10 - The Britannia of Edward Lhuyd

Summary

Born an illegitimate son of Bridget Pryse and Edward Lloyd in Shropshire, Edward Lhuyd gave up his father's Anglicized surname just before he turned thirty, around 1688. By then Lhuyd had added a fascination for natural history to his passionate devotion to Welshness, probably at the hands of his father's botanist-gardener Edward Morgan, himself associated with John Evelyn and the great naturalist John Ray. Lhuyd's earliest ‘botanical activities are some notes apparently taken during a journey from [the family seat at] Llandforda to Cardiganshire’. Jesus College, Oxford sparked Lhuyd's interests when he arrived in 1682. No influence may have been more important than joining Robert Plot's Philosophical Society. As Keeper of the Ashmolean, Plot ‘conceived a plan to travel throughout Britain collecting materials towards the writing of a descriptive survey of the country … [stimulated by] Pliny's Historia Naturalis, Leland, Camden, and the English chorographical tradition stemming from William Lambarde’. Indeed, Plot deliberately aimed to augment and correct Britannia by travelling with the same wide-ranging remit and close attention to detail that Leland once had.

Plot published his very detailed Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1674, by which he hoped to ‘advance a sort of Learning so much neglected in England’ by earlier generations: a close study of the natural world and its commercial possibilities. Plot completed a similar volume for Staffordshire in 1686, while Lhuyd was one of his students. Lhuyd became Plot's assistant the following year and regular correspondence followed with Ray, Martin Lister, William Nicolson, John Aubrey, and other leading naturalists and scholars. Plot tasked him to prepare ‘a catalogue of British fossils … based on the museum's collections’, but this fell by the wayside when Lhuyd succeeded Plot as Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1691. For his part, Plot embarked on journeys in Kent and Middlesex in the early 1690s. He died in 1696 before he could complete natural histories of either county, but his travels made him the ideal person to revise Camden's descriptions for Gibson. By 1695, student and master – now colleagues – had shared in the common enterprise of revising Britannia. Perhaps better than any of Gibson's collaborators, Lhuyd captures the shortcomings of Britannia and the possibilities for its renewal a hundred years after its first publication.