Yarranton often makes the culmination of one project the impetus for another, though he does not always do this. For instance, England’s Improvement employs a paragraph break to mark the shift between his discussion of the registry and plan to log Irish and English forests:
And if this doth not convince the Reader, that hereby we shall beat the Dutch without fighting, and pay our Debts without Moneys, I have no more to say.
Besides the Advantages aforesaid, let me tell you that I have found out two places, one in Ireland, the other in England: In that in Ireland are great strange quantities of Timber to build Ships, and places to build them.124
Language and typography place the logging proposals “besides” the purported benefits of the property register, rendering these two ideas adjacent but apart from one another. The new timber scheme nonetheless abides by its own internal logic of self-necessitation: “great and strange quantities of wood” become accessible only when workers make the Slane and Avon Rivers passable to ships. A cache of fleet-ready timber needs reengineered rivers to become boats. Conversely, the future navigability of the Slane and Avon depend on their proximity to forests, whose wood motivates the moving of land and water.
Yarranton depicts the project through a crude map (see Figure 2). The top of the map displays forest groves owned by English aristocrats, including Anglesey, who would stand to profit from the extraction of Irish timber. The bottom shows a finished ship under English ensign sailing out the broad-mouthed Slane River past Wexford into the open sea. The forest’s status as ships in potential could not be more obvious. The absence of dockyards, logging camps, and any other traces of labor implies that Irish forests, like Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest, might simply “rush into [the] Floods” on their own accord.125 Yarranton’s syntax lacks the prosodic compression of Pope’s later scene, but it relies on a similar animating conceit: “those Woods may with ease and at very cheap Rates be brought down the Slane to Wexford.”126 Cartography and grammar conspire to reduce rural wilderness to its industrial possibilities, possibilities that the single outbound ship implies are already being exploited.
Yarranton’s chain of projects stretches beyond the text of England’s Improvement. The multitude of benefits (and beneficial projects) signaled by the phrase “much more” would eventually motivate him to compose a “Second Part” to England’s Improvement, published in 1681. This continuation contained, among several additional proposals, “advice” for employing “Six thousand young Lawyers, and Three thousand Priests … who now have neither practice nor cure of Souls.”127 Yarranton recognizes that the institution of a land registry would clear parochial court dockets, deny lawyers lucrative casework, and make England sufficiently prosperous and self-content to repel the enticements of Roman Catholicism.128 Despite his tongue-in-cheek concern for jobless lawyers and papists, Yarranton nonetheless demonstrates his willingness to deal with the repercussions of his scheming and to solve, even fancifully, problems of his own making. The patterns of causation that drew together Yarranton’s projects outstretch the document that originally called them into being.
Universal Interest
Yarranton purports to voice collective values through the first word of his title, “England’s,” his strategically addressed dedicatory letters, and passively voiced predictions. He advances schemes that benefit broad constituencies, transforming the need for labor into a beneficial occasion of “employ.” A desire to employ the poor, to make enterprise serve its undertakers, was “one of the axioms of project writing,” according to Samantha Heller, who demonstrates how economic planners of the sixteenth century promised to make use of England’s idle and destitute subjects.129 The inventor Hugh Plat (1552–1608) typifies this caring rhetoric when he sets out to “procure great loue and securitie to the rich, sufficient maintenaunce and reliefe to the poor, some credit to the Author and no small benefite to the whole realm of England.”130
Figure 2. Map of Slane River from Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Poor relief remained a central concern of projectors a century later. Reynell was one of several improvers who proposed a herring fishery on the grounds it would employ a staggering half million subjects.131 The fishery, he explained, was just one example of public enterprise that England could profitably undertake if “the Rich hoard not up their Money, but employ the poor people in general works, as building of Houses, Colledges, Bridges or the like.”132 Nicholas Hawksmoor goes so far as to suggest that his proposal for a hospital in Greenwich would prove advantageous even if it never served a patient, because even “vain Projects” like Egypt’s pyramids and Trajan’s pillar were useful in that they “employed vast Numbers of the Poor, in Building.”133
Reynell and Hawksmoor exploit images of poverty to promote their schemes. They make a persuasive resource of scarcity. Similarly, Yarranton’s proposal to establish a network of granary banks, seven-story brick buildings that would protect corn from vermin, aligns poor relief with industrial growth.134 Granaries, he predicts, would benefit “all the people that are imployed in these Manufactures,” by supplying them with “bread sufficient, without a charge to the Publick, and thereby the Commodities will be manufactured cheap.”135 A reason to feed the hungry is that it cheapens goods, argues Yarranton, who charges his project to “cheat the Rats and Mice, to feed the Poor, to preserve the Tenant, to pay the Landlord, to bring us several Manufactures, to prevent Law-Suits, to fetch out all Moneys now unimployed into Trade; and it will be, if done, as the Blood in the Body, it will so circulate in a few years, that Corn will be to England better than ready Moneys; and to have this so, is undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.”136 This procession of infinitive statements explains how the erection of storehouses would monetize grain into currency “better than ready Moneys.” Yarranton predicts that corn, when secured from pests and freely distributed, would function as a unit of exchange similar to registered lands. The circulation of grain as money would ensure the availability of bread while stabilizing tenant-landlord relations, serving “undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.” All men hold “interest” in this project because they belong to the same body, Yarranton’s simile suggests, and depend on the same flow of blood.
Virtually all improvers aligned their proposals with some notion of the public good. But only certain works, like Yarranton’s, were comprehensive enough to claim “every mans interest.” Projects “should be made as Universal as possible,” declares the like-minded Reynell, “and that it be universal, all particular Parishes ought to be employ’d in it.”137 Both Reynell and Yarranton solicit readers who are poor and rich, rural and urban, Anglican and nonconforming to fashion their proposals as expressions of universal interest. Though the bulk of his proposals belong to the countryside, Yarranton maintains the importance of cities as centers of trade, showing how the fruits of the fields busied the ports of London. Yarranton addresses the dangers of urban life most explicitly through a proposal to fight conflagrations, like the Great Fire of 1666, by constructing a system of semaphores and roping water cisterns to sleighs.138 The publication details of England’s Improvement