Camden

WILLIAM CAMDEN (1551 - 1623)

The great Elizabethan antiquary and historian, praised by the poet Edmund Spenser as 'The nurse of antiquity/ And lantern unto late succeeding age', was born in London, though his mother's family (Curzon) was from Cumberland. Camden's famous work Britannia (1586) is based on his travels round England during his holidays as a Westminster schoolmaster (Ben Jonson was one of his pupils). An enlarged and improved version of Britannia came out in 1607: the book is written in elegant Latin, and was first translated in 1610.

Camden called Newcastle 'Ocellus, the eye of the North, the hearth that warmeth the south parts of this kingdom with fire'. He called the Cheviots 'lean, hungry and waste', just as Leland (q.v.) before him in the 1530s had referred to 'craggi and stony montanes'. Camden found the Borderers just as hard, and describes them spearing fish on horseback in the Solway. He visited the Roman Wall in 1599 and though he could not get as close as he wished because of 'the rank robbers thereabout', he writes in admiration:

'Within two furlongs of Carvoran on a pretty high hill, the Wall is still standing, fifteen feet in height and nine in breadth... Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descent of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling.'

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
WILLIAM CAMDEN (1551 - 1623) The great Elizabethan antiquary and historian, praised by the poet Edmund Spenser as 'The nurse of antiquity/ And lantern unto late succeeding age', was born in London, though his mother's family (Curzon) was from Cumberland. Camden's famous work Britannia (1586) is based on his travels round England during his holidays as a Westminster schoolmaster (Ben Jonson was one of his pupils). An enlarged and improved version of Britannia came out in 1607: the book is written in elegant Latin, and was first translated in 1610. Camden called Newcastle 'Ocellus, the eye of the North, the hearth that warmeth the south parts of this kingdom with fire'. He called the Cheviots 'lean, hungry and waste', just as Leland (q.v.) before him in the 1530s had referred to 'craggi and stony montanes'. Camden found the Borderers just as hard, and describes them spearing fish on horseback in the Solway. He visited the Roman Wall in 1599 and though he could not get as close as he wished because of 'the rank robbers thereabout', he writes in admiration: 'Within two furlongs of Carvoran on a pretty high hill, the Wall is still standing, fifteen feet in height and nine in breadth... Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descent of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling.'
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