As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his best attention to this branch of study, and what the ancients had written about England was intimately known to him.  Any one who looks at his book will see that the first 180 pages of the Britannia could be written by a scholar without stirring from his chair at Westminster.  But when it came to the minute description of the counties there was nothing for it but personal travel; and accordingly Camden spent what holidays he could snatch from his labours as a schoolmaster in making a deliberate survey of the divisions of England.  We possess some particulars of one of these journeys, that which occupied 1582, in which he started by Suffolk, through Yorkshire, and returned through Lancashire.  He was a very rapid worker, he spared no pains, and in 1586, nine years after Ortelius set him going, his first draft was issued from the press.  In later times, and when his accuracy had been cruelly impeached, he set forth his claims to attention with dignity.  He said:  “I have in no wise neglected such things as are most material to search and sift out the truth.  I have attained to some skill of the most ancient British and Anglo-Saxon tongues; I have travelled over all England for the most part, I have conferred with most skilful observers in each county....  I have been diligent in the records of this realm.  I have looked into most libraries, registers and memorials of churches, cities and corporations, I have pored upon many an old roll and evidence ... that the honour of verity might in no wise be impeached.”

It was no slight task to undertake such a work on such a scale.  And when the first Latin edition appeared, it was hailed as a first glory in the diadem of Elizabeth.  Specialists in particular counties found that Camden knew more about their little circle than they themselves had taken all their lives to learn.  Lombard, the great Kentish antiquary, said that he never knew Kent properly, till he read of it in the Britannia.  But Camden was not content to rest on his laurels.  Still, year by year, he made his painful journeys through the length and breadth of the land, and still, as new editions were called forth, the book grew from octavo into folio.  Suddenly, about twelve years after its first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, like a bolt out of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, called Discovery of certain Errors Published in the much-commended Britannia, which created a fine storm in the antiquarian teapot.  This attack was the work of a man who would otherwise be forgotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald.  He had formerly been an admirer of Camden’s, his “humble friend,” he called himself; but when Camden was promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of-Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it became his duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a charlatan.  He accordingly fired off the unpleasant little gun already mentioned, and, for the moment, he hit Camden rather hard.