‘Made and not born civill’

Abstract

This chapter reviews the emergence of civility in Britain under Roman tuition, through writings and images, with a particular focus on the historical and geographical works of William Camden and John Speed, English antiquarians whose influential accounts helped to transform understanding during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Their works are placed in the context of their time by considering contemporary writing that addressed colonial issues and also a number of plays that referred to the ancient past. How these comprehensions of native civility fared in the new political circumstances leading up to the end of the seventeenth century is also addressed. The pre-Roman and Roman population of Britain took on a particular significance in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This related to changing ideas about English (and British) identity in the context of the rediscovered classical writings, and to the intellectual assessment of the value of such concepts in the context of overseas ventures in Ireland and America. New understandings of national identity explored ancient accounts of Britain, setting them in the context of dominant ideas about classical Roman character, themselves derived from ancient writing; these defined the Roman as a complex amalgam of civilized and barbaric, cruel and cultured. A particular issue emerging from this understanding of the British past is emphasized: that Roman conquest and control led to the transfer of ‘civility’ to the savages or barbarians of southern Britain. The increasing focus on classical Rome and ancient Britain by scholars in Elizabethan and Jacobean society could not be satisfied by the narrative accounts presented by the classical authors. these texts were lacking in information about issues that were significant to antiquaries at this time, the new focus on pre-Roman and Roman Britain both motivated and drew upon the results of the search for the material remains of these people in the countryside of Britain. The initial growth of interest in Roman Britain took place at a time when Rome was viewed negatively and this influenced how ideas about the ancient past were articulated. From the time of Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s and during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth (1558–1603), classical Rome was often regarded with ambivalence in England because of its associations with the contemporary city.