Historians and critics assume that the topic of ‘Britain’ and Camden’s Britannia only became political in 1603. But Camden’s Britannia (1586) was political in its very conception. Camden deliberately set out to undermine George Buchanan’s innovative 1582 account of Britain’s three ancient, Gaulish-speaking indigenous races (Britons, Picts and Scots). Camden wants only one indigenous race: Britons. So he conflates Picts and Britons as ‘painted people’, excluding Scots. Ben Jonson, Camden’s pupil, transformed this identification of British indigeneity with painted skin in the The Masque of Blackness, where Britannia becomes an island ‘discovered’ by the daughters of Niger as they seek to become ‘fair’. Inverting the poetry of Claudian, for whom sunburnt Africans and painted Britons mark the extremes of a vast Roman empire, Jonson sets Britannia at the centre of a new sea-empire, integrating the races of Britain by producing them as unpainted and therefore ‘white’. As unpainted indigenous whiteness replaces Camden’s painted indigeneity, what is left is ‘blackness’, the unwashable hue of the peoples beyond the British seas.

Chapter 2 is ‘Progress: Ancient Custom in the Modern City’. Here I pursue sociopolitical questions prompted by ballad singing, in an analysis shaped by an understanding of historical time and process whereby the chief tension lay between an early modern conception of order, public space, and neighbourhood, as embodied by the singer, and a self-consciously modern urban programme of improvement and capital, advanced by journalists and the judiciary. I situate debates over ballad singing at the centre of this historical process, the better to understand both issues. I analyse the threats singers were said to represent, in moral and legal writing; the political power accorded to the song by authorities (centring on the endlessly repeated maxim of the early Enlightenment thinker Alexander Fletcher); contemporary medical views on the inflammatory power of music; the vexed question of public space; and the steps taken both to repress and to coerce ballad-singers. I focus on the few documented occasions when a ballad-singer had a demonstrable impact on the actions of a community, from Kennington, to Camden, to Whitechapel market, and I come to see the singer, not as analogous to rough music as such, but as a paradoxical, anachronistic voice of authority within those communities.