Introduction

Abstract

It is not surprising that many early copies of William Camden’s Britannia (1586) contain handwritten annotations.¹ After all, the text features hundreds of densely packed place names and antiquities. What is surprising is the uneven distribution of these notes. In one first edition copy, an anonymous early modern reader’s marginal jottings are strictly confined to the Midlands section.² In a volume published fourteen years later, a vigilant hand has written notes in the chapters on Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, and Rutlandshire to ensure that obliquely mentioned Nottinghamshire places are not wrongly ascribed to these other counties.³ A 1610 Britannia contains manuscript notes in several hands.⁴ One reader contributes copious marginalia, but only for the adjoining counties of Essex and Hertfordshire. The flowery brown calligraphy seems especially concerned with keeping up with the prominent gentry families of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, a scratchy black script appears for only a ten-page stretch in the section on the West Riding of Yorkshire. This reader turned writer provides a running list of the prominent place names mentioned in the text. A third hand, made orange by age, seems to have been particularly engaged by Camden’s description of a minor river in Surrey: ‘Not farre from hence the cleere riveret Wandle in Latin Vandalis, so full of the best trouts, issueth forth from his head … where by a tuft of trees upon an hil-top there are to be seene manifest signes of a pretty towne, and diverse wels built of flint stone’ (299).