Sociable Knowledge. Elizabeth Yale

peoples lived. As was not uncommon, Lhuyd believed that these were the descendants of one group present on the isle at the time of Julius Caesar, that is to say, prior to the Romans’ arrival in Britain. Roman and early medieval Saxon invaders drove the “British” to the more remote margins of the “Atlantic archipelago.” Their language was likeliest to be preserved uncorrupted in Wales, which had been less exposed to “Foreign Languages introduc’d by Conquest.”⁶² Yet Lhuyd did not necessarily believe that the ancient “British” were the only original inhabitants of Britain. In the proposals Lhuyd maintained a separation between the “British” and the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, though he did see them as historically and linguistically related.

      Lhuyd’s conception of “Britain” and “British” as objects of historical and topographical study continued to develop over the course of his research and seems to have expanded by the time he published the linguistic component of the Archaeologia Britannica in 1707. The title page proclaimed that the Archaeologia Britannica was a study of the “languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain” based on travels in “Wales, Cornwal, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland.”⁶³ The book was a compilation of comparative dictionaries and grammars of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Irish, which Lhuyd regarded as very similar, if not identical, to Highland Scots. Even within this volume, however, “Britain” and “British” were shifting signifiers. He sometimes glossed “Ancient Scots” as “Northern British.” Yet at the same time he maintained a separation between the “British” language as spoken in the south—in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany—and the “Scotish” spoken in the north and west—in Scotland and Ireland. He tended to associate “Scotish” with the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of Britain who had been pushed aside by the “Britans” just as the “Britans” were pushed aside by the Romans and the Saxons.

      Yet despite these fractures in Lhuyd’s concept of “Britain” and “British,” one thing was clear: the only way to understand the history of these languages and, through the languages, the history of the various peoples inhabiting Great Britain was by studying all of them; they had spent centuries jostling along together, pushing each other about, and borrowing from each other’s languages, and their histories were intimately connected.⁶⁴ Lhuyd mapped the geography of languages in order to elucidate these historical relationships. In a letter written while traveling through the Highlands of Scotland, Lhuyd noted that “most names of places throughout the kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland relish much of a British origin; though I suspect that upon a diligent comparison … we shall find that the antient Scots of Ireland were distinct from the Britains of the same kingdom.”⁶⁵

      Lhuyd’s comment, with its suggestion that language groups affiliated with both the “antient Scots” and the “Britains” were present in Ireland, hints at the complexities involved in tracing the movements of ancient peoples, not to mention in trying to link those peoples to present-day groups. In the vocabulary notebooks he kept while traveling in Scotland, he logged common words in at least two Scottish dialects; he also hoped to capture key words in at least three different Irish dialects.⁶⁶ Lhuyd systematically analyzed these data in order to deduce the relationships between the languages, requiring at least five to six specific examples using “core vocabulary” (that is, the words from Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue) to show that any given difference between the languages was a consistent rule.⁶⁷ Following this method, Lhuyd first established the division between the “P-Celtic” and “Q-Celtic” language families broadly recognized today.⁶⁸ P-Celtic includes Breton, Cornish, Welsh; Q-Celtic, Scots and Irish Gaelic. Extensive comparative study was the only way to uncover relationships such as this.

      Lhuyd cast the “Britains” spread across Great Britain and Ireland as people with deep connections to each other. Yet this was not a group whose shared identity was already widely recognized, either by the English or by each other. Relationships between and among the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish veered from contentious to nonexistent. Little in the way of a shared sense of identity united “Britains” in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall.⁶⁹ The word “Celtic” as a collective term for these peoples was only beginning to gain currency in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in part because of Lhuyd’s work. For many of the “Celtic” gentry and nobility, culture and a sense of identity were rooted in local topography and history.⁷⁰ If they looked beyond the local, it was to England, especially London and Westminster, rather than toward each other. This can be seen in a political context—for example, in the process of negotiation that led to the union of Scotland and England in the very year that Lhuyd published the first volume of the Archaeologia Britannica.⁷¹ Leading Scottish politicians looked to the relationship between England and Ireland not in solidarity but primarily as an example of unwelcome colonial dependency. The orientation toward England was also visible in the histories of Britain that emerged from both Wales and Scotland: to the extent that they argued for any sort of historical connections between the parts of Great Britain, it was either between Wales and England or between Scotland and England. Among the “vulgar,” those whose horizons were encompassed by parish and village society and who spoke English either not at all or as a second language, local identities and local relationships were even more paramount.⁷² In addition, while the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish gentry and clergy displayed enthusiastic interest in local antiquities, natural history, and languages, they did not generally see local topography (or their own identity) as a component of a “British” whole.⁷³ Lhuyd, in seeking to trace the relationships between the “British,” actively constructed that shared identity through the creation of linguistic, cultural, natural, and material histories that could serve as its foundation. He created his “Britain” as both a topographical object and a political object.

      Lhuyd further articulated in his 1707 Archaeologia Britannia a vision of the Welsh/British as the “First Planters of the Three Kingdoms,” the first founders of colonies, in the British Isles.⁷⁴ Latching onto this language of planters and colonies, he crafted a vision of Celtic history appropriate to the dawn of a British imperial age. In this he echoed John Speed, who referred to the ancient Britains as the “first Planters and Possessors” of the island of Britain.⁷⁵ Such a phrase was redolent with rich associations to projects for imperial expansion and the crafting of the British Empire. Lhuyd’s use of the word “planters” suggests something of the political overtones his work carried. Planters were those who established colonies—another word Lhuyd used, as a label for the earliest human settlements in Britain.⁷⁶ In the wake of rebellions in Ireland, led first during Elizabeth I’s reign and then again at mid-century during the War of the Three Kingdoms, the English established plantations in Ireland. Land was transferred from rebellious Irish subjects, both native Irish and Old English, Catholic descendants of Norman invaders who were mostly settled in the southeast around Dublin.⁷⁷ English colonists in the Americas, from Massachusetts Bay to Virginia, were planters.

      Planting implied control of territory and settled cultivation of the land, at least partly in the image of Adam and Eve, the first planters; its associations were agricultural, political, and biblical. Planters fixed themselves firmly in the land. Not all of the peoples who had visited Britain had done this, in Lhuyd’s view. In his additions to the 1695 edition of Camden, he firmly rejected the possibility that medieval Vikings had constructed the massive stone circles that could be found across Britain: they were but “roving Pirats,” roaming from place to place rather than establishing the communities that could build such monuments.⁷⁸ Planting implied civilization: seventeenth-century English planters in Ireland and in the Americas went forth to tame “wild” lands and gradually remake local populations, environments, and culture in England’s image.⁷⁹ In Ireland this included importing the structures of English governance and English Protestantism.⁸⁰ Land was divided by counties, replacing traditional lordships; courts of assize were instituted; and Gaelic inheritance laws were replaced by English ones.⁸¹ English and Irish were encouraged to blend, but only on English terms: under Cromwell’s leadership the Catholic Irish were made to worship in Protestant churches.⁸² The virtuoso William Petty’s numerous schemes for “civilizing” the Irish by encouraging marriage between English planters and Irish women were meant to transmute