William Camden's Britannia, printed by Ralph Newbery at Eliot's Court Press
The final book within the Bader-Hatcher acquisition is a second edition of William Camden’s Britannia, printed by Ralph Newbery in 1587 in London. The book is a topographical and historical survey of Great Britain and Ireland. It follows the 16th-century historical tradition which valued histories written by the authors of antiquity and aimed to correct and amend these original texts.
Newbery was primarily a bookseller, and his shop was located on Fleet Street a little above the Conduit. The Great Conduit was a man-made underground channel in London created to bring drinking water from the Tyburn river to Cheapside. It provided free access to water from the 13th-century to 1666, when use of the Conduit ceased after the Great Fire of London. The Conduit was located approximately near Fleet Bridge, and prior to 1560, Newbery's shop belonged to Thomas Berthelet.
Newbery was registered with the Stationers’ Company and appears to have mainly chosen Henry Middleton and Henry Bynneman as his printers. Henry Bynneman began one of the largest printing companies in London, Eliot’s Court Press. He would have printed the first edition of Camden’s Britannia, but since he passed away in 1583, it would have been one of the four men who inherited the business who printed this edition.
Britannia was written by William Camden at the encouragement of Abraham Ortelius, with the aim of restoring “antiquity to Britaine and Britaine to antiquity” (The Making of Camden’s Britannia). 16th-century historians valued the classical past and antiquity, and aimed not to rewrite history from information gathered from classical sources, but to restore these sources through correction and expansion. Camden’s work produced the first coherent picture of Roman Britain as he mapped out and compared a county-by-county description of 16th-century Great Britain and Ireland against classical sources describing Roman Britain.
Our edition is bound in simple limp vellum, this means there are no boards reinforcing the covers of the book. This was a very popular way of binding a book during the 16th century as it was one of the cheapest options. It is quite possible that this is the book’s contemporary binding, however, as discussed earlier in this exhibition, this book was donated alongside the rest of Dr. Standfast’s personal library around 1744. The book shows signs of being repaired at some point; there was an allowance allotted to the Standfast Library by the board of trustees set aside for the repair of the books; perhaps it was once used to repair this book.
It was not until the 1607 edition of Britannia that maps were added to the text, however, our edition does contain an example of the anglo-saxon alphabet and small woodcuts depicting the Magnus Monument Arch in Lewes and the cross belonging to the grave believed to belong to King Arthur.