306 REVIEWS

nate neighbours. Nonetheless, land accumulated by the wealthy did not facilitate the
emergence of large holdings; this acquisition was to provide younger sons and daughters
with sufficient land to start their own families. These younger children, he argues, would
eventually slip downwards in the social scale to become the village poor of later genera-
tions. The arrival of plague in 1349, when at least 40% of the tenants lost their lives,
sharply terminated this “high-pressure” demographic regime. Demographic recovery
was thwarted by a combination of improved life expectancy for adults who experienced
better living standards and a severe reduction in the life chance of infants and young
children. The net effect of these divergent trends was, in Razi’s view, to produce a
population heavily skewed in favour of those past the reproductive ages. This, in turn,
inhibited demographic growth.
These findings are founded upon a technique that uses an almost continuous series of
rolls. In fact, there are on average 13 court sessions annually over the period 1270-1400.
Razi correctly exposes the inadequacies of the Toronto school in its failure to distinguish
names from individuals in court rolls, yet he is far too perfunctory in the way he sets out
his own technique of identifying individuals using specific rules for nominative linkage.
His bold approach leads Razi to base his study upon a set of assumptions which must
also be questioned; some of them may well predetermine answers to the questions he
asks. He supposes that nearly all the residents of the manor were likely to have had
dealings in the manorial court so that their names would have been recorded in the rolls
at least once in every three years. However, this method of creating “census-like enumera-
tions” is fraught with danger, being likely to reflect the extent of the participation of
individuals in the court. Periods of high mortality and attendant economic difficulties
might have raised the level of activity in court business. Surely it is no coincidence that
the largest numbers of males are calculated to have resided in Halesown in the years
1293-5, 1309-10 and 1315-17, all phases of harvest failure.
A more fundamental problem concerns the method used to allocate ages to individuals
-ages which are then used as the basis for calculations of expectations of life at 20, age
of marriage and the age characteristics of plague fatalities in 1349. The minimum legal
age for holding land in Halesowen was 20 years. From this Razi proceeds to assume that
this was the approximate age at which all landholders initially entered into property and
when they would make their first court appearances. These are doubtful interpretations.
When, furthermore, he assumes that entry into land and marriage were closely linked in
time he can too easily assert that marriage occurred close to age 20. Expectations of life
are calculated to show that the wealthier tenants could expect on average to live a further
30 years at 20 whereas smallholders and cottagers could anticipate only a further 20
years of life at the same age as their more affluent neighbours. However, might we not
consider that the sons of the wealthier sections of the Halesowen tenantry entered land
earlier in life than the smallholders and that what we are seeing in these calculations is a
pattern of differential age-specific land acquisition and not mortality? A much more
thorough consideration of this assumption should have been undertaken since the
central theses of this concise, provocative and stimulating book hinges upon it.

SSRC Cambridge Group for the History

of Population and Social Structure R. M. SMITH

The Americas
WAYNE FRANKLIN, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers. The Diligent Writers of Early
America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. xiii+252.
$15.00)
This book demonstrates the rather alarming discrepancy, in our era of academic tunnel
 REVIEWS 307

vision, between the aims and methods of literary and historical scholars when interpreting
the same texts. Wayne Franklin is a literary scholar who has undertaken to examine a
body of writing generally studied only by historians and geographers: the narratives of
early travellers to America. Franklin discusses some 30 North American travel accounts
drawn from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to assess
the “prose strategies” employed by these writers to convey their image of the New
World. He argues that they found it very difficult to tell a European audience what
they had witnessed, and so they tended to organize their reports into three formulas : the
discovery narrative, in which the author describes in a rapturous and wondering mode
the natural abundance and promise of America; the exploratory narrative, in which the
author tries to impose a design or programme of action upon the undeveloped New
World environment; and finally the settlement narrative, in which the author wrestles
with the realistic and discouraging problems encountered in trying to tame or shape the
American scene. In this schematic fashion Franklin contends that early American travel
writers created a common aesthetic that pointed the way toward Thoreau’s Walden. To
support his case, he reproduces 30 maps, engravings, paintings and charts of early
North America, selected to illustrate his three themes of rapturous discovery, imposed
exploratory design, and realistic problems of settlement. The second theme of imposed
design-which strikes me as the most persuasive element in Franklin’s schema-is
particularly well documented in these plates. It is a pity that the publisher chose to
group all of the plates at the back of the book, rather than distributing them among the
appropriate chapters (for example, the discovery plates should be placed within Frank-
lin’s chapter on the discovery narratives).
The argument of this book may well be helpful to students of literature and art, but
historians and geographers-who generally look for particularistic factual information
or misinformation when they read these travel narratives-are likely to find that Frank-
lin’s exegesis is contrived and irrelevant. One big problem is that he is deliberately
non-chronological, In treating the discovery narratives, he jumps from Ralegh’s Dis-
coverie of the Empyre of Guiana (1596) to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
and then back to Alsop’s Character of Mary-Land (1666). Similarly, in treating settlement
narratives, he jumps from Settle’s True Report (1577) to Burges’ Journal of a Surveying
Trip (1795) and then back to Hayes’ Report (1583). This method plays havoc with two
centuries of developmental observation and accrued information about the American
environment. How, one wonders, can Jefferson, who drew upon 175 years of settlement
experience in writing his book, be construed as a “discoverer” of Virginia? Or how can
Hayes, who reported on a failed Elizabethan voyage of exploration and saw almost
nothing of America, be reckoned a “settler” in the New World? A parallel problem is
that Franklin’s typology is deliberately non-regional. He is concerned with broadly
American prose strategies rather than Puritan or Quaker or Southern strategies. Thus, in
his third chapter, he moves from Louisiana to Labrador to North Carolina to Pennsyl-
vania without commenting on local habits of mind or regional differences in reportage.
But of course these differences were sometimes extreme, as when the Puritan New
Englanders described their section of America as a “howling wilderness”. Franklin
devotes very little space to Puritan writers. Of the three New England narratives con-
sidered in this book, only Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation was written by an ardent
proponent of godly rule, and even Bradford was a somewhat peripheral figure in seven-
teenth-century New England. Since the orthodox Massachusetts Puritans wrote far more
fully about their American experience than did colonists in other regions, they ought to
be fitted into Franklin’s argument.
The problem here, of course, is that early New England travellers were far more
interested in reporting on their relations with God, or on the social order and discipline
of their covenanted communities, than in describing the physical environment of
America. Puritan writers were exceptionally biased, but it seems to me that most other
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English observers of America were conspicuously
more drawn to social than geographical reportage. Their accounts of human actors-and
308 REVIEWS

most particularly of Englishmen in action-were almost always far better observed than
their accounts of topography, flora and fauna, or climatic conditions. The Elizabethan
narratives assembled by Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations present a series of
strangely flat, uninformative snapshots of the alien American coast. These Elizabethans
sometimes mention the Negro slaves they encountered in the Spanish Caribbean, but
they show no curiosity whatsoever about the Blacks, or their African heritage, or their
bondage in America. They were somewhat more curious about the native American
Indians, but the liveliest scenes in their narratives always centered on the exploits of
Englishmen abroad rather than on their ethnographic encounters with strange new
people or their emotional response to a strange New World. I doubt that these first
English reporters were overawed and silenced by the immensity and strangeness of the
New World landscape; rather, they were absorbed by traditional Old World habits of
mind, and such basic issues as the human (i.e. English) struggle for survival.
No English travel narrative that I know of, from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries,
comes close to matching John White’s drawings of the Indians and Eskimos (represented
by five plates in this book) for fresh, close observation of the American scene. And
White is surely the exception to prove the rule. For the next century or more, later
English commentators failed to follow up his ethnographic observation, so that when
Robert Beverley looked around for pictures of Indians to illustrate his History and
Present State of Virginia, published in 1705, he adapted DeBry’s engravings of White’s
Roanoke drawings from the 158Os! With the exception of White, the early pictorial
record of the North American scene is more impoverished than the narrative record.
Franklin reproduces two interestingly stylized horror pictures of Spaniards torturing
Florida Indians in 1595, and the Jamestown massacre of 1622-but these pictures depend
in no way upon American observation, and derive instead from such European horror
models as the engravings of the massacre of St Bartholomew. In my opinion, the
“ravished observer, fixed in awe” who is invoked by Franklin on page 22 is very rarely
to be found among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English travel reporters. The
glowing promotional tracts issued by the sponsors of seventeenth-century colonies are
rapturous, to be sure, but in the same sense as a modern newspaper advertisement for the
latest condominium. Even into the eighteenth century, when Englishmen at home and
abroad take more interest than before in landscape description, it remains true that the
best informed and most systematic travel narratives are generally social commentaries on
the behaviour and customs of American colonists, rather than extended accounts of the
New World itself. Such narratives as Dr Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium or Janet
Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality or the Journal of Charles Woodmason or the
Marquis de Chastellux’s Voyage to America come to mind. None of them are mentioned
in this book.

University of Pennsylvania RICHARD S. DUNN

BARRY M. GOUGH, Distant Dominion. Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America,
1.579-1809 (Vancouver and London: University of British Columbia Press, Pacific
Maritime Studies Series, 1980. Pp. xiii+190. $19.95)
Gough is a Canadian historian of Canada. His interests and outlook are, however,
international, and it is not the least of this book’s merits that it draws the history of
Canada’s far western fringe, the former British Northwest Coast, into the wider realm of
(European) North Pacific history. Gough makes a systematic effort to relate that Coast’s
development to economic and political conditions and events elsewhere; in Europe, on
the East Coast of America, in Australia and China. Though, predictably in such a
survey, certain passages are thinner and more cursory than others and the author’s
special interests and areas of expertise are plain, he has succeeded in that effort. Gough
observes that this book is “a predecessor in terms of period covered (though not in terms