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Peter C. Mancall on Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxford-Shire

DONALD WORSTER began his history of ecological thought in the West with an essay on the English pastor Gilbert White and his frequently reprinted Natural History of Selborne. That was a logical place to start, especially given that White's book had the virtue of being a work of literature as well as empirical science.1 Yet a century before White published his history of Selborne in 1789, an Oxford-trained scholar named Robert Plot wrote The Natural History of Oxford-Shire, Being an Essay toward the Natural History of England. Published in Oxford in 1677, the book included sixteen carefully rendered full-page illustrations. The picture here is a composite diagram of Oxfordshire's antiquities. Though modern readers might find this an odd image for a book of natural history, setting in into its context reveals how nature was understood by one seventeenth-century observer.	1
The picture and the book that contained it present a pre-Linnaean scheme for describing an environment. As such, the image suggests how one early modern European understood the natural world and disseminated information about it. Born at a time when Europeans were filling their personal cabinets of curiosity with natural and human-made artifacts from across the world, Plot believed that works of humans and works of nature all logically fit a work of natural history. Nor was Plot troubled by the effects of human innovation on the environment. He could look out over his pre-industrial landscape without the anxieties that later prompted crafters of natural history to seek a nature away from what Worster elegantly labeled the "unpleasant aspects of modernity."2	2
To a modern observer, the picture contains a series of seemingly unrelated objects. But there was an order to it. Plot intended the viewer to read the image from top to bottom. The early modern owner of this copy (now at the Huntington Library) recognized Plot's intention, for he or she added folio references to relate passages in the text to the images. At the extreme upper right corner there is a stone that stood nine feet high, and nearby lay a circle in which the tallest of the stones stood at seven feet; two furlongs away in real life, and down and to the right on the picture, lay a group of five other stones, with the tallest again reaching nine feet. Similar clustering of standing stones elsewhere in the county had spawned a legend among "the common people" who called them "Rollrich-stones, and dream[ed] they were somtimes men, by miraculous Metamorphosis turned into hard stones."3	3
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
The center of the picture brings the viewer closer to the modern age. The largest object is the baptismal font for Edward the Confessor, which had been rescued from its ruined church and erected in the garden of Sir Henry Brown. The coin depicted to the left of the font represented Edward's divine ability to cure scrofula since he possessed what Plot termed "the gift of Sanation," which he bequeathed to his successors. The three interlocked rings below it were produced by either the Saxons or the Danes (Plot was not sure), possibly worn by "some ordinary person" since the largest ring (the "armilla") was made of copper with which "only the vulgar adorned themselves."4	. . .