4 - Cultural Complexity and Godly Nations

Summary

The ghost of John Leland fairly leaps out from the descriptions written by the travellers and authors who took up the encounter with multicultural Britain after his death. So commonplace did Leland's notebooks become that James Matthew Thompson, a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College Oxford, sought out Leland, Gerald of Wales, and Thomas Pennant for extracts concerning Wales in 1902. Thompson's family holidayed in Penmaen-mawr, Caernarvonshire and Thompson later married the local vicar's daughter. He found the Itinerary ‘an unpleasant book of mere hints’. Thompson was an avid traveller ‘who believed in the exemplary character and early formation of Britain's representative political institutions … [and] the existence of clear-cut national characteristics’. The incomplete, unformed character of Leland's notes left him cold. Thompson became a deacon in 1903 and made his name as a historian with a series of books on the French Revolution, writing ‘clearly and compellingly’ as ‘a whig with a social conscience’. Yet Thompson nearly destroyed his career in its earliest years with Miracles in the New Testament (1911), denouncing the invention of the virgin birth and resurrection. Pressured to resign, Thompson preserved his tenure, if not his ecclesiastical duties, in the name of academic freedom and rational inquiry.

Leland's Itinerary did not inspire Thompson's scrutiny of religious nonsense, but he had one thing very much in common with the generation of traveller- writers who followed Leland, Mair, and Boece. They studied the narratives for useful information, passed judgement on descriptions, and reassembled the raw material for their own purposes. Either as travellers directly or as armchair travellers, they did so with a variety of interests and motives. This chapter focuses on two related questions. First, how did they respond to the cultural complexity of the original accounts, their own experiences, or both? Second, in what ways might the religious revolutions in Britain affect the encounter with cultural complexity, especially from the 1560s and 1570s?

Political and national rivalries, religious plurality, and undertones of Anglo- Protestant imperialism encouraged travellers (among others) to filter the cultural complexity of Britain through confessional rivalries and prejudices. History, topography, and ethnography were all fields of engagement in the battle for the nation's soul.