SOURCE: Piggott, Stuart. “William Camden and the Britannia.” Proceedings of the British Academy 37 (1951): 199-217.

In the following essay, a transcription of the first Reckitt Archaeological Lecture, Piggott emphasizes Camden's efforts to construct a particularly Roman history for Britain. Piggott also surveys antiquarian history after Camden, including later editions of his Britannia, arguing that by the mid-eighteenth century the field of historiography was in sharp decline.

The choice of the year 1951 for the inauguration of a series of archaeological lectures is a singularly happy one. The story of antiquarian studies in Britain may fairly be said to begin with the New Learning, in Tudor and Elizabethan times, and of the scholars of that period the acknowledged leader in such researches, in his own day and for a couple of centuries later, was William Camden, born just 400 years ago, in 1551. It is therefore fitting that the first of the Reckitt...