have come from the eponymous hero Brabo, later in the Origines Goropius would extend his disbelief to the “fabulous inventions about Brutus.”Footnote 49 His counter-etymology of “Britain” as “free Dania” is in accordance with his theory that the island's first settlers were Danes, and it receives short shrift in the Britannia.Footnote 50 But the elimination of eponymy and substitution for it of an etymology purportedly rooted in geography and history represents a similar approach to Camden's.
Once he has disposed of Geoffrey, Camden provides an etymon for “Britain” that is no eponym but rather comes from the ancient British practice of body painting. For in the “native and ancient language” of the Britons, “Brith” is the word for whatever is “painted.”Footnote 51 As the practice that distinguished the Britons from other peoples, it then became their name and the root of the name of the entire island. Camden goes on to use the Welsh/British language to unpack the meanings of many other ancient place-names throughout his native land and, in a few cases, France. To a large degree his chorography of Britain is a journey from one toponym to the next. As the Catholic jurist and historian Richard White (1539–1611) expressed it in his Historiarum Libri (Books of history, 1597), Camden “by continually coaxing British words aims to draw forth the names of places.”Footnote 52
Although not all of these toponyms turn out to have British roots—some derive from Anglo-SaxonFootnote 53—the British toponyms bear the heaviest burden of proof because of the relative lack of evidence for the pre-Roman period in comparison to later ones. To Camden, this earlier period is the one for which, as Goropius expressed it, “little or nothing” has been “memorialized through writing.” Borrowing a scheme from the Roman antiquary Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), Camden divided antiquity into an “uncertain,” “mythical,” and at long last recoverable “historical” era.Footnote 54 But while Varro dated the start of the historical period at the first Olympiad (in the eighth century BCE), Camden did not believe this demarcation to hold as true for ancient Britain as it did for Roman and Greek antiquity.Footnote 55 Rather, Camden suggests that in Britain the effective start of the historical period was much later. For in the Britannia Caesar's invasion marks the shift from “fables” to “uncorrupted” historical records, and the lack of such records before this invasion not only renders the Brutus story dubious, but the rest of British antiquity too.Footnote 56 A work intended to restore antiquity and Britain to one another would then seem to be in a quandary. If he could not find some plausible evidence for Britain's prehistory, Camden would have nothing other than doubt with which to replace Geoffrey of Monmouth.Footnote 57
One source of the evidence Camden sought was “sacred history,” the important exception to the fables that he believed made up most of the writings about the mythic period.Footnote 58 For all their aversion to eponyms elsewhere, neither he nor Goropius rejected the ones that came from scripture and, in particular, the descendants of Noah. But scripture was only the starting point of sixteenth-century ethnic theology, and in the Britannia its ability to illuminate the mythical period is not for the most part supplemented through other texts but rather by means of etymological argument. Language is both the “greatest support” of claims about the origin of the Britons as well as the “most certain argument” of the origin of peoples in general.Footnote 59 Not only does evidence of kinship between different languages have the advantage of not depending upon reliable histories of a period for which Camden believed almost none to exist, but in theory this type of evidence allows the pursuit of ethnic origins to dispense with histories altogether. As Camden goes on to assert, if all histories had perished and no one had written down that the English and the Germans or the Scots and the Irish were kindred peoples, this kinship would be easily discernible from what their languages have in common. This commonality outweighs even the “authority of the gravest historians.”Footnote 60
Of course, Camden and Goropius were hardly the only early modern writers to highlight the importance of linguistic evidence about the remote past.Footnote 61 Annius himself often relies on names and etymologies in the Antiquitates,Footnote 62 but there were less controversial sources too. The Britannia makes much use of Continental scholarship, and although the French historian and political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) is only cited occasionally,Footnote 63 Camden might well have been influenced by the chapter on the “origins of peoples” in Bodin's widely read Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (Method for the easy comprehension of histories, 1566), where the ancient Celtic language is used to demonstrate that the Germans were an offshoot of the Gauls.Footnote 64 Bodin, however, makes no claims for the existence of ancient Celtic in his own day. Rather, this language has been “virtually lost” due to the spread of Latin under the Roman Empire, and now it only survives in the form of such “traces” as keep languages from being altogether “abolished” by the forces of change.Footnote 65
Camden also sought the language of the ancient Gauls through scattered remains rather than a coherent whole, and here his argument is not quite as free of written evidence as his credo about relying on linguistic relationships alone would suggest. Since this language was submerged in the “floods of oblivion,” its remnants have to be retrieved like “planks out of a shipwreck” in Latin and Greek texts, where they appear along with other references to the ancient Gauls (and Britons).Footnote 66 But the necessity of a piecemeal retrieval of words from classical literature was not the case for ancient British. Since he believed this language to be extant in modern Welsh, Camden in theory had there an abundance of words out of which to construct his etymologies. Once such “planks” of the Gallic language as could be rescued from the “floods of oblivion” were compared with their contemporary Welsh counterparts, the connection between the two peoples would become clear. Camden describes the likeness of their languages as one of both “sound” and “sense,” and the etymologies that demonstrate this likeness as not forced but instead achieved “most easily.”Footnote 67
At least, such etymologies seem easy so long as Camden's reader accepts the remarkable intactness of Welsh, not only in comparison to the shipwrecked ancient Gallic but also to most other languages as well.Footnote 68 (Welsh readers also had to accept that Camden's etymologies represented plausible uses of their language, which not all did.) The degree of certainty that Camden expresses about Welsh's preservation of an ancient language in uncorrupted form is all the more remarkable because in the Britannia words are scarcely immutable. Rather, part of the challenge of analyzing toponyms is their instability: “Thus as the years gradually turn, names gradually change.”Footnote 69 So Camden qua humanist philologist sums up the many variations in the name of a single town in Kent. The passage of years erodes such place-names, or else it gives them new additions, obscuring the originals. This erosion of names, moreover, reflects the broader mutability that is everywhere apparent in the Britannia, where the pursuit of antiquities is often the pursuit of the fragmentary remains of a once illustrious whole. As Camden points out at the end of his chapter on Roman Britain, the world offers evidence of alteration “everyday.” Just as new foundations of cities are laid, so new names of peoples arise while the old ones become extinct.Footnote 70 But amid the turbulence of history and the vicissitudes of nomenclature, how could an entire language be more or less the same as it was in antiquity? How could this language become an ark with which to navigate the “floods of oblivion”?
For all his determination to prove his thesis about the Dutch/Cimbrian language, Goropius was aware that such questions could be asked of the Origines,Footnote 71 but he addresses them most pointedly in a posthumously published work, the Hermathena (1580). There he quoted the familiar Horatian comparison of words to ever-changing leaves on a tree, and he even acknowledged that Dutch wasn't exactly the same as ancient Cimbrian since some of its oldest words had fallen into disuse to the point of being forgotten. But in a surprising twist he then claimed that the mother language would regain its oldest words if they were inferred from the derivatives to which they gave rise in various offspring languages, including English.Footnote 72 Elsewhere in the Hermathena Goropius admits that no language remains the same for a long time. But he tries to circumvent this problem by arguing that even significant changes do not have to deprive a language of its identity.Footnote 73 Thus, for Goropius it is “credible” that the much-evolved Latin of the age of Cicero would be still intelligible to the earliest Romans. If the ancient ruler Numa were to come back to life during this later period, its Latin, however altered, would not present him with the same difficulties as a foreign language.Footnote 74
If some of this qualifying of the more rigid ideas of the Origines still seems to strain rather than strengthen credibility, Camden was even more inconsistent about the imperviousness of the British language to mutability. Camden identified this language as “the least mixed and oldest by far,” but he also asserted that its purity was compromised during the centuries of Roman occupation when a substantial “force of Latin words crept into the British language.”Footnote 75 Even “Britannia,” as Camden explains it, is only a half-British word; the other half, “-tania,” is a Greek suffix that was added to the British root by Greek sailors whom he believed to have explored the island and perhaps left other linguistic traces of their presence.Footnote 76 All this, moreover, is to say nothing of the Saxon onslaught, which forced the majority of Britons to yield to the language of the conquerors as well as to their laws. Only a small number, whom the rough terrain in the western part of the isle guarded from the absolute victory that the Saxons achieved elsewhere on the island, were left to keep their language and identity intact.Footnote 77
But somehow the residue of Britons did just this, and Camden's point about the effect of their being isolated by rugged terrain raises the question of what else might set apart a language that had survived so many centuries unchanged. At points both he and Goropius suggest that it must be something exceptional, though this exceptionalism has a more obvious patriotic component when attributed to a native language rather than, as was the case with Camden and Welsh, a foreign one. For Goropius patriotism may even have included a hint of defiance. When he marvels at the ability of “so small an angle of the world” as the Netherlands to retain the “purity of its language” under the Roman Empire,Footnote 78 one can only wonder what the then-ruler of the Netherlands and dedicatee of the work, Philip II of Spain, was intended to make of such indomitable “purity,” which even the ultra-powerful precursor of the Hapsburg Empire could not compromise.Footnote 79 “Who does not love his native language?” Goropius asks as if to suggest that his own attitude toward Dutch reflects a general human tendency.Footnote 80 But he does not just assign to his own vernacular the distinction of being the oldest language. Through avoidance of corruption, it is also the “most perfect” one, and, among the languages that fall short of perfection in the Origines is Spanish, which, like French and Italian, is identified as a “barbarous” mixture of Latin and German.Footnote 81 In contrast to such corruption, a “divine benignity” has preserved the “genuine simplicity” of Dutch and left it to be the only key to a past that would otherwise remain unrecoverable.Footnote 82
Camden never claims perfection for Welsh/British. Nor was he ever an advocate for it as Goropius was for Dutch. But in a similarly rhapsodic vein, Camden does marvel at the longevity of the British language, which he does not attribute solely to the sequestering effects of geography. In a rare religious outburst he even rejoices over the “divine benignity of the highest creator toward our Britons, the posterity of ancient Gomer,” who, although overcome by successive invaders (Romans, Saxons, and Normans), have kept both their “ancestral name” and “first language” in “good condition.”Footnote 83 Here the Welsh, derived, like Goropius's Dutch, from Gomer, provide access to the remote past with an indomitable linguistic purity of their own. Indeed, in Camden's Latin the phrase “sarta tecta” literally refers to the “good condition” of buildings, and as a description of an ancient language, it suggests that this language has escaped the unhappy fate of so many of the castles, military outposts, and even whole towns that make up the landscape of the Britannia. Built by one or another group of conquerors, these all too often either fell victim to the next group or else dwindled gradually into ruinous obscurity. But through a “divine benignity” that is nothing short of miraculous, forces whose effects are felt so keenly elsewhere in the Britannia are held at bay by the British language, and thus this language is able to provide a more enduring testimonial to ancient origins than stone or brick.
EXPANDING ON SACRED HISTORY WITH ETYMOLOGY
According to John Aubrey (1626–97), Camden “much studied the Welch language, and kept a Welsh servant to improve him that language for better understanding of our Antiquities.”Footnote 84 In what may have been an outgrowth of such studies, Camden contributed a prefatory poem to John David Rhys's (b. 1534) grammar Cambrobrytannicae Cymraecaeve Linguae Institutiones et Rudimenta (Principles and rudiments of the Cambro-British or Welsh language, 1592), the prefatory material of which also includes a letter extolling the antiquity of the British language as well as its resistance to corruption from without.Footnote 85 Such professions were not uncommon in early modern texts by Welsh writers.Footnote 86 (The English antiquary John Leland also used the British language to unpack the meanings of place-names.Footnote 87)
In addition to John Davies, another proponent of his native language's longevity was Sir John Prise (1502–55), whose Historiae Britannicae Defensio (Defense of British history, 1573) makes this longevity an element in its vindication of the Galfridian narrative;Footnote 88 however, most important as a model for the use of the British language in the Britannia was the Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis Fragmentum (Fragment of a commentary on the description of Britain, 1572) of Humphrey Llwyd (1527–68), which was translated into English in 1573. Llwyd begins his chorography of Britain with a lesson on the grammar and pronunciation of the British language.Footnote 89 This then becomes the “foundation” for a “geographic” description of Britain, where, instead of names drawn from Latin and Greek, Llwyd derives them “out of the most ancient language of the Britons.”Footnote 90 Llwyd even offers an etymology of “Britain” itself, which, although different from Camden's, is rooted in this same venerable language.Footnote 91
But however he may have marveled at the stubborn survival of British/Welsh, Camden did not bring to his study of this language the same kind of patriotic identification as those whom he termed “our Britons.”Footnote 92 Indeed, his claim that they were descended from Gomer, not Brutus, undercut the traditional patriotic history of the Welsh. By contrast, Prise and Llwyd (as well as the English Leland) were defenders of this history, and thus for all their reliance on the British language, neither of them was using it to search for British origins. Even Llwyd's Welsh etymology of “Britain” was, as Camden noted in the Britannia, “without any prejudice towards Brutus”—that is, not to the disadvantage of the history of which Llwyd was a partisan.Footnote 93 For though in the Commentarioli “Britain” comes from a British word, through a separate etymology the British people take their name from the eponymous Brutus.Footnote 94 Like Camden, Llwyd claimed that there was “no more certain argument than language” for tracing the origins of peoples; however, when Llwyd uses this type of argument, it is not to show the origins of the ancient Britons but rather the extent to which they ventured abroad and left their mark in foreign lands.Footnote 95 Thus, while Goropius had asserted that Britain, or “free Dania,” received its name from the Danes, Llwyd took the opposite position, that Dania must have received the designation “Cymbrica” after marauding Cambrian troops marched through it. The name Cambria itself comes from “our annals,” the traditional British history where Camber, as the third son of Brutus, inherits the third part of his kingdom.Footnote 96
Llwyd's deployment of a Welsh etymology that Camden would later use in the Britannia is equally instructive. This etymology is of “Trimarchisia,” which the Greek geographer Pausanias (110–80 CE) had identified with the three-person cavalry teams favored by ancient Celtic invaders of Greece under the leadership of a figure who—depending on one's perspective—was either a Gaul or Briton.Footnote 97 In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia this leader, Brennus, sacked Rome, and in one version of this history also made inroads into Greece.Footnote 98 Pausanias, however, does not mention any Britons, only “Celts” and “Gauls.” Nevertheless, in an effort to show that these “Gauls” were originally British, Llwyd breaks down “trimarchisia” into modern Welsh components, “Tri” meaning “three” and “march” meaning “horse.” Thus, either the soldiers of Brennus were “true-born Britons” who had found their way to Gaul or the Gauls spoke British—which “histories” deny.Footnote 99 Llwyd's argument here reveals more than his desire to claim an impressive military conqueror for the Britons. Since he assumes the original Britons came from Troy, any word derivations linking them to a neighboring people had to be the result of expeditions outside their native land, not a shared identity.
But the perspective of the Britannia, as one early modern reader noted, is more akin to that of Goropius. In his commentary on the eighth song of Michael Drayton's (1563–1631) Poly-Olbion (1612), John Selden (1584–1654) made both Camden and Goropius the leading advocates of a narrative of British origins that was in opposition to Llwyd's account as well as to that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Selden was commenting on the River Severn's boast that the
Here the notion that the Cambrians, who for Drayton's River Severn are descendants of Brutus's son Camber, conquered and left their mark on the “Cymbrica Chersonessus,” or Jutland, is almost the same as Llwyd's explanation of how “Dania” became known as “Cymbrica.” Overflowing their native land, the Britons bring their name as well as their excess population elsewhere.
But Selden's commentary on these lines demonstrates his awareness that Goropius and Camden have turned the familiar relationship of Cambrians and Cimbrians on its head: “That Northern promontory now Jutland, part of the Danish kingdom, is called in Geographers Cymbrica Chersonesus, from the name of the people inhabiting it. And those which will the Cymbrians, Cambrians or Cumrians from Camber, may with good reason … imagine that the name of this Chersonese is thence also, as the Author here, by liberty of his Muse. But if, with Goropius, Camden and other their followers, you come nearer truth and derive them from Gomer, son to Japhet, who, with his posterity, had the North-western part of the world; then shall you set, as it were, the accent upon the Chersonese giving the more significant note of the country; the name of Cymbrians, Cimmerians, Cambrians, Cumrians, all as one in substance being very comprehensive in these climats.”Footnote 101 In Selden's account, once the distracting “liberty” of Drayton's poetic “Muse” has been curbed in favor of coming “nearer truth” with “Goropius, Camden, and other their followers,” the Welsh Cambrians are more likely to seem an offshoot of the Cimmerians/Cymbrians rather than their source. Nor is it likely that either people come from Camber, but rather from Gomer, the grandson of Noah. To be sure Selden here says nothing about Goropius's theory that the original Britons were Danes.Footnote 102 Nevertheless, he makes both peoples part of a vast migration that left traces of itself in the obviously related ethnic names that are “all as one in substance … very comprehensive in these climats.”
Camden establishes the link among Gomer, the Cimmerians, and the original settlers of Britain after first providing an overview of the postdiluvian repopulation of the world: “Out of the sacred history of Moses we are taught that after the flood the three sons of Noah, Sem, Cham, and Japhet, augmented with numerous progeny went out in different directions from the mountains of Armenia where the ark had landed, and propagated their peoples throughout the world.”Footnote 103 Even as Camden expands on this overview from “sacred history” with other biblical as well as nonbiblical citations, the basis of his argument about the Cimmerians is their name—in particular, its likeness to that of Japhet's eldest son. “Why should we not confess that the Britons, or our Cimmerians are the posterity of Gomer and named from him? The name sounds very similar.”Footnote 104 Indeed, the descendants of Gomer, once called the “Gomari” and identified with the Gauls by Josephus, are not hard to find in the “Cimmerii/Cimbri,” whose name has “filled this part of the world.”Footnote 105 Underscoring the importance of the “Britons’ own special name for themselves” to the discovery of their origins, Camden lists several such self-designations: “kumero,” “cymro,” “kumeri,” and “kumeraeg” (the last denoting “the Welsh language”), that support his theory. By contrast, he argues that “Cambri” is a latecomer, coined from one of these self-designations rather than from Camber, the son of Brutus.Footnote 106
For Goropius, too, sacred history represents the beginning of the genealogy of his own people. As he puts it in book 4 of Origines, Gomer was the oldest son of Japhet, “from whom the Gomer-ites or our Cimmerian ancestors draw their race.” Thus, “out of the history of Moses” it will be worthwhile to transcribe those things that “pertain to the first origin of our people.”Footnote 107 But as was the case for Camden, Moses, whose succinctness and brevity receive several mentions in Origines, can only take Goropius so far.Footnote 108 He is soon adducing Josephus as well as other sources that will allow him to elaborate on the Mosaic account.Footnote 109 But Goropius's main supplement to Mosaic history is the Dutch language, out of which he is not merely content to spin etymologies of words from various languages, both classical and vernacular. He also fleshes out Mosaic history itself by applying his etymological method to the key names of Genesis. Thus, in the case of the progenitor of the Cimmerians, “Go” and “mer” come together to mean “of good fame,”Footnote 110 while the father of humankind is explained as “Haat-dam,” an admonition that he is supposed to be a bulwark against satanic envy and hatred in the same way that a dam is against the ocean waves.Footnote 111 One might question whether Adam would have been in a better position to heed this admonition if, instead of the landlocked Garden of Eden, he had lived in the flood-prone Netherlands, where such dams were a familiar sight. Nevertheless, fascinating here is the notion that the interpretation of sacred history can come not only from the language but also from the geography of Goropius's native land. Indeed, this particular etymology takes to a patriotic extreme an attentiveness to location that animates parts of Origines no less than it does the chorography of the Britannia.
But if the language and the landscape of the Netherlands can help to explain the Bible, so too the Bible can help to explain the nomenclature of this landscape. Thus, reversing the direction of his etymology of “Adam,” Goropius finds an echo of Mosaic history in the Dutch word, “barg” or “berg,” which, among other things, can mean “mountain.” Why, then, is this word found in ancient toponyms marking places where, as is almost always the case in the “low lands,” there are none? Goropius's ingenious answer is that this happened through a metaphor. Because during the Flood the “first parents” preserved themselves on high ground, the word for “mountain” became synonymous with “every kind of preservation.” Thus “berg” was also used to denote a low-lying port, where ships were preserved in safety.Footnote 112
Without being quite so far-reaching in the Britannia, Camden nevertheless does use etymology to bridge the present and remote past, and he thereby recasts the antiquity of the British language and people according to the model of Origines—that is, as stemming from the Cimmerians rather than giving rise to them. This does not mean that the linguistic arguments of some Welsh partisans of British history did not provide an important model for Camden, too. Indeed, his analysis of the word for Celtic three-man cavalry teams may well have been taken from Llwyd. As in the Commentarioli, so for Camden the Celtic term breaks down into “Tri,” signifying “three,” and “march,” meaning “horse.”Footnote 113 But Camden does not use this etymology to show that the army of Brennus must have been made up of Britons, as Llwyd does. Rather, this army was one of Gauls, who did in fact speak British. That the word found in Pausanias is “unadulterated British” creates a different narrative of ethnic origins than it does in Llwyd.Footnote 114
This Welsh etymology is only one of many that Camden constructs for such old Gallic words as he was able to discover in Latin and Greek authors. Thus he also argues that the word used by the ancient Gauls for “hired soldiers” (as reported by Polybius) is close to the one by which “Britons now” designate “hired servants.” So too the word that to the fourth-century author Vegetius signified a “legion” of soldiers has yet to fall out of use among the Britons.Footnote 115 In a more complicated maneuver, Camden extracts “Divona,” the ancient word that the Gauls used for “fountain of the Gods,” from the fourth-century poet Ausonius, and he analyzes it as a combination of two words used by “our Britons.” These are “Dyw” (“god”) and “vonan” (“fountain”).Footnote 116 Likewise, Camden notes that “bard,” which is “pure British,” meant “singer” to the ancient Gauls, and he goes on to analyze “bardocucullum”—a word found in Martial (40–102 CE)—as an amalgam of “bard” and the still “intact” British word “cucul,” meaning “mantle.”Footnote 117
Only rarely does Camden acknowledge the possibility of an ancient Gallic word no longer existing in some current Welsh form. For instance, in the case of “rheda,” which according to Quintilian (35–100) meant “chariot” to the ancient Gauls, “the British language does not now recognize this.”Footnote 118 Nevertheless, though “rheda” has fallen from usage, it has not fallen far, since Camden is able to use other close British words such as “rhedec” (“to run”) to demonstrate that it was once “in use” among the British.Footnote 119 These still-extant words are “indubitably” out of the same “vine shoot,” and thus they allow Camden to infer the missing root. Camden goes on to derive the name of the Roman town Eporedia from this same root.Footnote 120
As the reference to Eporedia in Northern Italy would indicate, Camden did not limit his etymologies of place-names to Britain itself. In addition to Italy, he also uses the British/Welsh language to provide etymologies of several place-names in France,Footnote 121 and with these he might seem poised to expand the range of this language well beyond the borders of his native land, as Goropius did with Dutch. If the Cimmerian descendants of Gomer left linguistic traces of their presence throughout Europe, then these meanings too could be unlocked with contemporary Welsh. But Camden was only willing to grant his own muse so much liberty. “I would not go mad with the insanity of Goropius” is a caveat that he registers soon before he begins reducing place-names in France to their supposed Welsh roots. Along with the limited number of such etymologies in the Britannia, this caveat is an important indication that Camden will not be making Welsh the mother language in any general sense. Instead, the Britannia identifies the mother language as Syriac,Footnote 122 but well before this Camden makes clear that Welsh is no substitute for Hebrew. In contrast to Goropius, Camden only provides one etymology for the name “Gomer,” and it is in the “holy language,” where “Gomer” means “ending.”Footnote 123 The name is “not rashly but divinely given” because the descendants of Gomer went on to occupy the “extreme ends of Europe.”Footnote 124 Nevertheless, in so doing they did not disseminate a language that could illuminate the biblical context out of which they arose.
THE GEOGRAPHIC ROOTS OF NAMES
But if in the Britannia the British language cannot interpret biblical names the way Dutch can in the Origines, this language does nevertheless provide copious evidence of the aptness of names closer to home. Although this aptness does not depend upon a superior power, Camden's British etymologies do often rely on the same basis as the divinely inspired Hebrew one—namely, geographic descriptiveness, whose importance becomes ever more apparent as biblical material gives way to the chorography that makes up the bulk of the Britannia. This chorography is divided into sections according to the descendants of Gomer who inhabited the different areas of the island before the Roman conquest, and the name of each group of descendants is subjected to etymological scrutiny that usually reflects some feature of the area it inhabits.
To be sure, as with old Gallic words, Camden derives the names themselves from classical texts, most often the Geography of Ptolemy (100–178 CE). But even as his sources are classical, Camden's etymological method is regional. Breaking down “Damnonii,” the name of the people who occupied the region later known as Cornwall and Devon, into what he takes to be its British/Welsh components, Camden argued that this name either came from this region's inexhaustible tin mines or its situation underneath mountains, while the name of the “Durotriges,” denizens of the future Dorsetshire, reflects their location by the sea.Footnote 125 Likewise, although not entirely ruling out the possibility that the name of the “Trinobantes” is taken from “Troia Nova” (“New Troy”), Geoffrey of Monmouth's designation of their greatest city, Camden is more inclined to derive the name of this people from the British “Tre-nant,” which he translates as “town in valley.” For the entire region of the Trinobantes lies in the Thames Valley.Footnote 126
So too although he derives “Britain” from the body painting practiced by the ancient British people, Camden most often provides etymologies of lesser toponyms a situ, or “from place,” as described in their own language by this same people. His sources for the most ancient of these toponyms are Roman texts, in particular the third-century Antonine Itineraries, but in his etymologies Camden assumes a minimum of the Latinization that he elsewhere claims to have affected the British language. For instance, he identified the ancient forerunner of the town of Winburne with Vindogladiam, as it was denoted in the Itineraries, and he argued that this earlier name came “a situ”—that is, “from its location” between two rivers, as demonstrated by a British word “Windugledy,” meaning “between two swords.” For through an “idiosyncratic usage,” “rivers” are called “swords” by the Britons.Footnote 127 Likewise, in Wiltshire the root of “Sorbiodonum,” also taken from the Itineraries and identified as an ancestor of Sarisbury (Salisbury), turns out not to be an eponym but rather a monosyllable that Britons and Gauls added to the names of places occupying a “higher position.”Footnote 128 No less guided by spatial considerations, Camden derives “Cantium” or “Kent” “a situ” too; it comes from a word that in old Gallic means “corner.” Likewise, the first half of “Cornwall” is owing to its “horn”-like shape instead of “Corineus some ally of Brutus,” Cornwall's eponymous founder in Geoffrey's Historia.Footnote 129 To buttress the latter etymology Camden goes on to list several places outside of Britain that received their names “ab huiusmodi situ” (“from location of this type”).Footnote 130
This highlighting of the particulars of place might seem removed from the more wide-ranging tracing of origins practiced by Goropius. But although it is not primarily a chorography, the Origines does have elements of one, and this is particularly true of book 1, where Goropius sets out to examine the “antiquities of almost all of Belgium.”Footnote 131 There he begins by suggesting that the importance of place to the significance of toponyms has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. If only historians had paid more attention to the “geographical method,” they would have better illustrated the “antiquities of all regions” and not left behind so many doubts and disputes “over the primitive names of peoples and towns.”Footnote 132 Accordingly, the Origines begins its investigation of the “most ancient founders” of Antwerp “a situ,” with the location of the city that Goropius calls the “most famous market in the world.”Footnote 133
Goropius's etymology of “Antwerp” reflects its geographic situation, and though, like his analysis of the name “Adam,” this etymology pertains to water management, it does so with an emphasis on commerce rather than morality. Originally a citadel surrounded—and made inaccessible—by a swamp, the future city of Antwerp acquired both its name and identity when the inhabitants began to fill in the swamp and thereby open themselves to trade. The root of “Antwerp” is, then, “werp,” which Goropius equates with the Latin “molis,” or the “pier” whereby the swamp was overbuilt.Footnote 134 The only difference is that “werp” better expresses the “nature of the thing” than the more general designation of “molis,” since the former denotes the actual process of “throwing” material into the swamp to convert it to dry land.Footnote 135
This explanation is a far cry from the traditional story of the city taking its name from “Handwerp,” or “hand-throw,” an etymology based on the story of the hand of a giant being thrown into the river Scaldis by the eponymous hero Brabo.Footnote 136 Goropius makes short work of this story in the Origines. Nor is Antwerp the only place-name that he derives from the place itself. In lieu of a derivation from the Latin verb “laudare” (“to praise”), Louvain is said to be composed of Dutch monosyllables denoting the “situs urbis” (“location of the city”), and in particular its inclusion of both high terrain (“lo”) as well as swampland (“ven”), like the similarly named Venlo on the banks of the Meuse river.Footnote 137 Elaborating on his own etymology, Goropius argues that nothing is more pleasing than such variety of terrain, and he goes so far as to compare that of Louvain to Rome, with the victory being awarded to the former. This rivalry between the two cities in effect reenacts the triumph of a vernacular etymology of “Louvain” over a Latin one.
Shifting his attention to Asia in book 5 of Origines, Goropius demonstrates still greater faith in his native language by using it to unpack the meaning of toponyms far removed from the Netherlands. As part of a complex argument about the location of Mount Ararat, the landing place of Noah's ark, Goropius derives the name of the “Araxes” river not from Hebrew or Chaldean but rather from the Scythian/Cimmerian language that he identifies with his own vernacular.Footnote 138 The argument whereby Goropius makes the three syllables of the “Araxes” combine to denote a river that moves at different speeds and then turns into a lake is not easy to accept. But venturing closer to home to build his case, Goropius also notes that the “Arar” (now Saône) river in France is so named because its “slowness makes it hard to discern the direction in which it is flowing.”Footnote 139 The description is quoted loosely from Caesar, who, however, does not use it to offer an etymology of the river's name.Footnote 140 Nevertheless, both the same description and etymology reappear almost verbatim in the Britannia when Camden analyzes French place-names that are rooted in the language of the Cimmerians. To the Britons, “Ara” denotes “slowness,” and the Arar moves with such slowness that “the eye is not able to judge in which direction it flows”Footnote 141
Camden's use of a different language to arrive at the same etymology of a word as Goropius becomes less surprising when one recognizes that, though he did not accept the specifics of Goropius's theory of British origins, Camden did accept that the Britons were a Cimmerian people. If, as seems likely, Camden encountered Goropius's Dutch etymology of the name “Arar” in the Origines and converted it into a British one, he could also not have failed to notice Goropius's accompanying expression of a more general faith in such derivations of place-names. Noting the aptness with which Scythian/Cimmerian words are imposed on the things they signify, Goropius argued that his own etymology of the “Araxes” comes closer to “an image drawn on a map by Castaldo” than does a wordy description of the same river by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela.Footnote 142 A map of Turkey and Persia by the Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi (1500–65), whom Goropius dubs “the most diligent delineator of all Asia,”Footnote 143 was published in Antwerp in 1555.Footnote 144 Given his hope of exploring this region for the English government, Goropius's interest in this map is not hard to fathom, but most striking here is his sense of etymology as cartographic in its ability to uncover the “nature” of places through their names. Thus, the “interpretation of the name” through his native language can “square with” the elegant depiction of the Araxes on Castaldo's map.Footnote 145
Camden's treatment of place-names suggests a similar convergence between etymology and contemporary cartography. Although his etymologies offer greater credibility than eponymous ones, as fantastic figures from Geoffrey's Historia give way to the observable details of a particular location, nevertheless one of their effects is to tell at points a suspiciously modernizing story about those who gave the names. In effect, Camden has assimilated the prehistoric (in the Varronian sense) Britons and their language to his and Goropius's own age of “map consciousness,” characterized by “the ability to absorb and transmit spatial information encoded in representational patterns of cartographic projection.”Footnote 146 Indeed, the supposed verbal mapping of their surroundings by the Britons complements the actual county maps that were introduced in the 1607 Britannia.
To look at one of these maps is to view a multitude of place-names displayed amid representations of the very topographic features, mountains, rivers, and forests, from which the Britons were supposed to have drawn these names. It is also to see shapes that once might not have been so apparent to the British name-givers as some of Camden's etymologies would suggest. Thus, casting doubt on the derivation of “Cornwall” from an ancient British word denoting its “horn-like” configuration, the notes to the second English translation (1695) of the Britannia ask whether the “form depending intirely upon the increase or decrease of the sea-coast” would not have been more discernible to sailors at a distance than to the inhabitants “by land, or by the assistance of their little boats, with which they ply'd only upon the very shores.” At least the “nature of the thing” would suggest as much.Footnote 147 Camden's etymology of “Cornwall” reduces an ancient giant and his slayer to scale (Corineus was supposed to have thrown a giant off a cliff), but it may have magnified the ancient Britons’ “little boats” and limited discernment of a coastline beyond what was likely at that time.
Even more than such technical abilities, however, language looms to near-gigantic proportions in both the Origines and the Britannia. For Goropius this language is the first and “best speech,” whose words expressing the “characteristics of things” are able to mimic the effects of a modern map even as they emanate from a prelapsarian source—namely, Adam in Eden.Footnote 148 The names of this “best speech” seem not so much “made” as “born with the things themselves,”Footnote 149 and this remains the case even though many of the things named in the Origines, unlike the scriptural examples of birds and beasts, were not yet familiar to Adam. For since the original Edenic language was not lost with him, rivers and regions that Adam did not know of could still be designated according to their nature. The correspondence between words and things carries over to subsequent users of this language, who construct toponyms out of the Dutch monosyllables that Goropius believed to be the most basic elements of the Edenic language. The naming of places in turn becomes an extension of Adam's power to name creation, which in Genesis is a sign of his dominion over it.
That this power of naming is exercised in Dutch is of course the point, and here the implications of Goropius's argument extend beyond the Edenic age of innocence to the age of discovery in which he had briefly dreamed of playing a part. Indeed, for all its antiquarianism, part of the interest of the Origines to Hakluyt may have been due to its also fulfilling one of the key functions of a narrative of discovery. Such narratives were typically intended to accord priority to one nation over another,Footnote 150 and whenever the Origines finds Dutch roots in the name of a place, it does in effect demonstrate that speakers of Goropius's native language were there first. During a period when mapmakers such as Castaldo and Ortelius were charting the world with ever greater sophistication and accessibility to readers, Goropius was identifying places on their maps as having already been delineated linguistically in his native tongue.
Given his own awareness of the importance of cartography to global empire, one can only again wonder what Goropius's dedicatee, Philip II, was supposed to have made of all this.Footnote 151 In his posthumously published Hispanica (1580), even as he argued a position flattering to the Spanish—that the New World had originally been discovered by Atlas, identified as an Iberian descendant of Noah—Goropius also maintained that the name given by Atlas to the New World was a Dutch one. This was “Opher,” by virtue of the newly discovered land being “over” or across the ocean.Footnote 152 Goropius was arguing against “Ophir” being the correct designation of the source of the gold delivered to Solomon in 1 Kings 9:28, but here the contemporary resonances of his biblical antiquarianism are intriguing too. In 1614 the name “Nieu Nederlandt” would first appear on a map of the New World, and later Dutch place-names on such maps would be used to argue the case for the Dutch right to this region.Footnote 153 Goropius's etymology, however, represents an earlier attempt to use language to insinuate the presence of the Netherlands in the New World—and, even more remarkably, to do so via a representative of the people to whom the Netherlands were then subject. As Goropius argues, the interpretation of names in the Atlanticus Orbis (Atlantic World) should emerge from the language of whoever first discovered it,Footnote 154 and so his argument about the Dutch root of a biblical name also serves to identify this prehistoric discoverer as linguistically, if not ethnically, Dutch.
As has been made clear, Camden never argues for anything like a global dissemination of the roots of the British/Welsh language. Nevertheless, etymology does reflect the influx of global commerce when the Britannia turns to England's own rival to the commercial hub of Antwerp. This is of course London, into which the Thames, “most placid merchant of the things of the world,” pours the wealth of East and West.Footnote 155 After rejecting London's identity as “New Troy” and further dismissing the notion of its name being due to an eponymous founder, Ludd, Camden proposes two alternative etymologies and then fuses them together into an image of the city's contemporary grandeur. The first is drawn from the ancient British custom (as recorded in Caesar and Strabo) of calling woods or groves “cities.” After identifying the British word for “grove” as “llhwn,” Camden goes on to argue that “London” could mean “city par excellence or sylvan city.” But Camden also links London to the British word for “ship,” “lhong,” and he alternatively suggests that “London” means “city of ships.”Footnote 156
Camden then brings together these two disparate etymologies by likening the sight of all the ships docked in the London of his day to “a forest,” where masts break up the light in the manner of trees.Footnote 157 Here the shift into metaphor suggests an underlying congruence between remote British antiquity and the present. The ancient British meanings of “London” combine to form an image that expresses the ever-growing international importance of the early modern city in terms of its past. London was always the “city par excellence,” but now it is becoming that in a global rather than merely sylvan sense. This vision of London is in turn owing to a language that, like the city itself, is both ancient and current, as well as, in more ways than one, still living. Not only does this language continue to be spoken by the Welsh, but it also continues to speak the nature of what it describes, even when this is a city that as much as any other demonstrated the transformative power of change.
CONCLUSION
Seven years after the publication of the 1607 Britannia, Edward Brerewood's (1565–1613) Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions through the cheife parts of the world would make the case for “the British tongue which yet remains in Wales” being one of fourteen matrix languages.Footnote 158 Brerewood's argument is a modification and popularization of the polygenetic theory of linguistic origins in Scaliger's Diatriba de Europaeorum Linguis (Diatribe on the languages of Europe, 1610), which, claiming the contemporaneous existence of eleven unrelated “matrix” languages in Europe, represents a riposte to the facile use of linguistic correspondences to trace ethnic kinship.Footnote 159 Nevertheless, the depiction of the British language as a still-extant matrix and the emphasis of Brerewood, in particular, on its immunity to the influence of Latin during the Roman occupation hardly overturn the assertions made about this language in the Britannia.Footnote 160 At least John Davies recognized as much. In the preface to his Rudimenta Davies brings together Camden, Brerewood, and Scaliger to support his claims for the antiquity of Welsh.Footnote 161 Although Davies concedes that his native language may be contaminated with some Latin words, overall his preface argues the opposite.Footnote 162 Among its other attributes, the Welsh/British languages emerge as the great exception to mutability. All other languages suffer this.Footnote 163 Only the Britons retain the same idiom as they used long ago.Footnote 164
As Camden knew from his struggles with the Galfridian account of ancient Britain, mythical history is slow to die, and this was no less true of his own foray into it. In 1706 Paul Pezron's influential Antiquite de la nation et de la Langue des Celtes (1703) would reach an English-speaking readership in the form of David Jones's translation, The Antiquities of Nations. The focus of this text was on the Ancient Gauls, not the Britons; the partiality to his own nation that led to Pezron being accused of Goropianism by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) was of the Gallic variety.Footnote 165 Nevertheless, one of Pezron's claims, that the language of “the posterity of Gomer” was still spoken by the “Ancien Britains in Wales,” represented a revival of Camden's view, and readers of the English translation in particular were likely to have recognized it as such.Footnote 166 If the notion of a language unscathed by mutability seems, to quote a recent editor of this translation, “absurd from a modern perspective, in which linguistic change is assumed to be continual and ubiquitous,”Footnote 167 it does not make complete sense from an earlier one either. Indeed, Pezron and Camden appear together as targets of satire in Jonathan Swift's hilarious Discourse to Prove the Antiquity of the English Tongue (1765), which uses facetious etymological arguments to demonstrate that this tongue has “varied very little” for over two thousand years.Footnote 168
Citing Goropius's and Camden's theories of a Cimmerian migration, Selden distinguished between coming “nearer truth” with language and history and holding onto the “liberty” of a poetic “Muse.”Footnote 169 It is not, however, just the coexistence of his commentary and Drayton's poetry in the same text that suggest how much the one did not necessarily exclude the other in early modern antiquarianism. The very theories to which Selden refers demonstrate this as well. Even as history made inroads into Varro's mythical age, it also produced new myths to replace the old. In particular, the attempt to find a replacement for legend in accounts of the origins of peoples and languages was stymied by the lack of documentary evidence. The most notorious way around this problem was that of Annius, to forge missing documents, but language itself provided another. In their etymologies both Goropius and Camden pressed the philology that was early modern historicism's most sophisticated tool into the service of a sometimes fanciful Muse.
