Having watched the first of the three BBC programmes "Nicholas Crane's Britannia: The Great Elizabethan Journey", the connection with William Camden was a bit limited, but judging by our search logs the programmes will still produce a surge of interest in Camden and his book.
The obvious problem facing the programme makers was that the book covers thousands of places (literally -- see below) while a talking head can visit only a few. It is therefore worth point out that the whole text, in Holland's English translation, is available on the Vision of Britain site.
This is NOT the best place on the web to read the whole text. There are annotated parallel texts, in English and Latin, on the site created by Dana Sutton of the University of California and hosted by Birmingham University:
www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit
The text on Vision of Britain was very generously supplied by Professor Sutton, and we hold only the English version and have taken out his annotations. However, what we have added is maybe more useful to people with specifically local interests and a limited amount of time: we have systematically marked up the places mentioned within the text which has two consequences:
<> As you read the text, the placenames usually appear as hyperlinks, and clicking on them takes you to a place page which includes a map of where the place is.
<> The Birmingham site has no kind of search facility. Ours does include a rather basic free-text facility covering all our travel narratives, but the place names used by Camden are often very different from the modern form. More usefully, therefore, you can search for places by their modern names and see whether there are links to Camden. The way this works is that you type the place name into our home page, which takes you to our "place page". If there is a link called "Travellers' Tales" near the top of that page, then there is a mention somewhere in the collection of travel narratives. Clicking on that link takes you to a list of the pages in the narratives that mention that place, and clicking on an item in that list takes you to the first mention of the place on the relevant page.
At present, a total of 2,688 places in Great Britain have been identified as mentioned in the collection. Camden is much the longest and most thorough of the "narratives", and 1,875 of the places mentioned are mentioned by Camden.
There were a few place names mentioned by Camden which I could not identify, but the larger limitation is that the current system is built around a set of "places" derived from our very systematic gazetteer of administrative units. In practice, this means that the linked places do not include physical features, most landed estates, and settlements which did not give their name at least to a parish; the last is mainly a problem in Scotland.
A new version of A Vision of Britain through Time will be launched in the next few months with many enhancements. One of them is that it has a new gazetteer of places based mainly on the Ordnance Survey's 1953 "Gazetteer of Great Britain", extended to include everywhere else in our current gazetteer. When I marked up Brittania, I tried to mark up all settlements whether or not they were in our current gazetteer, so a lot more links should appear almost automatically once we move to the new system. The underlying architecture of the new system has been extended to cover Ireland, which should also benefit the presentation of Camden (the architectural extension is actually to the whole of Europe, but that is far from meaning we will have equally systematic coverage of the whole of Europe).
Humphrey Southall,
Reader/Director GB Historical GIS,
Department of Geography,
Buckingham Building,
University of Portsmouth,
PORTSMOUTH PO1 3HE
Historical GIS team: 023 9284 2500
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