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Transcription of William
Camden's Britannia, edn 1789
This transcription and notes are from Britannia by
William Camden, translated and edited from the 6th edn 1607
in Latin and with additions, by Richard Gough, published by
T Payne, and Son, Castle Street, St Martin's, and by G G J
and J Robinson, Paternoster Row, London, 1789. The copy used
is in the Map Collection of Hampshire CC Museums Service,
item HMCMS:FA1999.5.
source type: Camden 1789
Only pages relevant to Westmorland, Cumberland etc, are
transcribed; that is - part of the chapter for Lancashire ie
North of the Sands, all of Westmorland and Cumberland, and
part of The Wall. These places lie in the area of the
Brigantes.
'Additions'
`Each county section begins with the translated text of
William Camden, and is followed by additions made by Richard
Gough.
Footnotes
Richard Gough gives many footnote references. These have
not been traced or commented upon; this transcription makes
the text accessible, but has no pretension to be a scholarly
appraisal.
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title page |
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Transcription
Deciding how to arrange a transcription in 'records'
which are destined to become html pages is not always easy.
The William Camden/Richard Gough text is reasonably well
structured in sections with regular use of marginal guides.
To match previous transcriptions this transcript is made
page by page, ignoring the problems that a section or
sentence might be split across page breaks.
Somewhen, the text, at present in MODES records, will
migrate to xml. At this change the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI) will be considered, though that methodology is biased
towards academic study of 'Literature' rather than everyday
text. TEI would mark up the whole of the Camden text as one
document, the particular arrangement into pages for an
edition treated as a subsidiary feature. I need to have
smaller units as records, which will become html pages. The
book here is being treated as an object in its own right,
each page an item, rather than a text which is only
incidentally presented in a book.
Some of the exact typesetting has been ignored, though
italics and some unusual characters are indicated using html
markup. Hyphenation across lines has been removed, judging
as well as I am able to retain the hyphen where it likely
belongs, comparing with the same word elsewhere in the text
if possible. A word split across pages is left that way, but
the beginning part of the word is added as inferred data to
its continuation on the following page. Catchwords have been
recorded.
Peculiarities of spelling and grammar are preserved; they
might be confirmed by '(sic)', but not very often: I have
typed and have proof read as accurately as I can.
Notice the interesting method of referencing footnotes by
superscript letters in the text running from a..z, across
several pages, then starting at a again. Also notice that
even if a footnote letter is given in the text and given at
the foot of the page, there is not always text in the
footnote. A separate set of footnotes, intermingled, are
numbered. These are Richard Gough's own additions.
(Also see OFR file TRANS01.rul under Topics)
Scripts
This edition of William Camden's work has material in
Greek and a sort of Anglo Saxon font. There are Unicode
entities to encode some of this, the Greek successfully, the
Anglo Saxon less so; they appear as obscure numerical codes
in MODESforWindows but in theory would appear as the
appropriate character in MODESxml. Unfortunately not all the
characters are supported by the default set of fonts
supplied with most people's computers, and many would remain
as obscure number codes, or cause errors in xml. When
transferred to html pages many would not be decoded
properly, either because html readers do not read them, or
the character set is not available on the machine being
used.
Greek characters seem to work satisfactorily, and will be
transcribed in Unicode. A software tool called Babel can
help this process. The Anglo Saxon stuff is less common
Unicode and will usually not be used, instead a
transliteration into ordinary Latin script will be made, the
fact noted by the text plus a comment being within square
brackets, eg:-
[Loncasterscyre - Anglo Saxon]
Note that the use of the ampersand (&) in transcribed
text causes no problems in MODESfor Windows as there is no
intention to interpret them as keyword separators. But, they
are necessary in Camden's marginals. These marginals must
also be treated as transcriptions, and not used by keyword
analysis.
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Text Indexing
Keywords for indexing the text have been recorded, as
well as I am able: mostly using today's placenames rather
than the text's version; recognising unnamed places if
possible; using locality type terms if nothing else is
possible, indexing objects and topics if useful. Thus, I
have tried to interpret and understand the text to make the
indexing helpful and comprehensible in today's world; a
basic rule is 'would you want this page if you were
searching with this keyword?' The placename spellings of the
text are put into the Old Cumbria Gazetteer, where all sorts
of spellings are indexed.
While places have been identified with modern placename
where possible, no such rationalisation has been attempted
with personal names.
No attempt has been made to deal with synonymy of species
names; what is found is what is used in indexing.
Gazetteer Extracts
Chunks of text relevant to each place are extracted and
gathered together, and loaded into the record for the place
in the Old Cumbria Gazetteer. This is much easier to use for
a place than searching through pages in the history book;
you can go to the original text and read it all in context
of this and other texts and illustrations, if you wish. The
gazetteer is arranged using standard placename spellings,
today's version of the placename, but is indexed on all
sorts of spellings, and by other place data.
Not all keywords allocated to the text will prompt a
gazetteer entry. Some places in the text will be
unidentifiable some keywords are for other topics than
places.
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title page |
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Brigantes |
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Lancashire, north of the sands, Camden |
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Lancashire, north of the sands, Additions |
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Westmorland, Camden |
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Westmorland, Additions |
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Cumberland, Camden |
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Cumberland, Additions |
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Division of Cumberland at The Conquest |
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The Wall, Camden |
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The Wall, Additions |
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Horsley's Account of The Wall |
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