SOURCE: Rockett, William. “The Structural Plan of Camden's Britannia.” Sixteenth Century Journal 26, no. 4 (winter 1995): 829-41.

In the following essay, Rockett proposes that the tripartite structure of the Britannia disproves the common assumption that Camden's history was meant to focus on Roman Britain. Rockett instead finds the Britannia to be a history of social organization, detailing the unification of diverse peoples into a common nation.

Assessments of William Camden's Britannia have been almost entirely uniform in the twentieth century. To this day, Britannia is ordinarily seen, for better or worse, as one of the monuments of English antiquarian scholarship, and its principal subject matter is still thought to be the history of Roman Britain. Camden's motive in writing it, it is assumed, was to enhance England's standing among European nations by illustrating the antiquity of its origins. These assertions were made in the mid-twentieth century by Maurice Powicke, T...