‘This dear, dear land.’ John of Gaunt’s death-bed elegy for ‘this sceptred isle’ in Richard II (1597) is one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare. Still quoted 400 years later – as patriotism or critique in wartime propaganda, television dramas, parliamentary speeches and anti-littering adverts – ‘this England’ is a classic political setpiece.

But Gaunt’s mournful celebration of ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea’, ‘This blessèd plot’, ‘Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege / Of wat’ry Neptune’ is also part of another tradition: the lost art of chorography.

Although nature and travel writing remain established forms, chorography has been largely, undeservedly forgotten in the literary landscape. Yet this protean form, deriving from the Greek choros (‘place’) and graphia (‘writing’), combining geography and topography, social and cultural history, antiquarianism and mythology, panegyric and lament, is a vital chapter in intellectual history. It was not just Shakespeare’s dramas that were profoundly influenced by chorography, but much of the literary culture of early modern England, including the work of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes. The story of chorography, though, begins in the ancient world.

Ptolemy’s Geography (c.149 AD) began by stating that ‘Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein,’ whereas ‘chorography, selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully of the particulars […] even dealing with the smallest localities, such as harbours, farms, villages, river courses and such like’, ‘as if one were to paint only the eye or the ear by itself.’ Ptolemy thus frames chorography as an art of place. If geography has ‘need of mathematics’, he said, then ‘chorography needs an artist’. Classical thinkers tended to emphasise the illustrative and cartographic aspects and ‘visual literacy’ of the form. Later, medieval scholars began to realise more fully the etymology of chorography as ‘place-writing’.

The introduction to the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (c.1340), for example, combined both time and place, albeit on the vast cosmological and global scale typical of medieval ‘universal chronicles’. Higden offered descriptions of towns, roads, rivers, ecclesiastical jurisdictions, dialects, flora and fauna of Britain, drawn from Bede, Gerald of Wales and Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the 16th century, English lay scholars fused humanist methods of source criticism with an increasingly sophisticated sense of anachronism and the emergent techniques of material and philological antiquarianism, revitalising chorography as an erudite yet literary form.

Richard Helgerson writes in Forms of Nationhood (1992) that ‘Chorography […] is the genre devoted to place, as chronicle is the genre devoted to time.’ In practice, however, it was often difficult to separate history from geography and chorography. The royalist polemicist and historian Peter Heylyn wrote in Microcosmus (1621) that: ‘as Geography without History, hath life and motion, but at randome, and vnstable; so History without Geography, like a dead carkasse hath neither life nor motion at all’. Chorography, then, was not quite history, yet could not help verging onto the historical, because it dealt with the remains of the past – natural and human – that endured in the present, whether preserved intact or as ruins, ghosts, folk tales or the indexes of environmental change, such as erosion, clearance, reclamation and drainage.

Such questions of genre were no mere scholars’ quibbles. As the historian Daniel Woolf says in The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (1990), antiquaries and chorographers ‘sought to distance themselves from the narrative historians and chroniclers’, due to the ‘Sword of Damocles’ looming over those who ventured onto sensitive political territory – or worse, commented on current events through historical analogies. The most famous cautionary tale was that of John Hayward, whose Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (1599) landed him in the Tower of London thanks to a fawning dedication, ‘in expectation of future time’, to Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who launched a botched rebellion against the ageing Elizabeth in 1601. It was these dangers that led William Camden, author of the Latin Britannia, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (1586, translated 1610) to shrink from examining politics and monarchical history: ‘remembring myself to be a Chorographer […] leau[ing] these matters vnto our Historiographers’.

The flourishing of chorography in the 16th century was made possible by key advances in antiquarianism and cartography. John Leland was commissioned in 1533 ‘to peruse and diligently to serche al the Libraries of Monasteries and Collegies of this noble reaulme to the intente that the Monumentes of auncient Writers as welle of other nations […] mighte be brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte’. Leland never got around to writing his planned history of Britain – he suffered a mental breakdown around 1550 and never regained his sanity – but his ‘Itineraries’ (1538-43) provided raw materials for later chorographers by salvaging some of the mass of topographical, bibliographical, economic and archaeological data and ancient and medieval social, legal and cultural records unleashed by the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536 onwards.

Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of the Counties of England & Wales (1579) was another key development, kickstarting an obsession with mapping and describing the nation. Saxton’s work formed the basis of virtually every printed map until the advent of the Ordnance Survey in 1791. Camden called Saxton not a cartographer but ‘the excellent chorographer’, harking back to the Ptolemaic definition of the art.

In A Perambulation of Kent (1576), the first of a wave of county chorographies, William Lambarde told his reader: ‘my purpose specially is to write a topographie, or a description of places, and no chronographie, or storie of times (although I must now and then use both, since one can not be fully bee performed without enterlacing the other)’. Here we can see the generic hybridity of chorography as a descriptive mode, as well as the productive tension between the two narrative axes of time and space. Lambarde sought to:

shew in perticular, the boundes of eche Shyre and Countie, the seuerall Regiments, Bishops Sées, Lasts, Hundrethes, Fraunchises, Liberties, Cities, Markets, Borroughs, Castles, Religious houses, and Scooles: The Portes, Hauens, Riuers, Waters, and Bridges: And finally, the Hilles and dales, Parkes, and forests, & whatsoeuer the singularities, within euery of the same.

Lambarde roved around his county, describing ‘the Air in Kent’ (‘somewhat thicke’) and ‘The Soile’ (‘for the most parte bountifull’), comparing Dartford to ‘Mesopotamia, for so me thinketh that this countrie, lying betwene the Riuers of Darent and Medwey may wel be termed’, examining the ‘gavelkind’ ‘Customes of Kent’ that were ‘discrepant from the common lawes of our Realme’, and summarising the political and military history of the Cinque Ports.

Eschewing the usual chronological structure of histories and chronicles, lest they be accused of composing a ‘storie of times’, chorographers like Lambarde invented other narrative structures in the form of routes: moving south to north, say, or following rivers, valleys, roads and other natural or man-made landmarks. In this way, chorographers devised ways of plotting that ran counter to the temporal logic that defined history.

The mapmaker Humphrey Llwyd (or Lloyd), celebrated as ‘The Inventor of Britain’ at a National Library of Wales exhibition in 2019, earned renown as the author of the Latin Breviary of Britayne (translated into English in 1573). It contained loving descriptions of ‘this most noble, and renowned Iland’, combining ‘learned discourse of the variable state, and alteration thereof’ throughout history ‘together with the Geographical description’ of ‘the true renowne of Britayne’. A highly respected scholar and historian in the Welsh Renaissance, Llwyd nevertheless defended Brittonic legends against the demythologising humanist scholarship of Polydore Vergil, who poured scorn and scepticism on the tales of Arthur and Merlin so central to Welsh and British identity and folklore.

William Harrison said he ‘neuer trauailed 40 miles in all my lyfe’. But he wrote a magnificent Description of England that served not only as an introduction to Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) – the sourcebook for Shakespeare’s histories and countless other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas – but became famous in its own right. Harrison’s chorography encompassed ‘auncient names’, ‘ryuers and waters’, ‘bathes and hote welles’, ‘castelles and holdes’, ‘parkes and warrens’, ‘auncient coines’, ‘the food and diet of the Englishe’, their ‘apparell and attire’, as well as many other spatial, social, material, economic and historical descriptions such as ‘Englishe Dogges’, ‘Quarries of stone for buylding’ and ‘the drie measures of Englande, and their comparison with others’.

More than any other work, however, Camden’s Britannia represents the high watermark of chorography. An instant success, the original went through five editions before its English translation by Philemon Holland appeared in 1610. The last Latin reprint in Camden’s lifetime was published in a glorious folio edition complete with maps (including Saxton’s) and engravings of coins, monuments and topographies.

Camden spent years mastering the ‘skill of the most ancient British and English-Saxon Tongues’, ‘travelled all over England’, ‘looked into most Libraries, Registers, and memorials of Churches, Cities, and Corporations’, ‘poored upon many an old Rowle, and Evidence’, ‘examin’d the nature of the soil’ and ‘places of greatest antiquity’. Yet this intense scholar and antiquarian, who ‘diligently perus’d our own Writers; as well as the Greek and Latin ones, that mention the least tittle of Britain’, was also moved to panegyric. In Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine (1605) – bits that never made it into the Britannia – Camden lauded Britain as ‘stored with infinite delicate fowle’, ‘walled and garded with the Ocean’, ‘watered with pleasant fishfull and navigable rivers’ and:

So rich in commodities, so beautifull in situation, so resplendent in all glorie, that if the most Omnipotent had fashioned the world round like a ring, as hee did like a globe, it might haue beene most worthily the onely gemme therein.

This is the chorographical ore Shakespeare mines to produce Gaunt’s immortal monologue. Indeed, Camden’s influence on later writers is difficult to overstate. Ben Jonson praised Camden in an epigram as the man in ‘to whom my countrey owes / The great renowne, and name wherewith shee goes’:

What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!

What light in searching the most antique springs!

What weight, and what authoritie in thy speech!

Men scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach.

Britannia drew the highest praise from Camden’s contemporaries and scholars across Europe, and its author played a vital role in the development and dissemination of scholarship. He established the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at Oxford University in 1622 (which continues today) and was a founding figure, along with Sir Robert Cotton – who collected the famous library named after him – of the Society of Antiquaries.

We can measure the cultural impact of Camden’s masterpiece in those works that adopted and adapted his chorographical vision of Britain. Fairyland, the fantastical setting for Spenser’s epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), was peopled by historical analogies, familiar legends, and magical allegories, yet it was also populated by ‘endlesse moniments’: ancient weapons, scrolls, relics and other remnants. Not only that, but Spenser imagined Fairyland with close attention to its physical features, including rivers, mountains, caves, coasts and, famously, ‘the plaine’ across which the ‘Gentle Knight’ comes ‘pricking’ in the opening of Book I. ‘The Marriage of Thames and Medway’, the chorographical centrepiece of The Faerie Queene, imagines the two rivers and their peoples, regions, myths and stories, converging at a sumptuous banquet. The poem is typical of Spenser’s romantic imagination, but Camden’s ‘De connubio Tamae et Isis’ (‘On the Marriage of the Thames and Isis’) from Britannia supplied the blueprint.

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (1598), Hotspur, Glendower, Worcester and Mortimer, plotting to overthrow the king, examine a map of England to ‘divide our right / According to our threefold order ta’en’. Hotspsur demonstrates a chorographer’s eye when he complains:

Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here,

In quantity equals not one of yours.

See how this river comes me cranking in

And cuts me from the best of all my land

A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.

I’ll have the current in this place dammed up,

And here the smug and silver Trent shall run

In a new channel, fair and evenly.

It shall not wind with such a deep indent

To rob me of so rich a bottom here.

Shakespeare returned to chorography in King Lear (1606). The famous opening scene sees the king ordering: ‘Give me the map there. Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom’, giving to Goneril ‘shadowy forests and with champains riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’ and to Regan another ‘ample third of our fair kingdom’ before Cordelia, refusing flattery, ends up with ‘nothing’.

John Stow’s Survey of London (1598, 1603) was another pioneering chorography. Before it, Stow had written chronicles, annals, summaries and epitomes of British history, but the Survey was a different beast. Born from Stow’s love of and curiosity about his city, it cited not only wills, parish registers, livery records, and the dispersed former monastic holdings but ballads, folktales, and oral testimonies. Stow’s Survey was also a socio-topographical history, attempting to record how London had changed  – culturally, economically, politically, spatially, architecturally – during a period of rapid transformation, examining tombs, muniments, epitaphs, rivers, roads, walls, bridges, wards, inns, colleges, merchants and trades, laws and customs, housing, water supply and sanitation, and ‘divers Roman and other Antique Curiosities’.

Camden also influenced Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), a long poem annotated by the historian John Selden with a series of prose ‘Illustrations’. Britain’s ‘Delicacies, Chorographicall Description, and Historie be my subejct’, Drayton said, and ‘the Chorographie of this song’ celebrated ‘euery Mountaine, Forrest, Riuer, and Valley; expressing in their sundry postures; their loues, delights, and naturall si∣tuations’. The title page literalised Drayton’s anthropomorphism of the island, depicting ‘Great Britaine’ as a goddess enrobed in – what else? – a map of the nation.

The patriotism of chorography inevitably lent a latent political charge. ‘The emergence of the country as a single, if variously significant, term for the focal point of allegiance’, said Helgerson, ‘parallels the emergence of the description, survey, or chorography as an autonomous and widely practiced genre’. Place-writing had seditious potential because it incited a different kind of loyalty: the ‘natural affection’ – ‘by far the strongest affection that is’, according to Camden – for one’s nation. Unlike in chronicles, royal panegyric, political biographies, or even history plays, the main character in a chorography was not the monarch or the nobility but the country itself. We can thus trace a political pedigree in chorography from Richard II to William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (1810), which mourned, as Gaunt did, ‘Englands green & pleasant Land’. Thinking of the country as a place for everyone rather than someone’s property allows us to imagine the nation independently of those who currently rule it.

The travel and nature writers of the 20th and 21st centuries are the heirs of these chorographers. Patrick Leigh Fermor, like the early modern philologist-antiquarians, brought a polyglot’s curiosity and a perambulator’s love of people and places to his walking masterpiece A Time of Gifts (1977). Nicolas Bouvier’s many travelogues turned chorographical journeys into a form of religious ecstasy. ‘In the end’, Bouvier says in L’Usage du monde  (1963, translated as The Way of the World in 2007):

The bedrock of existence is not made up of family, or work, or what others think or say of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.

In Re-Visioning the Earth (1996), Paul Devereux sought to revive the form: ‘chorography, not topography […] place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’. The counterpoint to Bouvier’s rapture is the cynicism of Iain Sinclair. London Orbital (2002) conducts an autopsy on London’s body politic as much as a perambulation of its hinterlands. ‘Hungry for place’, Sinclair is driven by ‘an urge to walk […] to the point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts’.

In a more radical, macabre vision, Andy Sharp’s The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography (2020) combines occult history, folk horror, and black magic, all firmly rooted in England’s history, localities and landscapes. The result is a demonic form of chorography: a roving ‘English Heretic’ punning and pushing back on English Heritage’s claim to fix the canonical meaning of the land, mapping ‘a new geography’ and ‘a new psychodramatic landscape’ that turns England into ‘a cosmic mystery play’. Contemporary nature writers like Mark Cocker and Richard Smyth are, in a way, scions of the naturalist branch of the chorographical family tree. The tendency to elegise ecological loss in a ‘literature of consolation’, as Cocker puts it, recalls the melancholy of John Stow surveying the crumbling ruins, commercial blight and decline and fall of London’s material heritage at the turn of the 17th century.

Chorography is one of English literature’s most eccentric and mercurial forms, mixing antiquarianism, history, poetry, and geography into a patriotic paean to the land and its people. Chorography’s synchronic rather than diachronic format – the precedence of place over a past or future unfolding in time – offers a window into a radical form of writing, different from history and fiction, then or now.