William Hallam grew up in the little village of Lockinge (Berkshire) but lived for the rest of his life in Swindon, where he was employed at the Great Western Railway Works. His remarkable diaries (eighty-two volumes: 1886–1952) provide an exceptional opportunity to assess the effects of moving from a rural, agricultural background to an urban, industrial one. Hallam was in many respects a classic example of the alienated industrial worker. This certainly intensified his passionate ruralism, yet its roots lay much further back, in the deep-seated loyalties formed by his early experiences in Lockinge. Indeed, although he was a working-class man rather than a genteel middle-class woman, the parallels between the role landscape played in Hallam’s life and in Beatrix Cresswell’s are remarkably close.

Chapter Five explores the transformation of early medieval origin material in historical chronicles written by nationalist authors in the early modern period. These antiquarians included the same origin legends that we find in our sources from the early medieval period in their later chronicles, yet they were using them in very different ways. While the origin narratives of the early medieval period were used to form cohesive histories of the insular region as a whole, early modern chronicles used this origin material to shift away from holistic insular narratives and towards a divisive nationalism. Chapter Five focuses on four representative samples from the voluminous corpus of late medieval and early modern historical works: John of Fordun’s Chronica gentis Scotorum (1385), later continued by Walter Bower as the Scotichronicon (1447); Holinshed’s Chronicles (first edition 1577; second edition 1587); William Camden’s Britannia (first edition 1586); and Seathrún Céitinn / Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (completed 1634). This final chapter reveals how early medieval origin material was put to new uses during the early modern period as part of a shift towards a divisive nationalism from what had been an encyclopaedic approach to the history of the insular region as a whole.

Chapter 20, “Encountering and Inventing Constantinople in Early Modern Europe,” discusses the idea of Constantinople in medieval and early modern Europe, and the lure it held for early modern antiquarians. It examines the nature of the city these scholars imagined against the reality of the city they found.

The rediscovery of Athens by Western travelers from the fifteenth century onwards led to an international fascination with the ruins of the city and their relationship with descriptions in ancient literature. The publications and manuscripts of these journeys preserve crucial documentation for the remains of Athens, its temples, topography, and inscriptions, much of which has been lost over the subsequent centuries.