England can possess trade only by furnishing her with “all that she can desire.” These conjugal comforts included a property register, navigable rivers, a bank, a “Court of Merchants,” and the construction of “lumberhouses” (i.e., pawn shops) where “poor people may have Moneys lent upon Goods at very easie interest.”76 These institutions would entice trade to abandon the Netherlands and “come and settle her self with us,” predicts Yarranton, who emplots improvement as noncoercive seduction, an expenditure of civilian labor preferable to the ravages of war.77 Yarranton’s story of Anglo-Dutch conflict treats commerce not simply as an object to be seized, but as an independent agent capable of denial and consent. His courtship allegory reframes commercial rivalry as a contest of hospitality.
Yarranton dedicates his longest tale to lobbying for the establishment of a land registry, a national office that would keep track of who owned what lands under what terms. England’s Improvement identifies land registration as the cornerstone of Dutch prosperity, a long-standing tradition of centralized record keeping that enabled Hollanders to verify property claims, and thereby borrow against their estates.78 In England, by contrast, “no man can know a Title by his writings” and therefore must resort to cobbling together parish-held deeds and liens to certify property rights. Yarranton suggests that starting a registry would encourage the pursuit of land-backed loans, which would, in turn, transform England’s rural acreage into exchangeable value, injecting “riches, strength, and trade” into a countryside that held so much of its wealth and wealth-creating potential in the soil. Registration would be the mechanism by which English subjects could obtain credit to improve their estates and parishes could amass the funds necessary to commission Dutch-styled public works. Registration would, according to Yarranton, unleash “all delightful Golden Streams of Banks, Lumber-houses, Honour, Honesty, Riches, Strength and Trade.”79
Yarranton dramatizes the consequences of England’s lack of a registry through the story of a fictitious family ruined by its pursuit of a loan. The protagonist is the family father, who owns an ancestral estate worth “a Thousand pounds a year” and owes “Four thousand pounds” in costs associated with outfitting his son in business and paying his daughters’ dowries.80 The high value of the land and modest balance of debt suggest that this man should have no trouble obtaining and repaying a loan. But without clear title to his property of the sort registration would provide, the landholder cannot submit his property as security, even though “the Estate hath been in the Family Two hundred years.”81 He is forced to consult a “scrivener” to acquire a mortgage and to cosign that bond with “coventers,” a process that often failed according to Yarranton, leaving the mortgager unable to repay his debt and without means to set his sons and daughters “into the World.”82
This particular landholder does manage to secure a loan, but the terms are harsh. Yarranton interjects his own voice in this narrative frame to ask the reader to ponder the dire repercussions of scarce credit and predatory creditors: what would happen if the estate were to fall on “bad Times, or decay of Tenants, great Taxes, or the Eldest Son matching contrary to his Father’s will, or oftentimes it is worse, he is so debaucht no one will match with him?”83 In these unhappy cases, the mortgager stands no chance of satisfying his coventers, despite residing on lands worth significantly more than the original debt. “Sheriff, Bayliffs, Solicitors, and Lawyers” inevitably descend on the estate and it is “torn to pieces.”84 The former owner, now an unlanded debtor, must plead before “the Fleet or Bench” and suffer the humiliation of debtor’s prison.85
This upsetting tale transforms a proposal for clerical transparency into familial tragedy, complete with the confiscation of homestead, fractured paternal-filial relations, and incarceration. “O Pity, and Sin,” Yarranton exclaims, “that it should be so in brave England!”86 Outside England, the same transaction is less harrowing. A loan seeker in Dutch Friesland, Yarranton explains, can call on his sons trading in Venice, Hamburg, Nuremberg, and Danzig to acquire credit because “every Acre of Land in the Seven Provinces trades all the world over, and it is as good as ready Money; but in England a poor Gentlemen cannot take up Four thousand pounds upon his Land at six in the hundred interest although he would Mortgage a Thousand pounds a year of it.”87 Although this particular Friesland merchant’s holdings command only £100 a year (one-tenth the annual returns earned by his English counterpart), he is able to borrow at a lower interest rate and at less personal hazard. Land registration, according to Yarranton, made Dutch soil an internationally exchangeable commodity in an era when English estate holders could not prove titles to the satisfaction of parish justices.
Yarranton presents Anglo-Dutch commercial rivalry through the experience of individual economic actors, characters endowed with human hope, judgment, and emotion. His storytelling recasts diplomacy as romance, and malfunctioning debt instruments into a crisis of familial integrity—fictions that enabled even those readers who did not understand Yarranton’s proposals to support them. Another writer who invested macroeconomic phenomena with affective resonance was Blith, who campaigned for timber cultivation in Commonwealth England by telling the story of an aged widow: “I have heard of a poor woman that had two or three ash-trees in her Garden hedge, & a strong wind came and blew the Ash Keys all over the Garden, that at the Spring, her Garden was turned from that to a hopfull plantation of Ashes as green as a leek above the ground, the woman was at a great debat, to loose her Garden she was loth, and to destroy so hopefull a crop she was unwilling.”88 The germination of ash seeds presents a gripping dilemma: the “heard of” woman must decide whether to maintain her garden, a crucial chore given her poverty, or cultivate the accidental nursery, which might return greater sustenance, but only after the trees came to maturity and someone purchased their timber. The woman recognizes that over time the trees would prove more lucrative than vegetables, but she is hesitant to risk her livelihood in pursuit of future gain. Blith distinguishes between the conservation of private uses and the exchange of commodities, in this case through a timber trade that would likely dispose of the ash trees in London’s shipyards. The woman, in other words, must decide whether to maintain her austere existence or become the “English Improver” that Blith heralded: “at last she resolved to let them grow, and now her garden is turned into a nurcery, and she is turned a planter, and hath ever since maintained it to that use, and made many times more profit than she did before.”89 The parable of the ash keys rewards public-minded plantation. Remitting the fruits of the land to a national economy yields “profit,” an exchangeable surplus unavailable in the subsistence paradigm. Blith’s triumphant conversion of garden plot to literary plot furthermore suggests that even the most precarious members of society, here a “poor woman,” can contribute to the Commonwealth, helping to furnish England’s navy at a time when war with the Netherlands first loomed on the horizon.
Projectors like Blith and Yarranton recognized the power of allegories and anecdotes to make improvement concrete and personal. The ruined mortgager and reluctant orcharder solicit pity and admiration, even when the economic impasses they personify do not pertain to individual readers. Their narratives also stand in for explicit argumentation, limiting the instances in which Yarranton needed to make bald claims about the future, claims that would tip off his audience to the fact that they were reading a work in the disreputable project mode. Whenever possible, Yarranton tries to appear as if he is describing rather than disputing, composing narrative rather than building polemic. These performances reflect Yarranton’s anxieties over the usefulness of language for enlisting readers to his cause, anxieties he processes paradoxically by renouncing rhetoric altogether. A signature of project writing, I will now show, was a disavowal of projects and writing. Inspection of England’s Improvement reveals a text at war with its medium.
Writing Against Language
England’s